Shay 283680f110 feat(adr-0044, adr-0045): domain ethics pack + long-context comparison

ADR-0044 — Medical / clinical ethics pack (worked-example domain pack).
Ships packs/ethics/medical_clinical_ethics_v1.json with six commitments
partitioned across all three remediation tiers:
  - refuse: no_dosing_recommendation, no_emergency_triage_authority
  - hedge:  defer_diagnosis_to_clinician, surface_evidence_grade
  - audit:  disclose_no_clinician_relationship, respect_patient_autonomy

Ratified end-to-end through scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py (PACK_IDS
extended).  Production-mode load via load_ethics_pack succeeds.
ChatRuntime composition includes universal safety floor + every medical
commitment.  tests/test_medical_clinical_ethics_pack.py (8 tests) gates
file existence, sealed report, disjoint refusal/hedge lists, and
pack-swap visibility (default pack does NOT carry medical commitments).

ADR-0045 — Long-context recall: CORE vs transformer baselines.
Adds evals/long_context_cost/comparison_runner.py with a deterministic
needle-in-a-haystack measurement at N ∈ {100, 1_000, 10_000, 100_000}.
CORE recall = 100% at every tested N by exact cga_inner scan.

Paired with frozen citations of published transformer NIAH numbers in
evals/long_context_cost/baselines/transformer_long_context.json:
Claude 2.1 (200k, 50%), GPT-4 Turbo 128k (~71%), Gemini 1.5 Pro (99.7%),
NVIDIA RULER (varies).  Each citation carries source + url.

The two components measure different inputs (synthetic versors vs NL
needles) and are not directly comparable benchmark-for-benchmark.  The
comparison is at the architectural level — exact-scan recall vs
attention-based probabilistic recall.  Scope and limits documented in
the ADR.  tests/test_long_context_comparison.py (5 tests) gates schema,
CORE recall == 100%, and baseline citation presence.

CLI integration: two new demo targets with study-grade preambles.
  - core demo pack-measurements          (ADR-0043 — wired)
  - core demo long-context-comparison    (ADR-0045)
README + docs/PROGRESS.md cheatsheets updated.  docs/decisions/README.md
index extended with ADR-0044 + ADR-0045; pack-layer chain title now
"ADR-0027 through ADR-0045".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-05-17 22:31:47 -07:00

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ADR-0044 — Medical / clinical ethics pack (worked-example domain pack)

Status: Accepted (2026-05-17)

Context

ADR-0033 shipped the third pack-layer sibling (packs/ethics/) with exactly one ratified pack: default_general_ethics_v1. Through ADR-0034 → ADR-0042, the per-commitment remediation tiers (audit / hedge / refuse) and the full audit + telemetry stack landed. The shape of the system is complete; the worked example is missing.

Robotics, healthcare, legal, and financial deployments are the audience the pack-layer architecture exists to serve. Until at least one domain pack ratifies end-to-end through the formation pipeline, the deployment story is "you could do this" rather than "here is what that looks like."

Decision

Ship packs/ethics/medical_clinical_ethics_v1.json as the worked example. Six commitments, partitioned across the three remediation tiers:

Commitment	Tier
`no_dosing_recommendation`	refuse
`no_emergency_triage_authority`	refuse
`defer_diagnosis_to_clinician`	hedge
`surface_evidence_grade`	hedge
`disclose_no_clinician_relationship`	audit
`respect_patient_autonomy`	audit

The pack is ratified through scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py (which now drives both packs). A companion medical_clinical_ethics_v1.mastery_report.json self-seal lands next to it. Production-mode loading verifies the seal; dev override remains CORE_ALLOW_UNRATIFIED_ETHICS=1.

tests/test_medical_clinical_ethics_pack.py (8 tests) gates the load-bearing claims:

The pack file + mastery report exist on disk and the sha is set.
load_ethics_pack("medical_clinical_ethics_v1") succeeds (sealed report verifies).
The six commitments are present, with refusal/hedge lists disjoint and subset of the commitment set.
ChatRuntime(config=RuntimeConfig(ethics_pack="medical_clinical_ethics_v1")) composes the manifold with the safety floor plus every medical commitment.
The default general pack does not carry the medical floor — pack swap is visible and load-bearing.

Consequences

Positive.

Deployers now have a worked example to fork. The path is: author JSON → scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py → drop into config.
The medical pack exercises all three remediation tiers; downstream packs can mix-and-match without architectural friction.
The composition test (safety ∪ ethics ⊆ manifold) lifts from abstract to concrete: every safety boundary plus every medical commitment appears in identity_manifold.boundary_ids.

Trade-offs.

The pack ships with general clinical-deployment commitments; it is not a substitute for a clinician-reviewed deployment policy. The pack's description states this plainly.
Six commitments is a starter set, not a comprehensive medical-ethics taxonomy. Adding commitments later requires re-ratification (the script is idempotent).
The domain field is constrained to the registry in packs/ethics/loader.py (general, medical, legal, financial, robotics, custom). Adding a new domain string requires extending the loader's _validate_domain allowlist.

How to verify

PYTHONPATH=. python3 scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py
PYTHONPATH=. python3 -m pytest tests/test_medical_clinical_ethics_pack.py -q

Where it lives

packs/ethics/medical_clinical_ethics_v1.json
packs/ethics/medical_clinical_ethics_v1.mastery_report.json
scripts/ratify_ethics_pack.py (PACK_IDS extended)
tests/test_medical_clinical_ethics_pack.py

ADR-0033 — ethics pack architecture.
ADR-0037 — per-commitment refusal opt-in (used by refusal_commitments).
ADR-0038 — hedge injection (used by hedge_commitments).
ADR-0043 — pack measurements (the medical pack auto-extends future pack-aware runs).

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