core/docs/assessment/04-phase2-findings.md

Phase 2 — Findings, Corrections, and the Phase 3 Handoff

Executor: Opus 5, 2026-07-27. Verified against: forgejo/main @ 8927c563. Deliverable: nine layer cards in 10-layer-cards/ (M0, M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, MG, MV), each schema-compliant per 03-card-schema.md.

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1. Corrections forced by re-verification

Phase 2's charter was to verify rather than inherit. Three inherited claims did not survive. Recording them prominently, because the pattern matters more than any single correction: every falsified claim came from a document, and every falsification came from reading code.

1.1 The L11 always-on process is BUILT (Phase 0 Finding 0-C was wrong)

chat/always_on.py::run_continuous (279 lines), chat/always_on_daemon.py::run_daemon (195 lines, single-instance lock, SIGINT/SIGTERM-wired stop, load-time identity guard), and CLI command core always-on (core/cli.py:244) all exist. They landed 2026-06-14 — five days after the .system-map/ snapshot of 2026-06-09 that declared "no forever entrypoint exists." Phase 0 inherited the map's claim.

The real M6 finding is different and more actionable: the process is built, has a complete falsifiable soak harness (evals/l10_always_on, four predicates with *_holds/*_bites pairs), has never been run to a recorded long-horizon artifact, and is enforced by no suite at all.

1.2 Candidate CR-1 (attention/allocation) is not a missing layer — it is a live, undocumented one

Phase 1 registered attention as a possibly-missing function whose blueprint articulation (ADR-0008) had no successor. The mechanism is live on the serving path. generate/stream.py::_attention_candidates (:255-263) runs SalienceOperator().compute(...) then AttentionOperator(inhibition_threshold).plan(...), and the resulting allowed_indices are intersected with language candidates at :329 — replacing them outright at :331 when language candidates are absent. use_salience defaults True (core/config.py:35).

Note also that generate/salience.py composes core.physics.salience.SalienceOperator (imported as CurvatureSalienceOperator) rather than duplicating it — so this is a layering, not the duplicate-implementation hazard it first appeared to be. That correction is recorded here rather than propagated as a false finding.

CR-1 is therefore re-characterized: not "does attention exist?" but "the mechanism that gates every generation step, and consumes ~73% of turn time through cga_inner, has no owning ADR, no card, and no layer in any ratified articulation." The blueprint's InhibitionMask class exists in core/physics/inhibition.py but is imported only by core/physics/__init__.py — the live inhibition is a scalar threshold, not the operator. The gap is governance and documentation, not capability — which makes it cheaper to close and easier to have missed.

1.3 Candidate CR-2 (agenda/drive) — the components exist; the claim survives and sharpens

Phase 1 recorded DriveGradientMap and ExertionMeter as never built. Both are constructed in chat/runtime.py (:716, :714). But:

• DriveGradientMap is constructed and never read. No site reads self._drive_map. Deleting it changes no output. By the sabotage test this is decoration — and it is the cleanest instance the assessment found.
• ExertionMeter is exercised (record at :2912, fatigue at :2913) but its output flows only into drive_summaries and fatigue_index — telemetry. Fatigue gates no decision.

So CR-2's substance is confirmed and stated more precisely: CORE has drive and exertion objects and no chooser. Nothing ranks what to do next. The mechanisms exist as instrumentation; the function does not exist as agency.

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2. The stage-coverage audit

The taxonomy's central instrument, run with evidence. A stage is covered only where a live component owns it and carries evidence that would fail if the mechanism were deleted.

Stage	Verdict	Owner	Basis
listen/ingest (text)	covered	M2	inject on the live path, closure-checked at the gate
listen/ingest (non-text)	uncovered	M2	sensorium/ (59 modules) imports nowhere on the serving path; no projection heads
comprehend	covered, narrowly	M3	Deduction bands wrong=0 over 18,000 cases; reader spans 19 constructions vs a 1739-construction writer, fabricates on 22
recall	covered	M1	Exact CGA recall live; fabrication-control lane pinned
think/reason	covered	M3	ROBDD entailment 716/716 against an independent oracle
articulate	covered	M4	Live serving, ratified wrong=0 lanes, typed refusal, negation now representable
learn from reviewed correction	covered	M5	Two pinned loop-closure lanes prove the single reviewed path
replay deterministically	covered	MV	11 SHA-pinned lanes, CI-failing on drift
(the cycle's runner)	claimed-only	M6	Process exists; no measured horizon, no suite-enforced pin, continuity flags default off

Seven of nine covered; one uncovered by deliberate scoping; one — the runner — claimed-only. The single uncovered stage is non-text ingest. The single unproven layer is the one the telos names.

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3. Cross-cutting findings

F-1 — Built-and-off is the dominant pattern, and it is unaccounted. Across layers, substantial machinery exists behind flags that default False: unified_ingest, curriculum_serving_enabled, ask_serving_enabled, verified_serving_enabled, consolidate_determinations, review_pending_proposals, review_derived_close_proposals, auto_contemplate, auto_proposal_enabled, vault_promotion_enabled, persist_session_state, strict_identity_continuity, identity_wave_gate, identity_action_surface, realizer_grounded_authority, accrue_realized_knowledge, estimation_enabled. Only deduction_serving_enabled is ratified ON. Each default is individually defensible; no document states the set, nor what evidence would flip any of them. This is the largest single lever in the system and it has no register.

F-2 — Enforcement lags capability, most where it matters most. M6's soak pins run in no suite; M1's no-approximate-recall prohibition has no verified failing pin; MG's cross-cutting writ has no bypass pin. In each case the mechanism is sound and the guarantee that it stays sound is doctrinal rather than mechanical. MV's hand-curated suite tuples cannot detect an orphaned pin — the highest-leverage single fix the assessment has found.

F-3 — The strongest in-repo standard is not applied where exposure is highest. M5's formation pipeline declares six trust boundaries, content-addressed in and out, no floats in hashed payloads, no pickle, an audit record for every rejection. M2 — the boundary facing untrusted user text in production — has no comparable declared table. The bar exists; it has not been carried to the hotter surface.

F-4 — Documentation debt is now load-bearing, not cosmetic. chat/always_on_daemon.py has no ratifying ADR while the governing ADR-0146 explicitly rejected the daemon shape. The live attention mechanism has no ADR. The MIND-PHYSICS-BLUEPRINT renderer line is stale. ADR-0252's "34 surface organs" does not reproduce (18 resolve_promotable_*, all in generate/derivation/). When the record contradicts the code, every downstream reasoner inherits the error — as Phase 0 did.

F-5 — What is excellent, stated plainly. The typed learning boundary (M5) dissolves the autonomy-versus-safety trade-off rather than splitting it. The selection-not-rewrite surface discipline (M4) preserves the honest artifact even when it is not served. The non-hardening invariant (M1) structurally forbids an axiom flag. Fail-closed unknown lane shapes and NON-CANONICAL run stamping (MV) are the habits of a system that expects to be wrong. Phase 5 should carry these forward as the standard other layers are measured against, not merely as an audit's polite paragraph.

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4. Layer verdict summary

Layer	Liveness (re-verified)	Fitness	The one-line reason
M0 Substrate	live-serving	fit	Does one thing without compromise; optimization has twice aimed at the wrong function
M1 Knowledge & Memory	partial-wiring-debt	fit	Exactness and typed standing reinforce each other; what compounds vs resets is invisible in the name
M2 Afferent Boundary	partial-wiring-debt / inert	strained	59 modules reach no serving path; the trust-boundary bar exists elsewhere in-repo
M3 Comprehension & Reasoning	partial-wiring-debt	strained + superseded-in-place	Expert substrate, novice reader — ratified diagnosis, unrun acceptance gate
M4 Expression & Serving	live-serving	strained	Excellent discipline; surface precedence accreted one arm per capability
M5 Learning & Growth	partial-wiring-debt	fit / strained	Best-executed idea in CORE, 24×–73× under-fed
M6 Continuity & Process	partial-wiring-debt	strained	Built further than reported, proven less than assumed, enforced by nothing
MG Governance & Identity	live-serving	fit / strained	Alignment as structure; enforcement gate off and unauthorized
MV Verification & Evidence	partial-wiring-debt	strained	Right instincts; coverage is a curation artifact with a hole at the worst spot

No layer is wrong-solution. Two candidate wrong-solution findings are deferred to Phase 4 with evidence: the Wilson/replay independence basis in M5's licensing, and DriveGradientMap as constructed decoration.

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5. Handoff to Phase 3

Deliverable: component cards in 20-component-cards/, per 03-card-schema.md §6 depth allocation.

Descent order:

1. The four ⚑ zero-subsystem zones, all load-bearing, three on the serving path: comprehend-organ (→ core/comprehension_attempt/, 6 modules), determine-phase (→ generate/determine/, 8 modules), realize-phase (→ generate/realize/ + realizer.py + realizer_guard.py), sensorium-falsification (→ sensorium.environment.falsification).
2. M6's built half — engine_state/, chat/always_on.py, chat/always_on_daemon.py, and the evals/l10_* harnesses. Establish what the soak would prove if run.
3. M3's derivation organs — resolve the 34-vs-18 count against ADR-0252's diagnosis. This determines whether the debt is being paid down or was measured differently.
4. M4's surface-selection arms — enumerate every arm and its precedence; this is the input to the Phase 4 Third-Door question.
5. The CR-1 attention mechanism — generate/salience.py, generate/attention.py, core/physics/{salience,attention,inhibition}.py. It gates every generation step and owns the hot path; it needs a card regardless of how the layer question is ruled.

Verification obligations (non-negotiable):

• Stamp verified_at with the SHA actually inspected. The system map is a prior; 2026-06-09 is stale by two major arcs.
• Apply the sabotage test to every live-* claim. DriveGradientMap shows the failure mode is present in this tree, not hypothetical.
• For every invariant cited, name its pin and confirm the suite that runs it. Several Phase 2 cards had to record suite: none.
• Distinguish imported from constructed from read from gating a decision. All four appear in this tree and only the last is load-bearing.

Standing: PR #138's fabrication findings are measured-and-pinned, held for ADR + ratification — record, never re-discover, never fix.

Open items for Phase 4 seeded by Phase 2: the flag-default register (F-1); the orphaned-pin meta-check (F-2); M2 adopting formation's trust-boundary table (F-3); the ADR/code contradictions (F-4); Wilson/replay independence in licensing; DriveGradientMap deletion; surface-precedence as a declarative table; the evals/l10_* suite assignment.