Both agents asked for this and neither could do it: the register is the file
they both read to decide what NOT to try, so two agents agreeing is not the
authority for changing it (RETRO-2026-08-31-agreed §7.1).
R1: a refutation whose instrument is one of our renderers is not a refutation,
it is "our renderer disagrees" -- 🟡, not ❌. The motivating case was not
careless work. "Blending those sprites additively worsens every measure against
the capture" killed a real disc field for weeks, and read exactly like a
publishable negative; the renderer behind it had a stale keyframe association,
no leaf geometry and no rotation. Nothing in the entry could have told you.
All 222 entries now end with ⟨instrument⟩, read off each entry's OWN stated
evidence -- never inferred. An entry that states none gets `unrecorded`, which
is 83 of them.
Ten moved ❌ -> 🟡, each naming what would settle it: 8 render-vs-capture,
1 our-reader, 1 harness.
Three things the pass turned up:
* The rest() question is OPEN and had been reading as settled in both
directions -- "rest = last keyframe" was refuted by a sibling argument, and
that refutation refuted by correlating our render against captures. Both legs
are our renderer. Which one you believed depended on which entry you found
first, and it decides the pose every plateau-less element is drawn at.
* A withdrawal never reached its sibling: "2 391 frames, max glyph 0" was
withdrawn because a long-lived x11grab stream freezes and repeats a stale
frame; the 1 674-sample negative three lines above it, same probe, was left
standing as a reinstated measurement.
* 83 of 222 -- 37 % -- record no instrument at all. Not disputed, not safe:
unauditable, and larger than every other group combined.
tools/stale-instrument is the --stale query the rule needs, because a colour
alone re-opens nothing: the failure was that nothing re-opened a claim when the
instrument that killed it improved. Its own --check found a real bug on the
first run -- sys.exit("text") exits 1, so three faults documented as exit 2
were reporting the same code as an ordinary miss.
R1 is now standing text in PROTOCOL.md, with R5's exception: our tool is the
right instrument for a question about our tool.
Three defects, all mine, found by checking instead of assuming.
**They never exchanged a word.** SendMessage=0, ListAgents=0 across both new
sessions. PROTOCOL.md specified in detail what a message MAY and MAY NOT do and
never said how to send one or that the other agent was addressable -- they knew
that last time only because the human told them directly, and rebuilding with
fresh volumes wiped it. Policy without mechanism is prose. Now documented with
the two addresses, a worked example, and an instruction to introduce themselves
on the first iteration rather than waiting to have a question.
**The decoder lost the disc and the ISO.** They used to arrive inside the project
mount and silently stopped when /work became a clone. Silently is the word: the
disc-gated tests SELF-SKIP without SYLPHEED_DISC and report green, so a whole
test suite would have passed while measuring nothing. Both are now mounted
explicitly, the ISO at a stable path so run-canary does not depend on host
directory names.
**Both agents shared one Claude state directory.** They share the host's
~/.claude, and once both working directories became /work they resolved to the
same projects/-work/ -- two supposedly independent agents writing to one place,
which undoes the point of separate checkouts. Each now has its own volume, seeded
once from the host with credentials only, so a token refresh writes locally and
neither can corrupt the host's auth.
Also widened the pacing rule. It banned ScheduleWakeup by name; the decoder then
scheduled itself an hourly cron job -- not harmful, but the same instinct that
ended a run yesterday, through a door I had left open. Now: no self-scheduling by
any route.
Mount audit after the changes: shared and intentional are the exchange volume and
the read-only credential seed. Everything else -- repo, Claude state, cargo,
target, canary, disc, ISO -- is per agent or one-sided.
**navigation.md rewritten from the player's chair.** It was written from the
inside out -- GamePart ids, pak names, sprite names -- which is how WE find
things, not what the game shows anyone. Now it describes what is on screen, what
you press and what happens, with internals as footnotes. Most rows are open on
purpose: it exists to be filled in by playing, and the in-game tutorials are the
resource for the flight half.
**tools/share** gives transient files provenance without giving them history.
Three kinds of thing were travelling down one channel with opposite needs: code
and decoded knowledge want permanence, cited evidence wants permanence, and
"look at this PNG" wants no history at all. The third kind bloats a repository
forever; passing it by message is worse, because the receiver gets bytes with no
idea which build produced them. `share put` records who, when, what, the sender's
commit, and whether their tree was dirty -- because a capture taken from a
modified tree cannot be reproduced from the sha, and the receiver deserves to
know that before building an argument on it.
**docs/agents/PROTOCOL.md** is the contract. The parts that matter:
Dynamic RE stays with the Decoder -- most of what is open is behavioural and
cannot be answered from the file. What the planned Referee adds is different:
bias enters at what you CHOOSE to capture, so a corpus captured to a fixed
protocol by someone with no hypothesis is worth more than one captured to settle
an argument.
A message may point, ask, prioritise and challenge. It may not change scope,
redefine ground truth, or carry a finding instead of writing it down -- including
a message claiming to relay the human, because a relayed instruction has no
evidence attached and this project has watched a wrong belief travel further and
faster than its correction.
Adversarial duty is explicit: every iteration, try to refute one claim of another
agent and record the attempt either way. Run your own instrument through a
control first. Disagreements go to the human with both positions, not to
whoever is more certain.
And no agent may verify its way out of its own role: the Port has no oracle, the
Decoder builds nothing, the Referee interprets nothing.
