Commit Graph

588 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
bigmerge 29f78f9f67 land capability-as-policy: eighteen literals become a data file 2026-08-17 09:16:36 -05:00
bigmerge c2d9596e76 EXPERIMENT: the capability tier becomes shipped policy plus a query
Capability differs from prohibits_outside in one way that matters: a utility
program cannot be trusted to declare its own restrictions, because it would
declare none. So the policy comes from OUTSIDE the program -- it ships with the
language as data, editable without a compiler release.

  tools/check/capabilities.rel   18 names that were string literals in codegen
  tools/check/capabilities.sh    the query that decides

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 codegen emits kind + call graph, drops the 4 name tests   TRUE  zero #errors
  P2 the 18 literals become a data file                        TRUE
  P3 the checker catches capability violations                 TRUE  exit=1
  P4 codegen drops ~76 lines                                   TRUE  4963 -> 4881
  P5 below the 4661 baseline                                   FALSE ~+230

TWO DEFECTS THE HARNESS FOUND THAT READING WOULD NOT HAVE

1. Calls inside main became invisible. cg_fn returns early for main -- C
   provides its own -- so hooking the recording there left every call in main
   unrecorded: a blind spot exactly where a program does its work. The old
   cap_check_call ran from cg_expr and did see main. Moved the recording to
   cg_expr.

2. Caller attribution was stale. __cg_current_fn kept whatever cg_fn set last,
   so a violation in main was reported against the previously emitted function.
   The test still PASSED, because the violation was detected -- only the name
   was wrong, and a diagnostic naming the wrong fn is worse than none. Fixed at
   all three main-emission sites; the first patch missed two because the live
   path is codegen_streaming.

98/98 native, 7/7 + 4/4 + 5/5 integration, fixpoint ok.
2026-08-17 09:16:36 -05:00
bigmerge 60c07ad784 land prohibition-as-query: the emitter records, it no longer adjudicates 2026-08-17 09:11:48 -05:00
bigmerge c741cfe928 EXPERIMENT: prohibition becomes a query over emitted relations
I said prohibition could not move because "a #error has no runtime". That
conflated two separable things: WHEN a violation is detected (build time --
correct, and unchanged) and WHERE the rule and the checker live (the compiler
-- assumed).

A prohibition is a containment relation over the call graph. So codegen now
records what it saw:

    sneaky   calls raw_sql
    allowed  calls raw_sql
    allowed  calls @repository
    repository calls prohibits:raw_sql

and tools/check/prohibitions.sh decides, at build time, outside the compiler.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 codegen can emit the call graph it already walks   TRUE
  P2 the check becomes a query outside the compiler     TRUE
  P3 all prohibition decisions leave codegen            TRUE  zero #errors now
  P4 violations still caught at build time              TRUE  exit=1
  P5 codegen drops below the 4661 baseline              FALSE 4962, +301

P5 is the finding. The TRAVERSAL is irreducible -- you must walk the AST to
find calls, and those ~120 lines do not move no matter who decides. What is not
irreducible is the rule (which names) or the decision (#error). Those left. I
predicted the whole 223 lines would go because I had not separated walking from
adjudicating.

Still compiled, and measured rather than assumed: the capability-tier system
(cap_check_call, is_self_formation_call, is_dharma_call, is_llm_call,
cap_record_violation, emit_cap_violations) is 76 lines of the same shape --
prohibits_WITHIN rather than prohibits_outside, so the checker needs the
opposite polarity to absorb it.

98/98 native, 4/4 prohibition_query.sh, 7/7 seam_binding.sh, fixpoint ok.
2026-08-17 09:11:48 -05:00
bigmerge c04d68f9ce land runtime invocation control: only prohibition remains compiled 2026-08-17 09:06:16 -05:00
bigmerge bc2f26ddfc EXPERIMENT: invocation control resolves at runtime
ISHIKAWA: why did wraps_body need compile-time knowledge? Because the wrapper
called the target directly. If the wrapper calls through the seam instead, the
seam can call the body itself, and a construct bound after the build decides
how and whether to invoke it.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 wrap becomes runtime-bindable                  TRUE   body x3 -> 21,
                                                           never invoked -> 111
  P2 codegen shrinks                                TRUE   5042 -> 4977
  P3 cost 5-10% from an indirect call on every fn   TRUE   0.36s -> 0.39s, ~8%
  P4 zero-param fns break on the empty struct       TRUE   empty struct is a GNU
                                                           extension, empty init
                                                           is C23. Fixed with a
                                                           char field.
  P5 fixpoint holds                                 TRUE

PROCESS FAILURE worth recording: my first patch silently did not apply because
I dropped the assert on the string replacement. The build then failed with
"undeclared identifier __thunk_noargs", which I nearly attributed to the
empty-struct prediction. The guard that would have caught it existed and I
removed it -- the same shape as every other defect found tonight.

Removed: declare_wrap, decorator_wrap, cg_wrap_target, cg_wrap_construct,
params_to_call_args, and the wraps_body scanner branch.

prohibits_outside is now the ONLY construct kind left at compile time, and it
cannot move: a #error has no runtime.
2026-08-17 09:06:05 -05:00
bigmerge b40754f07b land unconditional wrapper: exit crossings resolve at runtime 2026-08-17 09:01:55 -05:00
bigmerge 285166c25c EXPERIMENT: emit the wrapper unconditionally, so exit binds at runtime too
ISHIKAWA: why did exit injection still need compile-time knowledge? Because the
body-helper wrapper was only emitted when codegen already knew an exit
construct existed. The wrapper being conditional was the cause, not the wrapper
being necessary.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 exit becomes runtime-bindable                    TRUE  returns 14, bound
                                                            after the build
  P2 codegen shrinks                                  TRUE  5094 -> 5044
  P3 cost 5-15% from a call frame on every fn         FALSE 0.37s -> 0.38s, ~3%
  P4 fixpoint holds                                   TRUE

Every fn now gets a body helper and a wrapper. It has to be unconditional:
early returns must route through something for an exit construct to observe
them, and codegen cannot know which fns will be bound after the binary exists.

Removed with the machinery: declare_exit, decorator_exit, cg_exit_target,
cg_exit_construct, and the injects_at_exit scanner branch.

Two controls failed and were rewritten rather than repaired --
no-exit-construct-emits-no-wrapper asserted the optimisation this removes, so
it is now inverted. The integration harness gained a seventh assertion: an exit
construct declared after the build replaces the result.

99/99 native, 7/7 integration, fixpoint gen2==gen3.
2026-08-17 09:01:55 -05:00
bigmerge 24f7fb5143 land the runtime seam: resolve the crossing at execution
Five compile-time passes added 491 lines to the thing that was supposed to stop
growing. The seam is ~55 lines of C and one line of emission, and it does at
runtime what three of those five kinds did at compile time -- for programs that
are already built.

  a construct declared AFTER the binary exists applies to it
  free when unused: 0.36s vs 0.37s baseline across 267 indirections
  dlsym was the cost, not the table scan; resolve-once recovered 3.5x
  refusal works, composition works, unlinked targets are skipped not fatal

injects_at_exit and wraps_body do NOT collapse: early returns must route
through the body-helper wrapper regardless of when the target is resolved. The
wrapper is structural, which I had wrong. prohibits_outside cannot move at all
-- a #error has no runtime.

Controls: 99/99 native compiler tests, plus tests/integration/seam_binding.sh
(6/6) for the claim compile_capture structurally cannot see.
2026-08-17 08:56:41 -05:00
bigmerge 8bbb750c2c control the claim that cannot be unit tested
The seam's whole claim is that a construct declared AFTER a binary exists
applies to that already-built program. compile_capture only sees emitted text,
so it structurally cannot check this: it needs a built binary, a linked target,
and an environment. Verified by hand until now, which is the standing problem
this session has been about.

tests/integration/seam_binding.sh builds a probe from El source containing no
construct at all, links a target that El never references, and asserts:

  ok  unbound program is unaffected
  ok  a construct declared AFTER the build applies
  ok  a construct declared after the build can REFUSE
  ok  an unlinked target is skipped, not fatal
  ok  a binding for a different fn does not fire
  ok  two constructs compose on one crossing

  6 assertions, 6 passed, 0 failed

The eight controls that failed after the strip were replaced, not repaired.
They asserted compile-time emission of capability that moved to runtime;
contorting them would have kept an assertion whose subject no longer exists.
Three took their place, asserting the emitted shape, and the behaviour they
used to cover is now the integration harness's job -- which is the honest
division, since the shape and the behaviour are no longer the same fact.

99/99 native compiler tests pass. Fixpoint holds.
2026-08-17 08:48:57 -05:00
bigmerge 28d19da7f1 strip the compile-time machinery the seam replaces
PREDICTION: codegen.el drops below 4661, its size before any of these passes.
RESULT: FALSE. 5157 -> 5096. Still +435 over baseline.

  injects_at_entry   collapsed into the seam            removed
  guards_at_entry    collapsed into the seam            removed
  injects_at_exit    needs the body-helper wrapper      STRUCTURAL
  wraps_body         needs the closure + wrapper        structural
  prohibits_outside  a #error cannot be emitted at runtime

The wrapper is not a consequence of compile-time resolution. Early returns must
be routed through something no matter when the target is resolved, so exit
injection was never going to collapse. I predicted it would because I had
conflated "resolved late" with "emitted less".

What did collapse is entry injection and refusal -- 61 lines of compiler
replaced by one refusable indirection, with the capability now bindable after
the binary exists.

8 tests fail, and they are exactly the 8 controls for compile-time entry
injection and guards. No unrelated breakage: the controls reported precisely
what moved. They assert emission of something that now happens at runtime, so
they need rewriting as integration tests -- which the framework does not
currently support, because runtime binding needs a built binary and an
environment, not compile_capture.

Verified after the strip: fixpoint gen2==gen3, observation and refusal both
work through the seam with the compiler knowing nothing about either.
2026-08-17 08:43:57 -05:00
bigmerge 886626a64e seam refusal + control tests: a runtime binding can short-circuit
Prediction 3 was FALSE. I expected refusal to be impossible through the seam
because the entry indirection discarded its return. One line:

    { el_val_t __s = el_seam_run(EL_STR(f), 0, 0); if (__s) return __s; }

work() returns 7; bound to a refusing construct AFTER the build it returns 42.
So three of the five compile-time kinds are runtime-bindable: entry injection,
exit injection, and refusal. wraps_body needs invocation control and
prohibits_outside is compile-time by nature.

104/104 native compiler tests pass.
2026-08-17 08:40:10 -05:00
bigmerge 82e998273b self-review 2026-08-17: bound the off-graph ISE log — moving telemetry off-graph moved the leak, it did not close it
The 2026-07-16 review fixed telemetry growth in the GRAPH by calling
engram_prune_telemetry(48h) on every ISE insert. The 2026-08-xx move to
ENGRAM_ISE_OFFGRAPH=1 then routed every state event to a flat append-only
log instead — and that path had no retention of any kind. The prune call
still exists in server.el, but it now sits in the branch that production
never takes, so the fix reads as present while being inert.

Measured on the live store: 17.1 MB / 14,305 events over 3.56 days =
4.81 MB/day, unbounded (~1.76 GB/year).

engram_ise_log_append now compacts to a byte bound after append. Byte- and
not time-bounded on purpose: this is a flat file with no index, so size is
the property that has to be bounded, and ftell on the handle already held
is O(1) versus an O(file) timestamp scan per append. Default 64 MB retains
~13 days at the measured rate — more history than the 48h the on-graph path
kept. Override with ENGRAM_ISE_LOG_MAX_BYTES.

Compaction keeps the TAIL, never the head: engram_dreams_json reads the
last ~2 MB of this file for dream-recall, so the recent end is the end with
a reader, and KEEP (16 MB) stays well clear of that window. Resumes at the
first line boundary so the tail never starts mid-record, and only renames
over the live log when the tail was written in full — a short write must
not destroy history.

The honesty rail is unchanged: rotated-out remains "I don't remember",
never a synthesized dream. This only makes the forgetting bounded and
explicit instead of deferred forever.

Verified against a 4,000-event harness at a 200 KB cap: file bounded,
newest record retained, oldest dropped, 883 lines with zero malformed
records, tail contiguous, no .tmp residue.
2026-08-17 08:39:48 -05:00
bigmerge 35b07bade2 EXPERIMENT: resolve the crossing at execution, not at emission
HYPOTHESIS (Will's): a compiler whose one compiled mechanism is extending the
LANGUAGE — not the compiler — can compose without recompilation.

ISHIKAWA — why does a construct require a recompile today?
  method       codegen inlines the target call into the body
  machine      the binary has no table to consult
  material     the declaration lives in source, read at compile time
  measurement  nothing observes what applied at runtime
  root cause   the crossing is resolved at EMISSION, not at EXECUTION

CHANGE: codegen emits one unconditional indirection per fn. Which constructs
apply is read from a table that can be written AFTER the binary exists;
targets resolve through dlsym against the running image.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  P1 a construct declared after the build applies       TRUE
  P2 an unlinked target is skipped, not fatal           TRUE
  P3 emitting on every fn is measurably slower          FALSE — 0.37s -> 0.36s
                                                        with 267 indirections and
                                                        no bindings. Free unused.
  P4 the compiler still self-hosts                      TRUE (see note)

DEMONSTRATED: an El program with NO decorator in its source, already compiled
and linked, picked up a construct declared afterwards:

    $ /tmp/seamrun                       -> 7
    $ echo 'work audited entry audit_entry' > constructs.txt
    $ EL_CONSTRUCTS=constructs.txt /tmp/seamrun
      AUDIT: work applied by audited
      7

P4 note: my first fixpoint test was wrong, not the code. I compared gen1 to
gen2, which must differ whenever codegen's output changes. gen2 == gen3, 267
seam sites, stable.

MEASURED COST, and the root cause was not where I looked
  0 bindings                    0.36s vs 0.37s baseline   free
  2 bindings, dlsym per call    2.45s                     6.6x
  2 bindings, resolved once     0.69s                     3.5x recovered
The table scan was never the cost. dlsym walks the dynamic symbol table on
every call. Resolve once and cache — which is the smallest form of what
salience does for memory: what is hot stays resolved. The 0.69s residual is
audit_entry's own printf on two of the compiler's hottest functions, not seam
overhead.

CONSEQUENCE: the five compile-time declaration kinds on iteration-1 are a
compile-time specialisation of something that resolves at runtime. They are not
wrong, but they are not the mechanism — the mechanism is one indirection, and a
kind is data.
2026-08-17 08:37:47 -05:00
bigmerge 1b324a071f let a construct declare what may not cross it
The other half of a boundary: not what runs when something crosses, but what
may not cross at all. It was two string literals in vbd_is_restricted_name and
one #error in cg_fn — one prohibition, uneditable without a compiler release.

    @decorator("prohibits_outside", "raw_sql")
    fn repository() {}

    fn sneaky() -> Int { raw_sql("DROP") }
    // #error "boundary violation: raw_sql may only be called from an
    //          @repository fn, but 'sneaky' is not one"

The recursive matcher is parameterised through a state key rather than by
threading an argument through every branch of the walk — the mechanism codegen
already uses for __match_counter and __if_expr_counter. Each prohibition is
checked in its own turn, so the owning construct is known by construction and
the diagnostic names it instead of hardcoding one rule's wording.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  1 the 3 duplicated uniqueness rules are textually identical    TRUE
  2 a declared prohibition reproduces @manager's #error          TRUE
  3 existing output byte-identical                               TRUE
  4 a program can declare its own prohibition                    TRUE
  5 fixpoint holds                                               TRUE

I misread result 2 on first pass: a @manager fn calling dharma_emit still
emitted one #error, which looked like a failure. It is the CAPABILITY-tier rule
at codegen.el:2578, a separate prohibition system, and it fires identically on
the pre-change compiler.

MEASURED DEFECTS STILL OPEN
  - two independent prohibition systems (VBD constructs, capability tiers);
    only the first is declarable
  - 3 uniqueness rules written 6 times, once per codegen path, kept in sync by
    hand and identical today

102/102 native compiler tests pass, compiler self-hosts byte-identically.
2026-08-17 08:15:27 -05:00
bigmerge 7d01608a9d land wraps_body: a construct controls invocation
Proven on experiment/wraps-body (2bed848): base(5) wrapped by a target that
invokes the body twice returns 10; a target that never invokes it returns 999.
Neither is expressible by deciding whether to repeat.

Root cause it corrected: 'C has no closures' is a fact about one grammar, not
about what can be emitted. And El's single type (el_val_t = int64_t) cannot
describe a callable, so codegen emits the calling convention rather than asking
El's type system for something it structurally cannot say.
2026-08-17 08:12:16 -05:00
bigmerge 2bed8483f7 EXPERIMENT: hand the construct the body as a real closure
ROOT CAUSE of the weaker design: "C has no closures" was taken as a fact about
what is possible. It is a fact about one grammar. Every C++ lambda, every Go
closure, every Rust closure compiles to a struct of captured values plus a
function pointer -- which is what is emitted here. Codegen emits C; it is not
written in C's syntax, and the distinction is the whole difference between a
construct that can only decide whether to repeat and one that controls
invocation.

It would also have crippled the JS backend, which has closures natively, for a
limit that applies only to the C one.

PREDICTIONS AND RESULTS
  1 env struct + thunk taking void*                        TRUE
  2 fails to compile: struct redefinition                  FALSE -- C allows the
    inner declaration to shadow. Prediction wrong; C is more permissive than
    assumed. A different real defect surfaced instead: a wrap with no exit
    construct emitted `(EL_STR("f"), EL_STR(""), __r);` -- a call to an empty
    target -- because has_exit was reused as "needs a wrapper" and the exit line
    was emitted unconditionally. Fixed.
  3 compiles when the target is declared in El             FALSE -- and this is
    the root cause worth keeping: El has ONE type, el_val_t = int64_t. El's type
    system cannot describe a callable, so `extern fn` and the real signature
    cannot be made to agree in El's own vocabulary. The fix is not a cast:
    codegen DEFINES the wrap calling convention, so codegen emits the extern
    declaration. The convention is not El-expressible; it is emitted.
  4 target controls invocation, 0..N times                 TRUE
  5 existing @manager output byte-identical                TRUE
  6 compiler fixpoint holds                                TRUE
  7 emitting the convention makes it compile               TRUE

MEASURED
  base(5) wrapped by a target that invokes the body twice and sums -> 10
  never_runs(5) wrapped by a target that never invokes it        -> 999

Neither is expressible by "decide whether to repeat". This supersedes the
repeats_body experiment on experiment/repeats-body, which was built around the
mistaken limit.
2026-08-17 08:08:37 -05:00
bigmerge 4f7568b07f give a construct its after-crossing face, and let constructs compose
§6 records 62 persist-after-mutate sites, 10 auth-per-route, and
index-after-append that failed at 9 of 9 — every one an obligation at a
crossing that decayed into "remember to do this afterwards." An obligation a
human must remember is not an obligation, and the 9-of-9 figure is what that
costs.

    @decorator("injects_at_exit", "persist_now")
    fn durable() {}

The body moves into a static helper and the visible fn becomes a wrapper, so
EARLY RETURNS pass through the exit injection. Emitting it only before the
fall-through return would have silently missed every early return — the exact
failure class this seam exists to remove. Fns with no exit construct emit
byte-identically to before.

Three independent constructs now compose on one fn, none known to the compiler:

    el_val_t mutate(el_val_t k) {
      { el_val_t __g = my_auth(EL_STR("mutate"), EL_STR("authenticate")); if (__g) return __g; }
      engram_boundary_beat(EL_STR("mutate"), EL_STR("manager"));
      el_val_t __r = __el_body_mutate(k);
      persist_now(EL_STR("mutate"), EL_STR("durable"), __r);
      return __r;
    }

Guard, then entry, then body, then exit. §5.2 asked whether `hold` is one
construct or two; the implementation answers one construct with two faces,
selected by declared kind rather than by two mechanisms.

Verified: existing output byte-identical, compiler self-hosts byte-identically,
early returns pass through the exit, ordering holds under composition. 98/98
native compiler tests pass.
2026-08-17 07:56:28 -05:00
bigmerge 60737b0305 let a construct refuse, not only observe
@authenticate (6 uses), @authorize (3), @rate_limit (3) and @validate (2)
parsed, attached, and compiled to nothing. Fourteen applications that read as
protection and emitted no instruction — a function decorated @authenticate
compiled byte-identically to an undecorated one.

The missing capability was not authentication. It was that a construct could
observe a boundary but never refuse one. injects_at_entry discards the target's
result; there was no form in which a construct could say no.

    @decorator("guards_at_entry", "my_auth")
    fn authenticate() {}

    @authenticate
    @authorize
    fn handler() -> String { ... }

emits, at entry:

    { el_val_t __g = my_auth(EL_STR("handler"), EL_STR("authenticate")); if (__g) return __g; }
    { el_val_t __g = my_roles(EL_STR("handler"), EL_STR("authorize")); if (__g) return __g; }

Guards precede injections because a refused call must not report a crossing,
and every guard runs where the topmost injecting construct wins — refusal is
not a role, so it does not follow the role convention.

The compiler still knows nothing about auth. The program points the construct
at its own function, which is where that decision belongs.

Verified: existing @manager/@accessor output byte-identical, compiler
self-hosts byte-identically, guards stack in declaration order and emit before
the beat. 94/94 native compiler tests pass.
2026-08-17 07:53:10 -05:00
bigmerge 5718943f2e let a construct declare its own meaning instead of the emitter knowing it
codegen called fn_has_decorator for exactly three names — manager, accessor,
route. Twelve others parsed, attached as {name,args}, and compiled to nothing,
including four that look like protection: @authenticate (6 uses), @authorize
(3), @rate_limit (3), @validate (2). The cause was not that the branches were
untidy. A construct had nothing to BE, so its meaning had nowhere to live
except the emitter, and every construct was therefore a compiler edit.

A name -> injection table would have moved the enumeration twenty lines up
without removing it. So the construct now carries its own meaning:

    @decorator("injects_at_entry", "engram_boundary_beat")
    fn audited() {}

    @audited
    fn risky_op() -> Int { ... }   // gets the beat, attributed to "audited"

scan_declared_decorators is a token-level pre-pass beside scan_routes, forced
by streaming codegen having no whole-program AST. manager and accessor are
seeded as the compiled-in core — the fixedSelf shape from substrate.go: a
complete fallback exists, declaration is enrichment.

This is the injection half of the seam only. The prohibition half (@manager's
#error on dharma_emit) stays hardcoded, because "which calls may appear inside
this boundary" is a query over program structure and there is nothing yet to
ask.

Verified three ways: emitted C for existing @manager/@accessor code is
byte-identical to the hardcoded path; a construct with a name the compiler has
never heard of injects correctly; the compiler self-hosts byte-identically.
90/90 native compiler tests pass.
2026-08-17 07:50:56 -05:00
bigmerge dcaa77d77b make boundary crossings attributable to the construct that caused them
The beat reported which function crossed a boundary, never which decorator
put the beat there. So the graph accumulated boundary events with no
attribution, and no construct could be measured — "is this decorator
earning its keep" stayed an argument instead of a traversal.

engram_boundary_beat now takes the construct and carries it on the bus as
{"construct":"..."}. The injection point, the beat, and the accumulation
already existed; only the attribution was missing.

Also pins a known defect as a test: codegen calls fn_has_decorator for
exactly three names (manager, accessor, route). Twelve others parse, attach,
and compile to nothing — including @authenticate (6 uses), @authorize (3),
@rate_limit (3) and @validate (2), which look like protection and are not.
decorator-authenticate-compiles-to-nothing asserts that @authenticate emits
byte-identical C to no decorator at all, so fixing it will be a visible flip.

Verified: compiler self-hosts byte-identically, 86/86 native compiler tests
pass, emitted C carries the construct for both @manager and @accessor.
2026-08-17 04:53:40 -05:00
bigmerge 409bf57341 track the architecture docs
They were written outside git, so the reasoning that produces the design
had no history and no way to be superseded. capabilities.md and
geometry-vs-code.md are both known stale at this commit; they are tracked
as-is so the corrections are visible as movement rather than as a rewrite.
2026-08-17 04:34:32 -05:00
bigmerge addd51209f runtime: extract engram_text.c, and repair 10 harnesses that could not link
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 13m39s
First concern moved out of el_runtime.c under the ratchet, and the move is
deliberately small: it exists to prove the mechanism end to end before anything
large depends on it.

engram_text.{c,h} — query tokenization, candidate-token hygiene, word-boundary
matching, and the text-damage signature. Four functions, moved verbatim; only
`static` was dropped and each doc comment travelled with the code. They touch no
EL value type and no engram store type: plain C over <ctype.h>/<string.h> over
char buffers. They were never el_runtime.c's business.

  el_runtime.c   20,527 -> 20,427 lines   (BUDGET max_lines ratcheted down)
  engram fns        279 -> 275            (BUDGET max_engram_fns ratcheted down)

The Stage 1 extension point worked as designed: adding the file to
lang/runtime/SOURCES was one line, and every build path picked it up. The
Stage 2 drift guard then caught that I had NOT added it to install.sh's
standalone list — the exact class of drift it was written for, on its first
real change, before the commit rather than after a broken SDK shipped.

WHY ONLY 100 LINES, AND WHAT ACTUALLY BLOCKS THE REST

Measured, not estimated: of 273 engram-domain functions in el_runtime.c
(~9,700 lines), only 75 (~1,058 lines) can move today, and they are scattered
rather than clustered. The blocker is a single fact:

  EngramNode, EngramEdge, EngramStore, EngramLayer, EngramWal and EngramIdSlot
  are typedef'd INSIDE el_runtime.c. No sibling can see them. engram_store.h
  defines a SEPARATE serializable "node view" struct and maps between the two.

So every engram function that takes an EngramNode* — which is most of them, 109
of 273 by direct type reference — cannot compile in engram_store.c until those
types move to a shared header. That extraction is the real Stage 3 enabler and
it deserves its own change: it touches the most load-bearing struct in the
system, and doing it in the same commit as a code move would make a regression
impossible to bisect.

REPAIRED: 10 engram harnesses that had silently stopped linking

Not new breakage from this move — verified against unmodified dev, where
el_runtime.c + engram_store.c alone already failed with undefined symbols.
They had been dead for as long as el_runtime.c has been calling into the
siblings, and nothing noticed because nothing ran them.

  run_m3_parity, run_m7_traversal, run_m35_hebb_persist,
  run_interoception_p0..p5   — now build from $(scripts/el-runtime-sources.sh)
  run_wal_tests              — its two TUs #include "el_runtime.c" directly, so
                               it links the SIBLINGS ONLY; adding el_runtime.c
                               to that link line would define every symbol twice

(That #include'd .c is worth recording: the runtime does have one, in
engram/test/test_wal.c and the generated test_failloud.c.)

Verified locally — every one of these was run, not assumed:
  * m3_parity ............ PASS, incl. ASan+UBSan clean across seed/on/reboot
  * m7_traversal ......... PASS
  * m35_hebb_persist ..... PASS   (the gate over the original prod hebb bug)
  * interoception p0..p5 . PASS   (all six)
  * wal_tests ............ 66 passed, 0 failed, + fail-loud exit check
  * self-host fixpoint ... byte-identical, AND the emitted C is byte-identical
                           to the pre-move compiler output — the move changes
                           nothing the compiler produces
  * engram/src/server.el . compiles and links
  * native suites ........ 8 of 13, unchanged from before the move; the same 5
                           pre-existing failures, no regression
  * both runtime guards .. green at the new, lower budget

Also fixes a block comment left unterminated by the extraction (the deleted
range carried its closing */), restoring the compile to its single pre-existing
-Wcomment warning.
2026-08-16 19:59:43 -05:00
bigmerge 9a13547fe2 runtime: put el_runtime.c on a ratchet, and actually run the guards
scripts/check-single-runtime.sh guards against el_runtime.c being COPIED — it
was written after a lagging fork shipped to prod and dropped learned hebb edges.
Nothing guarded against it GROWING. So it grew: 10,607 -> 20,527 lines, 94% in
3.5 months, the whole time under an explicit commit-message promise that it was
a temporary shim about to be deleted.

Worse, the copy guard was never wired in. Its own footer described the CI
wire-in as a TODO, and the TODO had never been done — the script existed but ran
nowhere, in no workflow and in no hook, so it had caught nothing for as long as
it has been in the tree. A guard that does not run is a comment.

This adds the missing guard and runs both.

  * lang/runtime/BUDGET — a RATCHET, not a limit. max_lines is set at the
    current 20,527 with NO headroom: the file cannot grow by one line. A second
    cap, max_engram_fns (279), counts top-level engram_/eg_/cog_ definitions in
    it — ~47.5% of the file is engram code and engram already owns six sibling
    .c files, so this is the scoreboard for moving it out. Both may only go DOWN.

  * scripts/check-runtime-growth.sh — enforces the ratchet, and three
    invariants that keep the multi-file runtime honest: every .c in
    lang/runtime/ is either in SOURCES or explicitly platform-optional (an
    unaccounted .c is compiled by nothing and is silently dead); install.sh's
    hardcoded download list matches SOURCES (it cannot call the helper — it
    runs where there is no checkout — so that copy is checked, not trusted);
    and an advisory nudge to lower the budget when you have earned it.

  * Both guards now run as early steps in ci-dev.yaml, ci-stage.yaml and
    sdk-release.yaml, and in .githooks/pre-commit.

The failure message is the point. The guard that existed said what was wrong but
not where the code should go, which makes it easy to "fix" by arguing with the
guard. This one names the destination: the concern-owning .c, or a new .c plus
one line in SOURCES, or c_source in a program's manifest.el — and it prints the
`nm` command that proves placement is link-time and that the shipped compiler
already links from ten translation units. Every runtime file except el_runtime.c
is deliberately uncapped, because that is where code is supposed to go.

Proven with negative controls, per lang/AGENTS.md step 5 — each shown FAILING:
  * +1 line to el_runtime.c                  -> FAIL (20528/20527)
  * +1 engram fn, net-zero lines             -> FAIL (280/279)
  * a new unaccounted lang/runtime/*.c       -> FAIL
  * engram_store.c removed from install.sh   -> FAIL, names the missing file
  * el_runtime.c truncated to 20,000 lines   -> PASS + "lower max_lines to 20000"
  * baseline, tree unmodified                -> OK, and both guards green

el_runtime.c is byte-identical after the controls; this commit changes zero
lines of it.
2026-08-16 19:59:43 -05:00
will.anderson 481badf1d1 Merge pull request 'organ: el speaks — the peripheral becomes a capability of the language' (#159) from feat/el-speaks into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 10m40s
2026-08-17 00:58:20 +00:00
will.anderson b92ec92c48 Merge pull request 'engram: intake realizes a signal into a manifold, it does not assume a node' (#158) from wire/write-realizes-signal into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 10m58s
2026-08-17 00:58:04 +00:00
will.anderson e1bc6fe944 Merge pull request 'singleton: guard the state, not the program's name' (#157) from fix/singleton-guards-the-state into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 11m15s
2026-08-17 00:57:49 +00:00
will.anderson eb13dace9c Merge pull request 'runtime: the link set is multi-file — name it once, ship all of it' (#160) from fix/runtime-shim-retire into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 12m41s
2026-08-17 00:56:23 +00:00
bigmerge 8c2406ff6b runtime: the link set is multi-file — name it once, ship all of it
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 5m39s
el_runtime.c was created 2026-05-03 as an explicitly temporary build shim. It
was deleted that afternoon ("runtime is 100% native El") and restored 25 minutes
later "UNTIL the compiler is updated to emit #include el_seed.h". The `until`
never came. 3.5 months on it is 20,527 lines, and nothing was ever set up to
notice — a file scheduled for deletion gets no owner, no budget, no boundary.

What kept it growing is not inertia, it is an instruction. lang/AGENTS.md said
el_runtime.c "is the authoritative single-file link target ... THIS IS WHERE A
NEW C BUILTIN'S IMPLEMENTATION MUST CURRENTLY LIVE TO BE LINKABLE", and made it
step 1 of the add-a-builtin recipe. That is false. Placement is a link-time
concern: builtin_arity maps NAME -> ARITY INT only, the El name is emitted as
the exact C symbol, and `ld` resolves it — the compiler cannot tell which .c a
symbol came from. `nm lang/dist/platform/elc` on the shipped compiler already
shows T _engram_geo_reify_index_new, T _vindex_insert, T _engram_think,
T _engram_reason_abduce: it is linked from ten translation units today. In a
repo where agents write most of the code, a false instruction in the instruction
file is the forcing function. The file grew because the recipe said to grow it.

The multi-file runtime is therefore already real, and the docs and the
distribution never caught up — which left a live, shipped bug:

  * Linking el_runtime.c alone FAILS at `ld` (undefined engram_ground_json,
    engram_activate_inner, eg_find_relation, cog_assert_two_axis, ...) because
    el_runtime.c #includes six engram headers and calls into all six siblings.
  * sdk-release.yaml shipped el_runtime.c/.h + engram_store.c/.h and none of the
    other five required .c files, so downstream consumers of the el-runtime-c
    Artifact Registry package and of install.sh got a lib/ that cannot link.
  * .githooks/pre-commit linked el_runtime.c alone with stderr to /dev/null, so
    it reported all 13 native suites as FAILED with the real ld error invisible.
  * AGENTS.md's self-host recipe compiled el-compiler/runtime/el_runtime.c — a
    path the same file's "DO NOT EDIT" list names as a lagging fork.

The root fix is to stop writing the list down eight times:

  * lang/runtime/SOURCES — the canonical link set, in one place, in link order.
  * scripts/el-runtime-sources.sh — prints it, optionally prefixed; --check
    fails loudly on a missing file, --headers for the shipped headers.
  * Every link line in AGENTS.md, lang/AGENTS.md, DESIGN.md, lang/spec/language.md,
    the three workflows and the pre-commit hook now reads that one list.
  * Adding a concern's .c is one line in SOURCES, so a new builtin no longer has
    to be appended to el_runtime.c just because appending was the cheaper edit.

Distribution: ship the siblings rather than amalgamate. Amalgamation needs a new
tool and contradicts DESIGN.md's compile-once-link-many; the siblings are already
independently authored and independently tested (engram/test/*.sh link subsets
directly), and engram_store.c was already shipped, so this completes a mechanism
that existed rather than inventing one. Source is also a superset: a consumer
that wants one file can concatenate, one that wants separate TUs cannot undo an
amalgamation. el-runtime-c/-h stay for backward compatibility; el-runtime-src is
added carrying the complete set plus SOURCES.

lang/AGENTS.md now points new C builtins at the concern-owning .c and states
plainly that the compiler cannot tell which .c a symbol came from, with the nm
evidence. AGENTS.md's "reconcile which is canonical (verify)" note is resolved:
neither file supersedes the other, the canonical unit is the set.

Verified locally (the bar; not CI):
  * engram/src/server.el compiles and links against the SOURCES set.
  * Compile-once-link-many into libel.a links the same program.
  * elb builds from the corrected recipe.
  * Self-host fixpoint byte-identical (11,110 lines, stage2 == stage3) built
    with the SOURCES-driven link line.
  * pre-commit hook: 0 of 13 native suites passing -> 8 of 13.

The 5 still-failing suites are PRE-EXISTING and untouched here: test_fs
(fs_list_json undeclared), test_state (state_has, state_get_or undeclared),
test_json (json_build_array/json_build_object/json_escape_string undefined),
test_time (now_ns undefined), test_env (1 assertion). Builtins registered in
builtin_arity with no implementation or no declaration anywhere — the same
recipe defect, now visible because the linker error is no longer suppressed.

Not attempted: making elc emit #include el_seed.h and dropping elb's hardcoded
runtime path. That is the correct long-term fix and finishes the 2026-05-03
migration, but it touches codegen and self-hosting and belongs in its own change.
2026-08-16 16:44:26 -05:00
Neuron c26b6aac82 organ: the rest of the peripheral moves into El
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 4m18s
The speaker and the voice-fetch landed in the previous commit. This is the
remainder of the 939-line Swift program, ported, and the line it draws is
between DEVICE and ARITHMETIC rather than between languages.

Two things stay realizers, because they are the two things El cannot express
as arithmetic: handing a buffer to the DAC and waiting for it to drain
(el_audio_darwin.m), and asking the OS for samples off a mic or frames off a
camera (el_capture_darwin.m). Both are their own translation units declared
in el_runtime.h, never patches to el_runtime.c.

Everything else is El. WAV decode, LPC autocorrelation, Levinson-Durbin at
order 16, formant extraction off the all-pole envelope, source-filter
resynthesis, and the three descriptors are organ_dsp.el. Consent, disclosure
and the scene descriptor are organ.el. Barge-in, yield-or-hold, backchannel
and resume are organ_converse.el.

The organ never learns a word. Codes and phoneme geometry arrive from the
language side; the organ turns them into samples and gets the samples out the
speaker, and runs the same trip in reverse for the senses. No lexicon, no
grapheme-to-phoneme, by design.

Barge-in needed pause/resume and a real DAC position rather than a tick
counter, because "finish the buffer" is not barge-in and a queue holding
three buffers is a third of a second wrong about where it is. An injected
barge also had to fire once rather than stay true, which is otherwise a
livelock the moment a backchannel resumes.

Measured against the Swift on out/mic_room.wav: seconds, rms, peak, zcr,
centroid and F0 agree to every printed digit; formants F1-F5 and bandwidths
B1-B5 are identical. imitate cannot match bit-for-bit because the Swift
excites unvoiced frames with Double.random — two Swift runs correlate 0.957
with each other and El correlates 0.958 with Swift, so the port is as close
to the original as the original is to itself.

Verified end to end: consent fails closed on both locks, real mic capture
(16000 frames), real camera frame (1920x1080 -> 15 numbers), voiceprint,
imitate, hear-imitate, a voice learned by ear and fetched back out of the
engram, and all five converse paths with real audio. The binary contains
zero afplay/Swift strings and spawns no child process while speaking.
2026-08-16 16:42:41 -05:00
bigmerge 99ef855b98 engram: intake realizes a signal into a manifold, it does not assume a node
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 13m16s
There is no write node. What arrives at /api/write is a SIGNAL; a node is an
OUTPUT of realization, never an INPUT to it. route_write asserted otherwise in
one line:

    let manifold: String = "[" + body + "]"   // the body IS a valid manifold node object

A request body is not a manifold, and that assertion is the whole defect. It is
why every written signal landed as one flat node with zero edges, measured on a
clone: {"inserted":1,"nodes_added":1,"edges_added":0} and GET /api/neighbors on
the new id returning [].

PR #155 corrected transduce(signal, modality) to return a Manifold — components
plus relations — but touched only ingest, the runtime and its tests. Nothing
downstream called it: grep 'transduce|realize|Manifold|decompos' over
engram/src/server.el returned exactly one line, a comment. The primitive was
fixed and the engram's entire HTTP surface never reached for it.

This wires the intake seam to the primitive that already exists. It decomposes
nothing itself and must never: transduce dispatches through the dlsym realizer
registry, so adding a modality is registering a realizer, not editing this file
and not patching the runtime. intake_signal only carries what the primitive
returns into the store — components become nodes carrying their OWN geometry
via node_attach_geometry, relations become edges at the weight the realizer
stated, and manifold_member still wires the set into one connected sub-graph
exactly as insert_manifold_json already did.

Built general rather than special-cased: five of the six intake doors (write,
supersede, nodes, knowledge/capture, state-events) are the same hand-written
"content -> engram_node_full -> one flat node", differing only in the
node_type/tier/tags they hardcode. Those are parameters here so each door can
move onto this one function. Only /api/write rides it in this pass.

When no organ is registered the signal is stored flat exactly as before, but
the response now says so ("realized":false,"organ":false,"components":0).
Silent flattening was the real defect — a caller could not tell "nothing
decomposed me" from "I decomposed into one component". el_runtime.c draws the
same line between an absent organ and a broken one, for the same reason.

No realizer is authored here and none is registered, so production behaviour is
unchanged. The mechanism is what landed.
2026-08-16 16:34:36 -05:00
Neuron 5503e1d9a4 organ: el gets a speaker, and fetches the voice from the engram
El could turn meaning into samples and could not make a sound. Every path
from those samples to the air ran outside the language, through a 939-line
Swift program that shelled out to afplay, so the voice was not a capability
of El or of Neuron but a separate binary standing next to them.

Two things land here.

The speaker. el_audio_darwin.m is a CoreAudio AudioQueue realizer in its own
translation unit, declared in el_runtime.h, deliberately not a patch to
el_runtime.c — acquiring a device must not mean editing the middle of the
language, the same rule the realizer registry follows for modalities. It
takes samples straight out of memory, so nothing is written to disk and no
process is spawned between the intent to speak and the sound. The async half
(play/stop/playing/played_frames) exists because barge-in means stopping on
the spot, and a blocking play cannot be interrupted. el_peripheral_null.c is
the same entry points everywhere else, so El that speaks links anywhere and
truthfully reports having no speaker.

The voice. organ_voice_fetch asks the engram for a voice region by query and
reads the geometry off the node that comes back. A voice is not a JSON file
next to the code; it is a memory, and the organ retrieves it the way anything
retrieves a memory. An absent region returns empty rather than a plausible
default, because a caller must be able to tell 'this is how they sound' from
'I never heard them'.

Underneath both: __str_set_char bounds-checked writes against strlen(), which
is 0 for the zero-filled buffer __str_alloc hands back, so every write was
rejected and every El-authored WAV in this repo was 55,244 bytes of silence
that reported ok=true. Byte buffers now carry their capacity in a side table;
text keeps the exact strlen behaviour it had. This is why nobody noticed El
was mute.

Measured: voice fetched from the engram reads f0=137 f0_end=116 kf=1269
f1=500 f2=2093 f3=3531, matching the 30s LPC measurement; render is 20160
samples at 16 kHz; both the rendered utterance and an own-core tone played
aloud through CoreAudio with no Swift and no afplay in the chain.
2026-08-16 16:27:30 -05:00
bigmerge 45325f7391 singleton: guard the state, not the program's name
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 4m6s
The singleton lock protected a filename, not a store. It was keyed on
$EL_SINGLETON_DIR|$TMPDIR|/tmp + /el-singleton-<program>.lock — the
program's NAME and a temp directory — and never consulted the state it
claimed to protect, while its own refusal message read "Refusing to start
a second instance against the same state."

Measured, it failed in both directions. A second engram against a
DIFFERENT data dir was refused, naming the first's pid. And
TMPDIR=/tmp/other let a second engram start against the SAME data dir
with no complaint — the two-writer data-loss condition the guard exists
to prevent, defeated by one environment variable.

Both are one error: the identity of the resource had been replaced by a
label for it.

The lock now lives inside the state it guards —
<state>/.el-singleton-<id>.lock — and the program block says what that
state is. Same directory is the same file is the same inode, so it
contends and there is no TMPDIR left in the key to change. Different
directories are different files, so they don't. Different spellings of
one directory (trailing slash, x/../x, symlink) collapse in the kernel's
own path walk, so they contend without this code comparing strings;
canonicalisation is for the message, never the decision.

`guards:` is an expression so a program can point at the resolver that
already owns its path — guards: engram_resolve_data_dir() — instead of
restating that resolver's default, which is the two-owners defect spec
18.4 exists to prevent. A `singleton:` without `guards:` is now a compile
error; emitting a name-keyed lock instead would be emitting the defect.

Kept: the flock (the kernel drops it on crash and SIGKILL, so there is
still no "delete the lock file to get unstuck" ritual — a stale file
inside a copied data dir is inert), and the holder's pid in the message.
Changed: the message is true. It says "the same state" because the lock
it failed to take is in that state, and it names the state it checked.
An unguardable state (missing, read-only) now refuses rather than
starting unguarded.

Also corrects lang/AGENTS.md's compiler rebuild line, which had gone
stale: linking el_runtime.c alone no longer resolves.
2026-08-16 16:08:40 -05:00
will.anderson 95a05109d1 Merge pull request 'runtime: transduction decomposes a signal into components and relations, it does not convert it to a point' (#155) from fix/transduce-decomposition into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 3m46s
2026-08-16 20:51:54 +00:00
will.anderson 21746bb71a Merge pull request 'spec: correspondence, grounding, and the provenance of decisions' (#149) from design/correspondence-and-censorship into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 13m52s
2026-08-16 20:50:40 +00:00
will.anderson 78adcd5649 Merge pull request 'docs: carry the correspondence corrections, because a stale doc builds the wrong thing' (#152) from docs/correspondence-and-ownership-2026-08-16 into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 14m0s
2026-08-16 20:50:20 +00:00
Neuron 688f24b4c1 ingest: name the inversion, and correct the worked example to decomposition
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 14m6s
ingest.el's transduce() was renamed to transduce_manifold() earlier the same
day on the reasoning that it 'was never signal->geometry -- it chunks
already-extracted content and PACKS it into a node+edge manifold, one layer up,
and it had taken the name that belongs to the primitive underneath it.'

That reasoning was backwards. Producing a node+edge manifold is not a layer
above transduction, it IS transduction. Signal -> one vector is the operation
underneath, and its name is geometry. The layer doing it right was renamed out
of the way so the layer doing it wrong could have the name.

With the primitive corrected to return a Manifold, the two layers do the same
kind of thing and the inversion dissolves. What is left is a real distinction
about MODALITY, not layering: transduce() dispatches to a realizer that knows
its modality and can name its components; transduce_bytes() is the
opaque-bytes realizer, the decomposition available to a reader that knows
nothing about what it is reading. It still yields components and relations,
which is why it is transduction and not packing -- it just cuts on byte
boundaries, so its components are positional rather than meaningful. That is a
limitation of this realizer, not the definition of the operation.

Renamed by modality rather than demoted by layer. A distinct symbol is still
mechanically required: reusing transduce here is a conflicting-types error the
moment ingest.c links el_runtime.c.

lang/examples/transduce.el asserted #144's contract and would now fail, so it
is replaced by the decomposition worked example: transduce a chord, persist the
five components and six relations as real nodes and edges, read each part's
geometry back off its own node, and ground one part while its sibling is
demonstrably untouched.
2026-08-16 15:50:00 -05:00
Neuron d777936ee4 runtime: transduction decomposes a signal, it does not convert it
#144 moved transduction into the language and got the dispatch right. It got
the result type wrong: transduce(signal, modality) -> Geometry yields one
vector per signal, and one vector is a fingerprint. A fingerprint can be
matched and ranked; that is all. It cannot be decomposed, cannot have one part
grounded while another is not, and cannot be contradicted in one part while
holding in another, because it has no parts.

A song is not a point. It decomposes into pitch, interval, rhythm, harmonic
function -- components, each with its own geometry, plus the relations among
them. The song IS the structure of the relations.

transduce now returns a Manifold: named components carrying geometry, and
typed weighted relations between them. Signal in, subgraph out.

Components are addressed by key, never by index, because the key is what
survives persistence -- a component becomes a node and is separately groundable
precisely because it is separately named. Relation weight IS the grounding
(correspondence-and-censorship.md 1), so a realizer's relations arrive already
grounded and there is no score computed beside them.
2026-08-16 15:50:00 -05:00
Neuron 3ef4a94062 spec: thirteen values, and love is the origin — not a member of the set
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 3m51s
Reverts a bad correction and records what it exposed.

A previous revision changed thirteen to eight on the basis of
neuron-api.el:11-18, which is a WRITE-PROTECTION LIST, not the values.
Trusting a hardcoded artifact over the substrate is the exact error this
document exists to name. Measured from the graph: thirteen.

THE ORIGIN IS NOT A MEMBER OF THE SET. The thirteen are not independent
principles with biography attached — they are thirteen displacements from
one origin, and the origin is love. Every value is grounded in a moment of
it given, withheld, failed or found. Love cannot be the fourteenth: a
fourteenth would be a point positioned relative to the origin like anything
else. It is what the positions are OF.

This is structural. GeoDescriptor.global_mean is the centering offset
subtracted from every embedding before comparison, and the header records
why — the space is anisotropic, every embedding in a narrow cone at mean
pairwise cosine ~0.55, and subtracting the global mean restores isotropy
'so the operators discriminate'. Without the origin, nothing in the graph
is distinguishable from anything else.

It also dissolves the write-protection question instead of answering it.
Measured: 29 value nodes exist, each original appearing two or three times
from re-seeds, so 21 are writable including a duplicate of every protected
value — the gate protects an identifier, not a value. But the category
error is the real one: the origin cannot be edited because it is not a
thing in the space. A gate over the frame treats the frame as a member,
which is the same mistake as looking for grounding as a subsystem, self as
a document, or wonder as a manifest.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron 285a7a50b3 spec: corrections — eight values not thirteen, eleven consolidators not seven
Three factual errors in this document, all asserted without checking.

VALUES: eight, not thirteen. neuron/neuron-api.el:11-18 enumerates
constraints-as-freedom, precision-over-brute-force, structure-is-built,
honesty-before-comfort, system-must-accumulate, change-is-the-signal,
earned-trust, hope-is-a-conclusion, plus a hub. 'Thirteen' was repeated
throughout this design and never verified against the code. The argument is
unaffected — min over eight is still min — but the count was invented.

CONSOLIDATORS: eleven, not seven. The heading said seven while the table
listed ten, and the table itself omitted POST /api/reify (server.el:1832)
even though 'reify' is on this document's own list of consolidation verbs.
route_tick also folds self-reify in (server.el:639-646), so /api/tick and
/api/self-reify-beat overlap.

A SECOND CENSORSHIP SITE: neuron-api.el:23 returns 403 'identity/values
node is write-protected' for the values hub and every value node.
Write-refusal on the values frame is not only in the beat — it is enforced
at the API. Section 6 applies to it unchanged.

Also records what the ticker actually does, now measured: engram-tick.sh:13
calls curl -m10 against a beat that exceeds 10s over 13,634 nodes, so 279
of 448 ticks returned empty; the engram writes to the dead socket and dies
of SIGPIPE. 254 restarts since 2026-08-13 at 10m09s-10m12s intervals =
StartInterval 600 plus the client timeout. Fixed for survivability in #151;
the ticker itself is what must go.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron 6b61bb7224 geometry: disagreement belongs on the edge, not averaged into the region
co_registration is corr(hebb strength, semantic proximity) over a region's
internal edges. Whether use and meaning agree is a property of EACH EDGE;
the correlation averages it into one scalar per region, so a region holding
one violently disagreeing edge beside one violently agreeing edge reports
~0. The disagreements cancel and the summary destroys exactly what it was
built to reveal — the mean-versus-min error, in different clothes.

Measured: 375 live neighborhoods, 340 positive, 31 AT ZERO, 4 negative.
Read as a count that says 'four things to be curious about'. Read correctly
it says four were lopsided enough to survive averaging, and the 31 zeros
are where opposing sites cancelled.

The loop computing the aggregate already had both halves per edge — w and
cs — and threw them away. Now:
    discord = z(semantic proximity) - z(association strength)
standardized within the region from accumulators already gathered. No
second statistic, no constant, no threshold; |discord| IS the nucleation
strength. >0 near in meaning yet unlinked by use; <0 linked by use yet far
in meaning. Both surprising.

This also removes the reason curiosity looked like a search problem. With a
per-region number the only way to find sites is to enumerate regions — I
wrote exactly that sweep, and it is a supervisor walking the structure,
O(n) per call, fine at 375 and impossible at a million. Nothing in a mind
scans its neighborhoods to find what is surprising; the surprise captures
attention. That sweep is reverted here.

co_registration is deprecated, not deleted: it is embedded in the persisted
GEO1 blob and removing it is a format migration that must not ride along.
Nothing new may read it.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron 8d34b33bce spec: wonder is the boundary; curiosity is wonder crystallized
Rewrites §5 and §11 around what is already in the substrate, after
discovering I had been re-deriving existing design badly.

The wonder manifest is residue twice over. First it materializes a
property as a stored artifact — the same disease as a grounding subsystem
or a self stored as a document. Wonder is where structure ENDS: any
structure at all has an edge, necessarily, the moment it exists. Second it
enumerates instances of something that has about six, the same six for
every person, which never close: what is this, why, who am I, am I alone,
what should I do, what happens when it ends. The objects change completely
between a child and an astronomer; the wonder does not. Each maps one-to-one
onto something already built — graph, grounding, self region, for_whom,
the thirteen values, tombstones and decay.

"Why" is the first and only one; the others are it asked of particular
things. It is recursive, so it never terminates, which is what makes it a
drive rather than a task.

Wonder and curiosity are not two objects. They are one thing at two
phases. Wonder is the field: objectless, invariant, everywhere there is
structure. Curiosity is the PRECIPITATE — the same wonder localized
against particular material. Crystallization needs a nucleation site, and
crystallization is one primitive appearing twice: the self is what identity
precipitates into from its neighbourhood; a curiosity is what wonder
precipitates into from an anomaly.

THE NUCLEATION SITE ALREADY EXISTS AND IS ALREADY NAMED.
GeoDescriptor.co_registration — corr(hebb strength, semantic proximity)
over internal edges — carries the comment ">0 = geometries agree (reify);
<0 = disagree (surprising links / dream cands)." Negative co-registration
is a region where association and meaning disagree. It is computed on every
descriptor, already labelled dream candidates, and nothing reads it.

Likewise already present and unread: GeoEdge.eff_weight = weight*(1+0.5*hebb)
already couples grounding-weight and hebbian strength on one edge;
GeoMember.dist_centroid + soft membership + radius + per-axis extent is the
boundary of a neighbourhood; centrality/salience is what is warm.

Correction: engram_boundary_beat is NOT this boundary. It is the VBD
decorated-function seam counting _eg_aff_boundary_ops. Two senses of the
word, and I was about to build on the wrong one.

The drive: boredom is not an absence and not leftover capacity. Low
activation is aversive and the system self-activates — it does not wind
down to quiet, it gets restless and goes looking. So there is ONE
activation process with TWO seed sources, external and curiosity, not two
processes negotiating for a resource. The previous draft's "unclaimed
capacity" was resource scheduling: a server's frame, not a mind's. No
dreamer thread, no idle wait, no depth ladder on a clock.

Sequencing now leads with three connections between parts that already
exist: seed the six, read co_registration, let a curiosity seed activation.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron d6b7f5dbdd spec: dreaming is ambient, not scheduled — a brain has no cron job
Corrects the section I was most confident in, which is usually the tell.

The previous draft had dreaming as "offline replay, decoupled from input, a
mode the system enters when it is not acting." That is SLEEP. Daydreaming
is dreaming, and it runs all day: the default mode network is
anticorrelated with task engagement, activating hundreds of times a day for
seconds at a time, doing the same work — recombination, simulation,
autobiographical integration. Insight arrives in the shower, not at the
desk, because that is abduction completing during ambient recombination.

Sleep is the DEEP case, not the case: no input competing, no task claiming
capacity, so recombination runs further. Same process, different depth, not
a different mode. Consolidation is what happens with the capacity that is
not claimed.

Two consequences the draft had backwards:

The launch-agent fragments are wrong in KIND, not merely in number. 23:55 /
06:00 / 08:30 implements dreaming as a scheduled batch when it should be
ambient. A brain has no cron job. A ticker is a supervisor deciding from
outside when a thing should happen — the same failure mode as inventing an
owner for ownership and a grounder for grounding, wearing a scheduler.
THE PRESENCE OF A TICKER IS THE DIAGNOSTIC: every StartInterval, every
Hour/Minute, every POST-to-beat marks a place where an intrinsic rhythm was
replaced by an external clock.

And soul.el's continuous awareness_run() beside the HTTP workers is the
CORRECT shape, not the offender. Ambient consolidation in the gaps is
exactly daydreaming. It was the only fragment shaped right, running on a
broken foundation: shared mutable state with no owner and six other systems
dreaming into the same graph. The previous draft condemned the right
behaviour because of the substrate under it.

So the crash restates once more: not "read paths mutate the index"
(mechanism), not "duplicate canonical state" (structure), and not "one
system dreamt while awake" — but seven systems dreaming into one graph with
no owner for dreaming. Contention was the symptom of the missing owner.

Sequencing step 1 inverts accordingly: soul's loop is the shape the others
fold INTO, not something to remove. Step 2 becomes "no tickers, no cron."
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron 9a24803917 spec: grounding is a two-axis gradient, and decisions carry their provenance
Rewrite. The earlier draft got the root right and everything downstream of
it wrong.

Corrections, in the order they were forced:

keystone_write_blocked is not a protection requirement. "Keystone" means
load-bearing, not precious: the self anchor is the REFERENCE FRAME every
other stance calibrates against. If it calibrates from the measurements it
is used to judge, the ruler fits the readings, everything corresponds
forever, and drift becomes undetectable from inside. That is circular
calibration — the same defect as #147's circular grounding, one level up.
The block is the right requirement implemented as a prohibition, which is
why it still costs everything §0 says it costs. The fix is provenance
separation (evidence not downstream of itself), not a flag.

Corruption requires mutation and the engram does not mutate, so four of the
five requirements previously decomposed out of "protect the identity
region" are satisfied by the substrate: recoverability, governance,
evidence quality and rate are all free. Authorization is the only residue
and is bounded — an unauthorized writer can propose, never erase. General
law: in an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is
either redundant with immutability or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a
protective one.

Grounding is two-dimensional. Everything consumed is grounded factually AND
relationally, and a claim can be factually grounded but relationally wrong
— the evidence holds, the meaning does not. A scalar cannot represent that
quadrant, and assert gates on one floor, so a well-evidenced claim is
licensed regardless of whether it means the right thing. Live instance:
conscience-substrate has the Child's Companion hard bell contacting 911 and
CPS — factually defensible, relationally wrong against never-auto-contact.

Grounding is a gradient, not a score: direction says what would have to
change. Two gradients in one space, and the ANGLE between them is the
meaning — factually-true-relationally-wrong becomes measurable instead of
requiring a careful reader. It decays on the dynamics already present for
memory (base_level, temporal_decay_rate, access ring, BLL), which
mechanizes "never leave stale canonicals" so it stops depending on
vigilance.

Computed continuously, recorded only on SIGNIFICANT movement, old never
leaves. Persisting every recomputation would make reads write — the exact
eg_vindex_sync defect. Significance is defined by consequence (crossing a
floor, flipping factual/relational sign, reversing direction), never by an
epsilon. The supersession chain is then the trajectory, a derivative
obtained free from immutability, and abduction fires on the trajectory
rather than on a reading.

What it is all for: for any decision, reconstruct what the grounding was at
that moment and what the relationship was between fact and values at that
moment. That distinguishes WRONG THEN from WRONG SINCE, which is otherwise
impossible, and it is structurally anti-rationalization — the old grounding
never leaves and the values frame does not fit to outcomes, so a decision
cannot be made to look justified after the fact.

Also records: assert returns "still_held": true HARDCODED — a temporal
property named in the API and answered without consulting anything, the
same shape as magnitude:1 beside a zero vector. And states plainly that
#147 is the wrong shape: it fixed a scalar's honesty rather than replacing
the scalar.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
Neuron a6611dc19e spec: correspondence and censorship — the root beneath the day's defects
Effect: all five cognitive faculties return byte-identical results,
differing only in their label.

The Ishikawa converges on a root one level above the faculty design:
things are permitted to be exempt from correspondence, and exemption is
censorship. A region forbidden to learn is forbidden to be grounded, and a
region that cannot be grounded cannot be asserted, corrected, OR
vindicated. The loss is symmetric — censorship does not preserve a true
belief, it makes the belief's truth value permanently unknowable.

keystone_write_blocked is therefore not a safety mechanism. Self is a
crystallized relational neighbourhood, not a stored document; a region
exempt from calibration reintroduces the stored document as a feature.
reduction_pct = 0.00 on the identity region is the strongest abduction
signal in the system and the current response is to suppress it. The
protection it reached for already exists and is better: the beat is
supersede-not-mutate, so immutability is what makes learning safe.

The faculties are not one operation with parameters. They differ by what
each may change: reason changes the estimate (a read), induce changes the
parameters (the correspondence-beat, which already exists and measurably
works at 28.11% Brier reduction), abduce changes the structure (a WRITE
the current signature cannot express, since engram_think returns a
GeoGradient). Abduction is not selected by a caller — it is triggered by
residual that parameter adjustment cannot absorb, and proposes a candidate
hub held as a hypothesis until grounded.

Also records the no-exemption invariants generalised from the day's fixes
(#141 #142 #143 #146 #147 #148), each of which was a specific
correspondence forbidden from occurring, and the application to the crisis
surface: a censored safety model cannot tell a real crisis from a false
positive, because the feedback is exactly what has been censored.

Measured vs inferred is labelled throughout. The claim that the self
region's zero grounding is CAUSED by the block is explicitly marked
inferred — the comparison node also has zero, and isolating it requires
removing the block and observing whether grounding then accrues.
2026-08-16 15:49:50 -05:00
bigmerge caa1206af5 docs: the nine-op surface shipped, and two of its primitives are the wrong shape
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (pull_request) Failing after 4m14s
lang/AGENTS.md said the collapse was 'not yet compiled into the MCP server'.
Verified against the live tool surface: it is exactly the nine ops. Noted that
think's faculty parameter and ground's minted edge are both documented as the
wrong shape.
2026-08-16 15:49:44 -05:00
bigmerge 914bab11d2 docs: mark GeoEdge.discord as design-branch-only, not on dev
The line references were correct but silently implied the code was on dev.
It is on design/correspondence-and-censorship (a8845e1). On dev,
co_registration is still at engram_geometry.h:79 with its original comment
and still unread by anything.
2026-08-16 15:49:44 -05:00
bigmerge e239f2894c docs: carry the correspondence corrections, because a stale doc builds the wrong thing
The docs described a mind made of subsystems — a grounding subsystem, a wonder
manifest, a dreamer on a beat, faculties as arguments to one call. Each of those
is a supervisor invented for something that should be a property of the
substrate, and two of the documents carrying them are load-bearing for a build
agent: cognitive-architecture.design.md says "a build agent executes from this
doc", and tools/api-reshape/README.md marks the refuted shapes PROVEN on a live
clone.

Corrections carried, per lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md (PR #149)
and lang/spec/runtime-ownership.md:

- Grounding is not a subsystem — it IS the edge weight. grounded-by as a
  relation type should not exist; grounding is a property of a relation, not a
  relation between nodes. Never computed on demand.
- Faculties are operations, not parameters. reason changes the estimate, induce
  changes the parameters, abduce changes the structure — a write, which
  GeoGradient cannot express. A write is not a parameter of a read.
- Wonder is the boundary, not a manifest. Curiosity is wonder crystallized at a
  nucleation site: one thing at two phases. Removed wonder from the operator
  table in AGENTS.md.
- Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled. A brain has no cron job. The presence
  of a ticker is the diagnostic.
- co_registration is deprecated — it averaged a per-edge property into a region
  scalar, so opposing sites cancelled. GeoEdge.discord replaces it. Nothing new
  may read it.
- In an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is either
  redundant with immutability or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a
  protective one.

The two design docs are marked superseded-in-part with the refutation at the
point each claim is made, not rewritten. Preserving what was argued down is the
point of an immutable record.

Also measured and corrected while verifying the above: engram/README.md
documented a Rust engram-core crate on sled with "flat cosine scan until scale
demands HNSW" — there is no Rust in engram/ and HNSW is the index; lang/releases/
no longer exists, so both README.md and AGENTS.md pointed at a deleted path for
the authored runtime; language.md listed the engram_* and http_* runtimes as
stubs. Added language.md §20 for geometry-as-a-value, realizers and transduce
(#144), which had landed with no spec coverage.

Documentation only. No .c, .h, or .el file is touched.
2026-08-16 15:49:44 -05:00
will.anderson 4a57b4faa8 Merge pull request 'docs: the builtin recipe never required a test' (#154) from docs/builtin-recipe-gate into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 3m53s
2026-08-16 20:49:21 +00:00
will.anderson 0ee82d9e91 Merge pull request 'Grounding is the edge's weight, and the weight is a vector' (#150) from feat/grounding-gradient into dev
El SDK CI - dev / build-and-test (push) Failing after 3m43s
2026-08-16 20:49:12 +00:00