core/docs/assessment/10-layer-cards/M4-expression-serving.md

M4 — Expression & Serving

Kind: layer · Parent: CORE · Assessor: Opus 5 (Phase 2) Re-verified: 39331dbc (2026-07-28) — see the arc note below. Verified at: 8927c563 (2026-07-27) Liveness: live-serving · Fitness: strained · Topology role: runtime boundary

Field → world. M4 owns the only bytes a user ever sees, which makes it the layer where the project's central discipline — wrong=0 or refuse — either holds or fails. Everything upstream can be correct and M4 can still serve a falsehood by selecting the wrong surface; everything upstream can refuse and M4 must render that refusal honestly rather than filling it. Its philosophical charge is that saying is a distinct act from knowing, governed separately.

Telos stages: articulate (primary); replay/determinism (trace emission) Macro role: Selects, governs, decorates, and emits the served surface; emits the telemetry that makes the turn auditable.

Arc note — 2026-07-28 (39331dbc). H-13 fixed: the speculative-marker cache un-marked a sibling proposal's still-unreviewed material on promotion, serving it without the (speculative, not yet reviewed) prefix. Claimant-tracked now; the served-surface honesty contract holds where it previously leaked.

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What it is / What it does

chat/runtime.py (3364 lines) is the layer's centre of mass, with core/cognition/pipeline.py (1381) wrapping it for the full cognitive turn, and generate/realizer.py + generate/surface.py producing the articulation. Around them: the register axis (chat/register_variation.py, chat/register_substantive.py), response governance (core/response_governance/: govern_response, shape_surface), grounding composers (chat/pack_grounding.py, chat/teaching_grounding.py, chat/deduction_surface.py, chat/curriculum_surface.py), the refusal surface (chat/refusal.py), safety and ethics checks, and telemetry (chat/telemetry.py, chat/verdicts.py).

The load-bearing behavior is surface selection, contracted in runtime_contracts.md: surface = determination_surface when a turn determined an answer over realized knowledge; = [approximate] estimate under a genuine SERVE license; = _UNKNOWN_DOMAIN_SURFACE when the unknown-domain gate fires; = articulation_surface otherwise. walk_surface and articulation_surface are both always retained as evidence — a determination or a gate is a selection, never a rewrite. This is the layer's best design property: the honest artifact survives even when it is not what was served.

Three distinct surfaces exist for three distinct invariants, and conflating them is a documented hazard: surface (what the user read), walk_surface (manifold/token-walk evidence), and hash_surface (the register-invariant truth-path capture that compute_trace_hash folds). Because TurnEvent carries the served surface but never hash_surface, trace_hash is not reconstructable from telemetry — a contract, not a defect. Verify a hash by replaying the pipeline, never by rebuilding it from a turn record.

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Contract

• Inputs: ArticulationTarget / PropositionGraph from M3, determination or entailment results, mounted register/safety/ethics/identity packs (M1, MG), session context.
• Outputs: ChatResponse (surface, walk_surface, articulation_surface), TurnEvent, TurnVerdicts, trace_hash, CognitivePipelineRecord, grounding_source, epistemic_state.
• Invariants:
  • Register must not move trace_hash (ADR-0069 inv C) — pin: register lane tests — status: running (register suites present).
  • Unknown-domain gate honoured — the realizer's fallback must not override the gate's stub — pin: contract tests in the cognition suite.
  • Realizer slot-type guard / C1 coherence floor (ADR-0075), with a documented exemption for deduction's quoted templates at both guard sites (chat/runtime.py:2371-2375, :3007-3010).
  • Grounding-source registration is a three-part atomic change (enum + enum-snapshot.json + UI badge contract) — pin: workbench-ui/enumCoverage.test.ts fails the build on divergence; tests/test_workbench_deduction_provenance.py.
  • A live /chat/turn with a trace hash but no status="recorded" pipeline record fails before journal append; pre-widening rows must show missing_evidence, never a synthesized green pipeline.

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Design vs build

• Design: docs/specs/runtime_contracts.md (the frozen surface-selection policy, the trace_hash contract, audit-ledger R7); ADR-0069/0071/0075/0077 (register axis and guards); ADR-0206 (response-governance bridge); ADR-0039 (audit completeness); ADR-0153 (trace-hash back-stamp); ADR-0254 (grounded-open hedge arm); ADR-0265 (negation reaches the surface); ADR-0024/0025/0026 (typed refusal, rotor and margin admissibility).
• Build: live-serving.
• Evidence:
  • Deduction serving is ratified ON and reaches served output — measurement — core/config.py:397 deduction_serving_enabled=True; verified by execution 2026-07-25 (_run_chat_turn on a modus-ponens prompt returns the entailment surface) — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Surface selection honours the unknown-domain gate — contract + pin — runtime_contracts.md §"Unknown-domain gate honour" — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Provenance falsification (a proved deduction answer recorded as grounding_source='none') is closed — the registration requirement and its pin are now documented in runtime_contracts.md §"Grounding-source registration" — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Negation reaches the surface (ADR-0265, merged 8927c563): under realizer_grounded_authority, "evidence does not support truth" and "evidence supports truth" previously served byte-identical surfaces — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Register decoration does not move trace_hash — pin — would-fail-if-absent: yes.

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Capacity

• Designed: every served surface is either grounded, disclosed, or an honest refusal; wrong=0 or refuse.
• Measured: wrong=0 holds across every ratified serving lane (deduction 18,000 cases / 25 bands; curriculum physics 32/32; deductive logic 716/716). Writer-side construction inventory: 1739 constructions emitted. Refusal is typed and carries a machine-readable reason plus per-step rejection evidence.
• Ceilings: a real refusing turn still returns surface == "" with refusal_reason == "" through ChatRuntime.respond()'s str contract — the typed evidence is unread between the raise site and the public return. The plumbing exists on CognitiveTurnResult and compute_trace_hash; materialisation awaits a future ADR. Curriculum serving is OFF; ask and verified serving are OFF.

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Dependencies & provenance

receives ← M3; reads → M1 (packs, register, lexicon), MG (safety, ethics, identity); feeds → M5 (correction capture), MV (telemetry, trace, pipeline record), M6 (checkpoint at turn boundary); governed-by → MG (safety is fail-closed and never swappable).

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Stage coverage

Stage	Verdict	Evidence
articulate	covered	Live serving with ratified wrong=0 lanes; typed refusal; disclosed estimates; negation now representable
replay/determinism (emission side)	covered, with a known asymmetry	trace_hash is deliberately register-invariant and deliberately not reconstructable from TurnEvent; audit-ledger R7 closed by deferred emission at the serve boundary

Zone roster: L6-chat-runtime (partial-wiring-debt per map → revised to live-serving at layer level: the serving path demonstrably executes end-to-end), L9-epistemic-verdicts ✱ (straddles MG; owned here, cross-referenced there).

Rollup note: the map's partial-wiring-debt label on L6-chat-runtime reflects internal wiring debt (dormant modules, unmaterialised refusal strings), not a non-serving path. The layer serves; parts of it are unwired. Weakest-link rollup again understating the serving reality.

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Judgment

Phase 3 refinement (C-3, 05-phase3-findings.md): "no single place states the precedence order" is half-wrong — core/cognition/surface_resolution.py::resolve_surface (494 lines) is a declared-precedence resolver for the pipeline seam. The accretion concern survives only for the upstream composer arms in chat/runtime.py; the Third-Door candidate refines to extending the existing resolver's pattern upstream. Full arm inventory: 20-component-cards/surface-selection.md.

Fitness: strained. M4's architecture is among the strongest in CORE — the selection-not-rewrite discipline, the three-surface separation, the fail-closed typing, the atomic enum/UI coupling. The strain is that its surface-selection policy has accreted one arm per capability (determination, estimate, unknown-domain, deduction, curriculum, hedge, register decoration, logos-morph override), each individually contracted, with no single place that states the precedence order as an executable rule. runtime_contracts.md documents it in prose across several sections; chat/runtime.py implements it across 3364 lines. That is the classic shape of a trade-off being split rather than dissolved — and a Third Door candidate for Phase 4 (a declarative resolution table with the precedence pinned, rather than ordered branches).

Honest wrinkles:

• A refusing turn serves the empty string. respond()/arespond() convert any ValueError to "" for their public str contract, so the typed refusal — reason code, blocking region, per-step evidence — is constructed and then discarded before the caller sees it. The system's honesty machinery is real and, on this path, unread.
• The layer that owns wrong=0 is also the layer where the PR #138 fabrications surface: the reader's fabricated member(every_dog, mammal) and the recited furthermore premise reach served output. The defect is M3's; the blast radius is M4's. Measured and pinned, held for ADR + ratification — recorded, not fixed.
• epistemic_state degrades honestly (epistemic_state_needed) where hand-copied whitelists degraded dishonestly (none). The asymmetry is a reusable design lesson: a coercion that asserts a falsehood is strictly worse than doing nothing.
• Surface selection is documented as "current policy… future realizer work may change it" — a standing invitation to accrete another arm.

Open questions:

• Materialise the typed refusal into ChatResponse.refusal_reason (→ ruling; ADR already anticipated)
• Should surface precedence become a declarative table? (→ Phase 4 hindrance audit)
• Whether TurnEvent should carry hash_surface remains an open ruling recorded in runtime_contracts.md (→ ruling)