Commit Graph
4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 f8d401029f Stop a turn locking out its own memory bank, and let the long run notice
The first M01 trial with the memory bank on was 26 turns on a GPU host. It
accepted every turn and reported "complete". It also wrote two memories and
no summary, and logged 180 `database is locked` errors, while derived status
still read `idle`.

The cause was a single uncommitted UPDATE. Retrieval bumped each used
memory's counter before the model call, and the turn commits only after the
reply has streamed. SQLite has one writer, so the turn held the write lock for
the whole reply. Every post-turn memory, summary and status write in that
window waited out the five-second timeout and failed. Recording the failure
needed a write as well, and without a rollback first it raised
PendingRollbackError. The loss therefore reached the log and never reached
the status the Insights panel reads, which F08 forbids. The draco run never
hit this because the bank was off there.

- `retrieve_memories` now only reads. `record_use` writes the counters in the
  turn's single commit, so a turn that never lands counts nothing.
- The post-turn task's outer handler rolls back before it records a failure.

The harness could not have caught any of this. It read three prompt sections
under names the builder does not use: `memories` (really `used_memories`),
`story_history` (really `history`/`recent_history`), and a `knowledge` prefix
that matched the fixed instruction section instead of the imported passages.
Memory tokens read 0 whatever the prompt held, and the in-history and
in-memories recall checks could never come out true. The labels are now
constants, pinned by a test against a prompt the real builder assembled.

The harness also stops at the first sign of failed post-turn work. It checks
/derived and new server.log lines after every turn, keeps its log position
across --resume, and waits for background work to settle before its final
checks. A run with no memories or no summaries now ends "failed", not
"complete".

Both new application tests fail on fec46f6: the lock probe sees
`database is locked`, and memory status stays `idle`. The full backend suite
passes (1392 passed, 17 skipped). A 26-turn re-run against the same host had
0 lock errors, wrote 7 memories and 2 summaries, and used them in the prompt
from turn 8.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0136VBTMUKWYeU6G9HgbDbND
2026-09-13 20:21:21 -04:00
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 fec46f66bb Turn the memory bank on for the long run, and refuse one that cannot use it
The first complete hundred-turn campaign did not exercise M01's
"summary/memory activation" step. Memory bank and auto-summarize are
per-campaign switches that default to off, and m11_long_run never
turned them on: summary_tokens and memory_tokens were 0 on every turn,
memories_used was empty, and M04's clue was recalled through narrative
state alone. The retrieval path M6 built was never asked, and nothing
in the evidence said so except a row of zeros.

setup now PATCHes both switches on, reads the campaign back, and stops
before the first turn if either did not take. memories_in_bank is
recorded on every turn, in the final summary and in the recall, and the
recall also says whether a summary exists, so which of the two recall
paths succeeded is stated rather than implied.

The embedding model is now required. Without one the summary pass still
writes memories, but memorybank.retrieve answers "No embedding model
configured" and returns none -- the same unexercised path in a fuller
bank. The harness refuses before it starts a server or claims --out.

tests/test_m11_long_run_memory.py drives setup against the real
application in-process: the switches are on afterwards, a server that
ignores the PATCH is refused before any state is written, the bank
count comes from the application and reads -1 rather than raising when
it cannot, and a run with no embedding model is refused. The four that
exercise setup and the bank count were run against the previous
harness and fail there; the premise test (a fresh campaign has both
switches off) passes on both, as it should.

The 2026-09-10 run in ~/m11-evidence/m01 therefore does not count as
M01. It has to be run again on this harness.

Backend 1,382 passed, 18 skipped, 0 failed. The eighteenth skip is
test_built_spa_fetches_no_fonts_remotely, which wants a built
frontend/dist this worktree does not have; it is an environment
condition, not a change here. The frontend is untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XKWHt2DXuvqP83cAk6Zq88
2026-09-12 21:56:14 -04:00
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 ef25b0a876 Stop re-reading the whole prompt every turn, and let a lost run carry on
M01, the hundred-turn campaign, is the one REQUIRED test still
outstanding. Everything here is about it finishing, and being worth
believing when it does. No requirement changed, no acceptance test was
retired or relaxed, and M11 §P.1's "no performance requirement" still
stands: what changed is the cost of a turn, not what a turn contains.

An inference server caches a prompt by its prefix. The history window
gave up its oldest action every turn, which changed the prompt near the
front and threw that cache away, so nearly the whole prompt was
reprocessed every turn however little had actually changed. The window
now snaps the oldest depth to a block and holds it, stepping every few
turns. Measured on real builder output at an 8,192-token budget: 124.0s
per turn against 362.4s. The cost is history depth, bounded by
TRIM_FRACTION at a quarter of the window, which is the dial between
recent history and speed.

A run that dies no longer starts again from turn one. m11_long_run
checkpoints resume.json after the prologue, after every scheduled step
and after every turn, and --resume reattaches to the same campaign. A
finished run deletes it, so the file's presence means an unfinished run
and starting fresh over one is refused. The model timeout is an option
rather than a hard-coded 600s, a turn that overruns is a failed turn
instead of an unhandled exception that ends the run with no summary,
and a run that has stopped producing turns writes its evidence and
stops.

Two checks could not fail. M04's planted clue went into an add_fact
"detail" key that the event does not define, so it was dropped and
fact_still_in_state could never be true; it is now in "value" and
proved at turn one, which stops a run measuring nothing for hours.
m11_browser degraded silently without a narrator into two failures that
read exactly like a product regression, and now requires one, with
--no-narrator as an explicit opt-out that marks the run partial.

Window discovery speaks Ollama's native API, so against vLLM or
llama.cpp's own server the window goes unverified and the budget
uncapped -- M11's own failure mode reached by another route.
context_window_override lets the operator state what they launched the
server with, and is used only where discovery left a hole: a verified
window always wins, so a declaration can lower an unknown ceiling into
existence and never raise a known one. "verified" still means the
server answered, so window_verified in a turn's provenance keeps the
meaning M11's report counts on.

planning/README.md said the M11 tree was staged rather than committed,
in two places; it was committed and signed. Planning package v3.8.

Backend 1,376 passed, 17 skipped, 0 failed; frontend 161; lint and
build clean. Every M11 harness re-run on this tree: browser 38/0/0,
offline 23/0, identity clean, contrast unchanged, recovery 14/0 on a
small bundle. M01 itself has not been run.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E9LiyxBxnMTXV2wRjdyDGB
2026-09-10 06:13:55 -04:00
JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 144406cd48 M11: what the server will actually read
The release-validation milestone, and the thing it had to settle first was
whether any of the earlier evidence meant what it said. M8 measured a deployment
enforcing a 4,096-token input window while the application budgeted 16,384.
Every request returned 200. What Ollama does with the excess is drop the oldest
tokens, and the oldest tokens here are the system block — the narrator's rules
and the campaign canon. A hundred-turn certification against that server would
have looked perfect and proved nothing, which is why this milestone could not
begin with a hundred turns.

So the application asks now. Ollama's window is a property of how a model was
loaded rather than of the request — sending num_ctx is accepted, ignored, and
worse, reloads the model at the server's own default — so the only honest move
is to find out and then tell the truth about it. /api/ps reports what a resident
model is being served with, /api/show what an unloaded one will load with, both
on the same host inference already uses, through the same endpoint policy and
the same TLS trust store. A verified window is a ceiling on the budget; an
unverified one leaves the budget alone and is recorded as unverified in the
turn's own provenance, so an old turn can be asked afterwards whether it was
built against a checked window. There is no third behaviour, and in particular
no hard-coded 4,096: a number the server did not say would be right on one
machine and wrong on the next.

The proof that this is doing something is a campaign whose canon sits at the
front of the prompt, 120 turns of history, and a 4,096-token window. The canon
is still there afterwards and the oldest history is gone. The same campaign
built the old way produces a prompt more than twice the window — the defect,
reproduced, so the fix is measured against it rather than asserted.

Two defects the validation found on its own, and they are the same defect twice:
something was true and nobody was told. A manual state correction of four
changes with one bad reference applied three, returned 201, and said nothing —
while recording the refusal on the audit row nobody reads. It came to light
because the identity diagnostic's own fixture was refused that way and the whole
run proceeded on a campaign with no scene, which would have read as a model
failure. And the narration-length setting moved no number: brief, medium and
long each became one English sentence, while the numeric hint the model actually
reads was derived from the global reply cap and said the same thing for all
three. Both now say what they did.

The other two post-M8 findings are closed as well. The tab said AI D&D, which no
document had ever claimed it did not; it says Interactive Story now, with the
open campaign first, and the name is the owner's decision rather than a
find-and-replace to something narrower than the engine. After an Undo the reader
could not tell where they had landed; the control row now ends with
"Moment 11 · later story ahead", from the server's own answer, in the word the
transcript already uses, with none of head, branch or depth anywhere near it.

The identity diagnostic exists and the root cause does not. That campaign was
destroyed, so no cause can be established — what M11 owes the finding is
something that can classify the next occurrence, and a diagnostic that makes only
the judgements a program can honestly make: duplicate keys, shared names,
protagonist drift, state and context disagreeing. Whether prose misattributed a
line is left to a person reading it beside its prompt, because a regex cannot
read dialogue and one that pretended to would produce exactly the confident wrong
answer this finding is about. Its detectors are proved to fire against a planted
second Alice.

Two entities may still share a display name. That was checked first, as the
finding asked, and left permitted: a mother and a daughter, or a stranger giving
a false name, are ordinary fiction, and refusing them to guard against a model
mistake would refuse the wrong thing. What was missing was that it happened
silently. It is reported now.

Evidence, not inference: a hundred accepted turns against a real narrator with
genuine process restarts; a real browser against the built SPA; a container with
no network at all; a campaign moved into a data directory that never existed.
Each was discarded and re-run whenever the product changed under it, and the runs
that were thrown away are listed in the report with the reason, along with ten
defects in the harnesses themselves — because a harness that has only ever
agreed with itself is not evidence, and two of M8's five harness defects were
masking real ones.

No dependency was added, removed or upgraded. No acceptance test was retired,
relaxed or reclassified. M11 is implemented and verified; it is not accepted, and
there is no release tag.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Qyn3oRd4D6pi72nKBG725B
2026-09-07 14:01:20 -04:00