bigmerge
daad2fa2a0
git diff errored to stderr on a malformed revision while wc -l counted empty
stdout, producing three confident IDENTICAL results that meant nothing. Had the
promoted trees actually differed, I would have reported the promotion clean.
The correct check is not 'how many files differ' but 'is the tree object the
same object' -- all three share hash 2acd9374.
All five defects are now visibly one shape: reading a PROXY instead of the
thing. One file instead of the operation, a variable name instead of the shape,
a scope instead of the whole, a pipe's exit instead of the program's, a line
count instead of object identity.
v1 — Experiments
Every change to El on iteration-1 was produced by one loop, run repeatedly:
Ishikawa → scientific method → Six Sigma → repeat
- Ishikawa — name the root cause, not the symptom. Why is this table here? never why is this table ugly?
- Scientific method — state a hypothesis, commit predictions before running, then run it in an isolated worktree and grade every prediction including the ones that failed.
- Six Sigma — eliminate the defect class, then add a control so it cannot silently return.
The organising finding
Predictions that came back FALSE were worth more than the ones that held.
Nineteen cycles, sixty-one predictions. The eleven that failed produced every significant result:
| Failed prediction | What it found |
|---|---|
| "the arity table has drifted from the header" | Zero drift — but 110 functions had no entry at all. The table was not wrong, it was 40% incomplete. |
| "codegen drops below baseline" (×4) | The traversal is irreducible. Walking an AST to find calls does not move no matter who decides. Only the rule and the judgment leave. |
| "guards cannot refuse through the seam" | One line, and refusal works. Six compile-time kinds were unnecessary. |
| "C forbids the struct redefinition" | C allows shadowing — and a different defect surfaced: an exit injection emitted with an empty target. |
| "routing el_bin_lookup through the gate fixes the SIGSEGV" | It did not. The fallback was the hazard: strlen() on an integer. I would have shipped the wrong fix and called it verified. |
A prediction that only ever confirms is a demonstration, not a test. One cycle
was run without committing predictions first — async-half-expressible —
and it produced a rigged result: pthread_join immediately after
pthread_create, with the word DEFERRED printed by the test itself. It had to
be discarded and re-run.
Layout
cycles/ one file per loop, numbered in order, named for the DEFECT
findings/ what the cycles produced, cross-cut by kind
Scoreboard
cycles run 19
predictions committed 61
predictions FALSE 11 ← the useful ones
silent miscompilations found 4
security-relevant defects 2
architecture questions closed 5
defects in my own measurement 4
Every cycle verified the same three things before landing: the compiler self-hosts byte-identically (gen2 == gen3), the native suite passes, and the integration harnesses pass. A cycle that could not show all three did not land.