core/docs/assessment/10-layer-cards/M5-learning-growth.md

M5 — Learning & Growth

Kind: layer · Parent: CORE · Assessor: Opus 5 (Phase 2) Verified at: 8927c563 (2026-07-27) Liveness: partial-wiring-debt · Fitness: fit (mechanism) / strained (throughput) · Topology role: runtime boundary + reviewed pack data

Controlled mutation. M5 answers the question that separates a cognitive engine from a database: how does the system come to know something it did not know, without acquiring the ability to lie to itself? CORE's answer is a typed boundary — durable standing is reviewed or proof-carrying; provisional standing may update autonomously iff it is typed, isolated, replayable, and structurally unable to masquerade as ratified truth. This is the layer where the project's epistemology becomes mechanism.

Telos stages: learn from reviewed correction (primary); replay/determinism Macro role: Converts served experience and curated material into standing knowledge, at a rate and standing the evidence licenses.

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What it is / What it does

Four regions. Teaching (teaching/, 46 modules): the reviewed loop — proposals, review, store, replay-equivalence gate, discovery, curriculum premises, ratification, domain chains. Formation (formation/, 23 modules): the content-addressed data foundry — Mine → Smelt → Forge → Compose → Compile → Run → Ratify → Promote — with six declared trust boundaries, every boundary content-addressed in and out, every rejection producing an audit record. Reliability calibration (core/reliability_gate/, core/ratified_ledger.py): earned SERVE licenses under a Wilson floor (θ_SERVE = 0.99), sealed practice ledgers, hash-verified on load. Capability (core/capability/, 14 modules): the ledger, the nine-predicate domain contract, lane-shape registry, reviewer registry, expert-demo promotion.

The boundary is enforced by failing-when-violated invariants rather than convention — INV-21 (vault-writer allowlist), INV-22/23 (unmarked defaults to SPECULATIVE), INV-24 (recall categorization; user-facing evidence is COHERENT-only), INV-29 (only vault/store.py transitions epistemic_status), INV-30 (open-world determine() never asserts False). Autonomous provisional writes — idle CLOSE consolidation, reliability counts, proposal emission, disclosed estimates — all flow through the same VaultStore.store path, written SPECULATIVE, rendered as_told / [approximate] / "proposal". There is no parallel learning path, which is itself an invariant.

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Contract

• Inputs: served turns and corrections (M4), comprehension failures and typed refusals (M3), curated source material (formation), curator/HITL rulings, sealed practice results.
• Outputs: PackMutationProposal / ReviewedTeachingExample (SPECULATIVE at creation), ratified chain corpora, sealed + SHA-verified ledgers, LicenseDecision, capability ledger rows, MasteryReport (self-sealing SHA).
• Invariants: INV-21/22/23/24/29/30 as above; formation's six trust boundaries; content-addressing rules (canonical JSON, sorted keys, no floats in hashed payloads, no pickle — pickle defeats replay and is a code-execution surface); pack mutation proposal-only until reviewed; identity-manifold mutation by prompt or correction forbidden.

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Design vs build

• Design: ADR-0021 (epistemic surface + one-mutation-path), ADR-0057 (teaching-chain proposal/review/replay-equivalence), ADR-0175 (calibrated attempt-and-eliminate learning; an engine cannot raise its own bar), ADR-0263 (ratified-ledger bridge: seal → ratify → SHA-verify → serve-gate), ADR-0262/0264 (curriculum + negative curriculum), ADR-0091/0106/0109 (domain contracts, expert-demo promotion, lane-shape registry), ADR-0218 (apply_certified_promotion), ADR-0161 (HITL async queue — scope only), docs/teaching_order.md (five-layer prerequisite-topological doctrine).
• Build: partial-wiring-debt.
• Evidence:
  • Miner- and curriculum-sourced proposals route through the single reviewed teaching path — lanes — evals/miner_loop_closure, evals/curriculum_loop_closure, both pinned in CLAIMS.md — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Earned-license machinery is real: 25 sealed bands / 18,000 cases with wrong=0 gate deduction's SERVE — measurement — chat/data/deduction_serve_ledger.json — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • formation suite exists and points at tests/formation — code-read — core/cli_test.py:208 — would-fail-if-absent: yes.
  • Five Tier-1 domains carry ratified status (3 audit-passed, 2 reasoning-capable), all with zero open gaps — CLAIMS.md, mechanically generated.
  • Curriculum serve ledger does not exist. chat/curriculum_serve_license.py:46 is the single production call site passing missing_ok=True, correctly, because chat/data/curriculum_serve_ledger.json is absent — code-read.

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Capacity

• Designed: an autonomous half that proposes and a reviewed half that ratifies, with volume flowing from curated material through formation into serving licenses.
• Measured — the binding constraint is throughput, and it is quantified. Curriculum bands are 24×–73× short of the entailed-bucket floor, and no served subject has a family close enough to flag as "next." Compounding this, ADR-0264 §4.1 establishes that the 16-premise compilation cap holds any band to ≤16 entailed cases, so no curriculum band can earn SERVE until query-scoping lands — an engineering blocker gating a content problem. Separately, distinct-evidence counting is unsound where replay is treated as independent trials: 21 of 25 ratified bands are short on that basis (Wilson assumes independence; a replay is one trial).
• Ceilings: HITL review is CLI-synchronous — the operator cannot review while the engine serves (W-009 open, L10-gated). Vocabulary extension is deliberately manual and slow; the position paper states this plainly as an open scaling question.

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Dependencies & provenance

receives ← M4 (corrections), M3 (failures/refusals); writes → M1 (the promotion target; vault and packs); gated-by → MG (identity mutation forbidden; safety non-swappable); evidenced-by → MV (lanes, ledgers, CLAIMS); blocked-by → M6 (async HITL needs the process).

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Stage coverage

Stage	Verdict	Evidence
learn from reviewed correction	covered	Single reviewed path proven by two pinned loop-closure lanes; proposal-only discipline mechanically enforced
replay/determinism	covered	Replay-equivalence gate on teaching chains; content-addressed, float-free, pickle-free hashing
(autonomous provisional learning)	covered, flag-gated	CLOSE consolidation climbs to deductive-closure fixed point under proof-gating; every relevant flag defaults OFF (consolidate_determinations, review_pending_proposals, review_derived_close_proposals, auto_contemplate, auto_proposal_enabled, vault_promotion_enabled)

Zone roster: L7-teaching, formation-curriculum, reliability-calibration, capability ✱ (straddles MV; owned here).

Rollup note: weakest-link rollup. M5's mechanisms are among the most rigorously built in the repository; its volume is the constraint. Do not read partial-wiring-debt as "the learning loop is unbuilt."

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Judgment

Fitness: fit on mechanism, strained on throughput. The typed learning boundary is, in this assessor's reading, CORE's most distinctive and best-executed idea — it dissolves the usual "autonomy versus safety" trade-off rather than splitting it, which is the Third Door done correctly and worth naming as a success rather than only auditing for faults. The strain is entirely on the other side: a ratification pipeline that is architecturally sound and 24×–73× under-fed.

Honest wrinkles:

• The autonomous half is built and switched off. Six or more learning-related flags default False. The machinery for a self-improving loop exists, is proof-gated, and does not run by default. Whether that is correct caution or accumulated hesitancy is a ruling, not a finding — but the gap between "built" and "on" is the largest in this layer.
• A committed ledger is necessarily an earning one, which makes the outcome-mix ruling the binding constraint — and the curriculum ledger does not exist yet. The one production missing_ok=True is honest and narrow, but it is load-bearing scaffolding.
• The Wilson independence problem is not cosmetic. If replay is being counted as distinct evidence anywhere a license is earned, licenses are being granted on overstated evidence. 21/25 bands are affected. This deserves Phase 4 attention as a possible wrong-solution in the counting, not the gating.
• Formation's trust-boundary table is exemplary — content-addressed in and out, no floats in hashed payloads, no pickle, every rejection audited. It should be the template other layers are measured against, and Phase 4 should check whether M2's ingest boundary meets the same bar.
• docs/teaching_order.md records a known gap since 2026-05-17: the identity-divergence curriculum predates the formation pipeline and still flows through runner.py rather than Forge → Compose → Ratify → Promote. Unverified at this SHA; carried forward.

Open questions:

• Is the Wilson/replay independence defect actually granting licenses on overstated evidence? (→ Phase 4, then ruling)
• Which autonomous-learning flags should be ratified ON, and on what evidence? (→ ruling)
• Does M2's ingest boundary meet formation's trust-boundary bar? (→ Phase 2 M2 card / Phase 3)
• Curriculum query-scoping: the engineering blocker gating all curriculum SERVE (→ ruling; ADR-0264 §4.1 names it)