Five sites in chat.el read state_get("soul_identity") and splice the result into
the system prompt, beside the voice, security and capability rules:
chat.el:737, 1745, 2620, 3425, 3480
Nothing has written that key since b163fa6. The producer was added 2026-05-02 in
601e0fe and deleted by the awareness refactor days later. Every chat turn since has
built its system prompt with an EMPTY identity section, and nothing reported it.
Found by the #132 state-key gate, which treats a read with no producer as a build
error rather than a silence. That is the entire argument for that gate.
RESTORED VERBATIM, NOT IMPROVED. soul_identity is an env-configurable persona LINE.
It is not soul_identity_context — the graph-derived
[INTELLECTUAL-DNA]/[VALUES]/[MEMORY-PHILOSOPHY] block written at soul.el:184.
Repointing the five reads at that block would have substituted different content and
called it a repair. Whether the chat prompt should ALSO carry the graph-derived block
is a real question and a separate one; it is not smuggled in here.
Verified by the gate that found it: dead reads 6 -> 1, and it now reports the
chat.el baseline entry as STALE — 'entries that no longer match anything; delete
them'. The remaining one is studio.el's soul_principal, untouched by this change.
Rung: BUILT, gate-verified, boots. NOT end-to-end chat-verified — proving the
prompt now carries the line needs a live provider call, which I have not run.
Refs #137, #132
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The rebase merged cleanly at source level but left dist/soul.c holding one side's
code and not the other — main's regenerated amalgam vs this branch's. The stamp
gate added in 9fd8c11 caught it on its first real use:
FAIL: dist/soul.c is STALE. It does not match the current .el sources.
Sources that changed: neuron-api.el, routes.el
Without that gate this branch would have looked clean and shipped an engine
containing the structural audit but none of the 08-09 engine work, or the reverse.
That is exactly neuron#133, which once hid five merged fixes including a P0.
Regenerated from the rebased sources: 1,204,442 bytes, 1,259 inlined bodies.
Verified after: stamp OK; builds from its own committed input (920,776 bytes);
interface 108 -> 110 routes with nothing removed, adding /api/neuron/audit/structural;
and the route answers — stage 1, assessment_kind 'annotated_characterization',
score null by design, with findings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
#133 regenerated the amalgam once and said so itself: 'Nothing in the tree
regenerates this file. Only a human running the recipe. It lags in batches, never
per-change, and it will drift again.'
It drifted again. Every binary deployed on 2026-08-09 was built by build-soul.sh
from a scratch amalgam that never touches dist/soul.c, so the committed build
input fell 2,761 bytes behind the sources by a different route than #133 describes.
Auto-regeneration is not available: the CI workflow records that elc needs 24GB+
of virtual memory and would OOM the runner. So the build cannot regenerate the
file. It can refuse to compile a stale one, for free and with no compiler.
tools/soulc-stamp.sh records a content fingerprint of every .el source at the
moment the amalgam is generated. --check recomputes and compares; divergence exits
1 and names the changed files and the recipe. Wired into CI ahead of the compile.
dist/soul.c regenerated from current sources: 1,176,361 -> 1,179,122 bytes, 1,247
inlined bodies (gate wants >=1200), and verified to compile clean at 903,552 bytes.
Demonstrated to FAIL on the bad input, per postmortem 0004's rule that a gate which
only passes on good input proves nothing:
fresh stamp -> OK, exit 0
one .el modified -> FAIL, exit 1, names memory.el
source restored -> OK, exit 0
Refs #133, #111
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Neuron