Sylpheed/docs/re/METHOD.md

Method traps already paid for

Each line cost an iteration at least once. They are general — they are not about Sylpheed, they are about how this kind of measurement goes wrong.

Like REFUTED.md, this list had been living in the autonomous agent's loop prompt, i.e. nowhere durable. See README.md for the ✅/🟡/❔ confidence convention itself.

Controls

• Every result needs a control. A control that fails kills the instrument.
• Run the known-positive through a new filter FIRST. Three filters have been killed by their own control. When one fails, read the known-good's disassembly before assuming a shape.
• A measured negative is a result — but a negative is only as strong as the route you ran, so state its reach.
• A null result needs its cause shown to have happened.
• A result with NO unknowns is suspicious.
• Census the whole set; always run the other population as the control. Zero partials is stronger than a majority.
• A 2×2 partition is the sharpest general tool — both off-diagonals empty is a law.
• Re-derive a doc's own numbers as the control.

Inference

• Never conclude from ONE sample.
• A law proved on one population is a hypothesis on the next.
• Finding one exception does not imply a family.
• Consistency is not proof. A suggestive coincidence is a coincidence until measured. An analogy is not a measurement.
• Same layout ≠ same instance. Same record-name set ≠ same object.
• A marker is only proven by what it leaves out.
• A high-confidence SCORE is not a high-confidence MECHANISM.
• Knowing HOW MANY is not knowing WHICH.
• Round numbers matching is weak evidence — unless you read the constant.
• My own last-turn result is a hypothesis too.
• A global partition can understate a per-owner one.
• A residual is measured against a population — name it.

Searching and tooling

• A search that returns thousands has no power; state the reach.
• A substring match is not a hit. A regex miss looks like a null result — print one raw sample before believing a zero.
• A derived table can be a cross product — measure its shape first.
• After refuting an instrument, sweep everything that depended on it.
• Before measuring how wrong a tool is, read what the tool actually does.
• The instrument must pass its own control.
• Classify a bulk before mining it. The residual is the prize.
• Rank by similarity — the cliff is the finding. But read the values before trusting the rank.
• Grep the nouns before designing the experiment — and believe it.
• Grep gives you a file list — read every file on it.
• The answer is often already in the doc that owns the subject — read it end to end. A 🟡 often names its own route.
• Before re-trying a blocked idea, check whether the blocker's own doc already tried it.
• Ship a regenerator with every artefact. An artefact that moves by a pure reorder is a tool bug.
• Never print per-entry lines from a disc-wide sweep — aggregate.

Reading the data

• Read what a loader NAMES, not where it stores.
• A field the disc never values still gets named by the loader.
• An indexed read beats a deduped-pool adjacency read.
• Check the whole string set, not the one matching word.
• A dict keyed by record name across a multi-entry pak is a lie.
• A set-difference over names hides reuse — join per USER.
• A self-index names records, not files.
• Case-insensitive hashing means two spellings can be one entry.
• An "unresolved" name may be the wrong kind, namespace or prefix — or part of a cut asset.
• A garbled value may be a real string in another encoding.
• Two of my own counts disagreeing is a grammar clue.
• A game's own typo is a join key.
• A bias constant in the code is a join key.
• A prefix trap: enumerate maximal [A-Za-z0-9_] runs, not startswith.
• Re-deriving a format is not a finding — asking whether its values resolve is.

Mechanics that have bitten

• Never hand-convert a decimal VA — print hex().
• grep -c counts LINES — use grep -o | wc -l.
• Counter.most_common() tie-breaks by insertion order — use sorted().
• Raw grep cannot see inside compressed pak entries.
• Commit messages go in a file (git commit -F); a literal | in a table cell needs escaping; git log --all -- <path> can hang.

Runtime / emulator

• Look at the PNG — and check its dimensions.
• "Animating" is not "still in a mission".
• Dedup entity enumerations by position value.
• Do not diagnose timing or liveness under gdb. ps %cpu is cumulative.
• Classify screens by whole-image statistics, not named pixels — a named pixel is only valid while the image sits at a known place, and nothing errors when it moves.
• Do not poll faster than the guest updates — it manufactures a clean curve out of noise.
• A probe that never performs the action will "prove" the action does not exist.
• The container's Canary binary can be older than the Canary source tree, and the failure mode is a hang, not an error. After a merge into sylpheed-re the prebuilt xenia_canary had no log_ui_draws, no mem_watch, no create_profile_if_none — and an unknown cvar makes xenia open an SDL message box before logging is up, which headless is an unexplained freeze. Check before trusting a harness flag: nm -C <binary> | grep cvars::<flag>, and build-canary Release if it is missing.
• A capture armed at a screen only ever sees the steady state. Anything about how a screen is built or animated has to be armed before it exists. Re-arming every few seconds and keeping every log tiles the approach: each F10 opens a new numbered file and closes the previous one complete.
• Measure animation in submitted frames, not in seconds. VdSwap counts are the guest's own frames, so an emulator at 80 % of real time does not move them; a stopwatch reading does, silently and by an unknown factor.
• ~This game's menus drop d-pad presses shorter than 0.3 s. WITHDRAWN 2026-08-28 — the menu WRAPS, and I had not measured that. The claim came from reading a cursor that ended up "one item short"; once wrap-around at both ends was measured (menu-navigation-semantics.md), every one of those press counts is exactly right — four presses at 0.12 s moved four steps through the bottom, which lands one above where a non-wrapping menu would put it. No press was ever dropped. The real lesson is the general one: a step count is only readable once you know the topology, and I invented a hardware-flakiness story rather than testing the ends of the list. Still true and worth keeping: screenshot after every step and read the cursor, rather than trusting arithmetic over the press count.
• A screenshot taken right after a transition can catch a screen mid-fade. A grab 2.5 s after Ⓑ returned the game to the title showed the title art with no PRESS Ⓐ BUTTON plate; one second later the plate was there. That very nearly went into the corpus as "the returned title has no plate". Sample a changing screen several times before writing down what it does not contain.
• Do not identify a menu cursor by label brightness. The obvious oracle — "the focused label is the brightest row" — fails on this game's menus, because the background art is brighter behind some rows than the highlight is. It confidently named the wrong item on a frame whose ring was plainly elsewhere. Detect the focus ring in the gutter left of the labels instead (tools/re-capture/menu_focus.py, 254 vs <82 — no threshold tuning needed), and look at the PNG before believing either.
• screenshot samples at 0.5 Hz — it cannot time an animation. Measured: ~2 s per grab (an import of the root plus an ImageMagick crop). A 0.4 s fade falls entirely between two samples, which is why a 40-frame burst across a screen change looked like an instant cut. For anything timed, record the display instead: ffmpeg -f x11grab -framerate 30 -video_size <W>x<H> -i :98+<X>,<Y> -t <secs>, then read per-frame statistics off the file. Take the geometry from xwininfo -root -tree, the same way bin/screenshot does.
• A screen's brightness curve is not its fade quad. The incoming screen's own elements animate in after the transition quad has cleared, so mean luminance keeps rising long after the fade is over — 1.47 s against a declared 0.97 s on one screen. Time the fade from where the frame is pure black, and take the ramp itself from the keyframes.
• A sound.pak entry is not a bank. Entry windows straddle bank boundaries (the leading-region effect), so a naive "walk the RIFFs in this entry" gives the tail of the previous bank, then one of your own, then the next bank's header. It looks like a bank with the wrong number of waves. The tell is a BANK id= that is not the entry's own number, and the fix is the seek packet counts — they pin each wave's join exactly, so a straddle can be realigned rather than thrown away. 4 of 32 BGM banks look like counterexamples until this is applied.
• Do not time a video whose start you did not see. An attract cycle sampled from partway through measured "≈85 s", which was used to argue it was not the 137 s ADV.wmv. It was ADV.wmv; the sampling began 39 s in. Identify a video by content — match frames against the candidates and check the matched playhead advances monotonically — before reasoning about its duration.
• A near-black frame has no signature. In frame-matching, low-contrast frames drive every correlation toward zero and the ranking becomes noise; one control frame scored 0.000 and another tied the wrong movie at 0.98. Read a dark frame's runner-up as no evidence, not as evidence for the runner-up.
• A screen that never changes is not necessarily hung — it may be a menu. A 90-second screenshot loop that presses nothing will report a perfectly healthy DIFFICULTY menu as a standing hang, and that reading survived in this corpus for months. Before calling a static screen a hang, look at it, and press something.
• Never run ps -ef in this container. Each of the three long-lived processes carries the whole loop prompt as its argv, so the listing is tens of kilobytes of the prompt you already have. Use pgrep -x <name> or ps -o pid=,stat= -C <name>.
• A file extension is not a format. sound.pak is full of .slb banks and names a .xgs project, and neither is an XACT container: the whole 1.08 GB archive contains zero XGSF, SDBK or WBND magic, and the executable has no XACT string at all. The names came from the authoring tool and survived into the shipped data. Check for the magic before committing to a parser for the format the extension advertises.
• A log-polling probe must compare a COUNT, not test for presence. Timing an operation by waiting for its "done" line in a log gives an instant false positive if any earlier run left one there. This produced a confident "39.5 fps" that was really 0.1 s of matching a stale line — and it disagreed with the true 28.5 fps by enough to have flipped a conclusion. Snapshot log.count(marker) before starting and wait for it to increase.
• This container kills long emulator runs. Twice in one session the xenia_canary process vanished with no crash line in its own log — once ~50 s into a boot, once ~145 s in at 1.15 GB RSS — while the box sat at ~1 GB free with swap exhausted. Budget dynamic experiments to fit in ~2 minutes of guest time, take the measurement early, and never read a disappearance as a guest crash without checking the log tail for one.
• When a frame-match will not resolve, sample denser before doubting the hypothesis. Identifying a movie from 5-second screenshots gave contrast-23 frames, a playhead that would not join up, and a runner-up winning one frame — it looked like weak evidence for the wrong film. The same question sampled every 0.5 s (ffmpeg x11grab at 10 fps) answered at 0.999 with a strictly monotone playhead. Sparse sampling does not weaken a signal gracefully; it turns it into noise that looks like a different answer.
• Check what instrumentation the local build already has before declaring a question blocked on tooling. Two Q8 residuals were written off as needing "an emulator whose audio path can be observed". The emulator in this container already had xma_param_probe — visible in the startup CONFIG DUMP the whole time — added by this project for exactly that purpose. Read the cvar dump, or nm -C <binary> | grep cvars::, before concluding you cannot measure something.
• "Strings a function references" is not "arguments a function passes". A loose filter over the strings in a caller produced a tidy-looking screen vocabulary; recovering the actual register argument at each call site removed half of it, including two names that appeared to be corroborated by independent measurement. If the claim is about an argument, simulate the registers — the cheap proxy manufactures agreement.
• A backward scan for addi rN, … misses arguments staged through another register. PPC code often builds a pointer in a scratch register and moves it into place later (addi r27, r11, X … mr r5, r27). A backward search for the destination register alone found 7 of 48 sites and missed the two known-good ones. Simulate forward over a window instead, tracking lis/addi/mr.
• Check a measurement against the WHOLE reference set, not the part you were reading. Two observed BGM stream sizes were recorded as matching "no bank's declared waves", which spawned a wrong theory that the decoder gets a window rather than a whole wave. They match BGM_103 exactly — the check had covered only the BGM_0xx rows of the census, because that is the block that had been on screen.
• instructions.function is unpopulated for most rows in sylpheed.db. A query keyed on it returns nothing rather than erroring — a bctr search scoped that way reported "no jump tables" for a function with two known ones. Scope by address between <start> and <end_address> instead, and gate any such query on a function whose answer you already know.
• Before testing "state X behaves like this", check that your route actually reaches state X. A test of "does Ⓐ work in phase 4 state 0" was run by pressing Ⓑ, on the strength of a decoded 4 → state 0 edge — but the same basic block also writes the phase field, sending it to phase 2. The test probed the wrong state and produced a confident refutation of a live hypothesis. When a transition sets more than one field, read the whole block, not the one store you were looking for.
• A default filter can hide a whole screen, and the corpus will record it as absent. screen list/render filter on is_build, which needs a .rat child; the developer splash has none, so it never appeared — and a page ended up stating it "cannot be rendered at all". It renders fine under --all. When two pages disagree about whether something exists, run the tool both ways before believing either.
• A logo that appears twice may be two different things. The boot shows SQUARE ENIX at ~2 s and again at ~10 s; the first is the splash screen, the second is the intro movie's own opening frame. Reading the capture alone gives "three logo screens". Cross-check a repeat against what is supposed to be playing at that moment before counting it as its own screen.
• Do not hard-code an expected element count into a structure scan. Looking for a .rat record's keyframes, I required 29 strictly-increasing times because a header word read 30. The records hold three keyframes in exactly the layout I was testing for, and the over-constrained filter reported the layout as refuted. Scan for the shape (here: 0x??ffffff fade words at a constant stride) and let the count fall out.
• Read the target text before writing a patch pattern for it. Two iterations running, a scripted edit to HANDOFF.md failed its assertion because the paragraph had been rewrapped since the pattern was written — and both times the finding landed in docs/re/ while the page the port agent reads kept the stale version. The commit's file count is the tell: if it is one short, an edit was silently dropped.
• Two renderers agreeing is not evidence the field is right. The port's composite and sylpheed-cli screen render matched on main_menu to 3/255 — and both omitted two elements the game draws, because both read one field through one decoder. Agreement between consumers of the same decode measures the decode's determinism, not its truth. Only a framebuffer capture is an independent check. (Reported by the port agent, 2026-08-28, after a capture crop found the missing bracket.)
• ./target/debug/<bin> is STALE in this container — CARGO_TARGET_DIR is redirected. The Dockerfile sets CARGO_TARGET_DIR=/sylph-home/re/target-container so a fresh cargo build writes there, while ./target/debug/sylpheed-cli remains whatever was built on the host, hours old. A decoder fix was verified against the stale binary and produced byte-identical "before" and "after" renders — which reads exactly like "the change had no effect" rather than "you ran the old code". Run the binary cargo actually wrote, or cargo run.
• A pivot-equality test conflates rounding with real breakage. Checking pivot == texture/2 over GP_TITLE flagged 74 % as mismatched, which reads as a systemic decode failure. Split by magnitude it is 17 exact, 54 off by ≤ 1 px (odd dimensions rounding), and only 24 off by > 8 px — and those 24 are the real finding, concentrated on one element family. Bucket a mismatch by size before reporting a rate.
• I have now broken the "read the target text first" rule three times. Each time a scripted HANDOFF.md edit asserted on a paragraph that had been rewrapped by an earlier edit in the same session, and each time the finding landed in docs/re/ while the port's page kept the stale text. Writing the rule down was not enough; the working fix is mechanical — grep/sed -n the target paragraph in the same command that patches it, and check the commit's file count.
• "The nearest header after the name" is not a name→header mapping. Looking for each sprite's T8aD header by searching for its name and taking the next T8aD returned the same header for every sprite — all the names live together in the declaration table near the top of the bundle, so "next" is always the first one in the file. It failed its own control instantly: different sprites reported identical dimensions. Match on something the header itself carries (here width × height against the decoded PNGs) rather than on proximity.
• cargo build passing does not mean cargo test compiles. Adding a field to T8adImage built the library fine in 1.48 s — and broke two test-only struct literals, so cargo test failed to compile with exit 101. A green build on the binary is not a gate for a struct change; run the tests before believing a data-structure edit is safe.
• Detach long background work with setsid, or a tool-call timeout kills it. Three attempts to run the disc-gated test suite in the background died at exit 143 with an empty log — the timeout's SIGTERM reached the whole process group. setsid nohup cargo test … & survives, and the run then completes across later tool calls. An empty log from a "background" job usually means it was killed, not that it produced nothing.
• Validate a recommendation before leaving it as advice. Having concluded a question was undecodable from the disc, I named a per-draw GPU capture as the next route "because it reads the blend state". It does not — checking the capture's own source showed it records textures and vertex attributes and no blend registers. A named next step is a claim like any other.
• Name the element from the draw's own coordinates before building on it. A skewed draw in a title capture was called "the swoosh" because the swoosh is the screen's only diagonal element — an identification by elimination, never checked against the draw's NDC extent. It was wrong: the quads span the full screen and beyond, the swoosh is a 234-pixel band. Five iterations of analysis pointed at the wrong element on the strength of it. Converting the coordinates takes one line and should come first.
• A census over a bundle's top-level table is not a census over the bundle. The keyframe rotation field read "always zero on this screen" for several iterations because every scan walked GP_TITLE build 4's declaration table, and the rotated elements are nested leaf records reached through an opt link. The bytes were right; the reach was wrong, and a negative stated without its reach reads like a fact about the disc. Say which region a negative covers, and check whether the thing you are looking for lives outside it.
• Do not assume 4-byte alignment when scanning raw bundle bytes. A nested RATC blob starts wherever the parent's chunk stream leaves it — ptloop01.rat sits at 0xbb5966 — so its 40-byte keyframe blocks are odd-aligned. A scanner that filtered candidates on %4 == 0 found 0/3 of its own control blocks and under-counted the corpus by 16 341 blocks, all of them nested. It cost nothing to catch, because the control was in the script.
• pkill -f <pattern> matches the shell running it. pkill -f kfscan.py from a bash -c whose command line contains kfscan.py kills its own shell: the tool call returns exit 143/144 and the edit that was queued behind it never runs. The same trap makes pgrep -f self-report — a "still running? yes" that was the shell seeing itself, on a job that had already finished. Use pgrep -x, or match on a path the current command line does not contain. (This is the second ps/pgrep entry in this file; the first is about ps -ef dumping the loop prompt.)
• Grep a legend and you count the legend. A sweep for elements with a rotation reported "1 element" in every build on the disc — the header line a=alpha r=rot° matched the r= pattern. A uniform count across heterogeneous inputs is the tell. Make the pattern require the value ( r=-?[0-9]+), and sanity-check that a known-negative build reports zero.
• A pattern over the archives you happened to check is not a negative. I wrote "rotation appears to live only in nested leaf records", correctly scoped to the three paks I had swept — and the sweep refuted it on the fourth, within the hour, because the alphabet had not reached GP_DIALOG yet. Scoping the claim was what made it cheap to withdraw, but the better move is to let the sweep finish before writing the sentence at all: a negative that is still running is not a finding, it is a prediction.
• A field that is implemented is not a field that is measured. The pivot-anchored scale term had been in blit for months and reasoned about in the handoff, and no capture had ever exercised it, because every element anyone had looked at was at 100 % scale where the term is identically zero. Look for the case that makes a term large — here 600 % and 800 % scale, worth 450 px — and check it there. A term you cannot distinguish from zero has not been verified by any amount of agreement.
• Printing a series' minimum and reading it as its range. I summarised a captured alpha series as "constant α ≈ 33" and built a contradiction on it — the summary printed min_alpha and no maximum, and the series actually ramps 34 → 255 → 33. The tell was there in the same table: the column beside it said 14 distinct colours, which a constant series cannot have. When a summary statistic and a distinct-value count disagree, the summary is wrong.
• Calibrate on one element, test on another. Fitting a declared ramp to a capture has two free parameters (rate and offset) and will "succeed" against almost anything — my first attempt scored RMS 128/255 and I nearly read the numbers rather than noticing the search could not reach the ramp at all. The version that means something: fix the clock from element A's ramp, check that fix against A's own next landmark, then apply it to element B in the same frames with nothing left to tune. That is what turned "the shapes look different" into "still at 255 nine frames after it should read 32".
• Two measurements can both be right and still disagree, when a heuristic sits between them. A change to the keyframe time association is favoured 26× by an animation measurement and rejected by a static-render comparison. Both are sound: rest() picks a pose by longest dwell, which is a heuristic layered on top of the times, so moving the times moves its tie-breaks. The mistake would be to treat one as refuting the other and drop the loser. Name what each measurement actually constrains — here timing versus pose selection — before deciding they conflict.
• Before believing a render diff refutes a decode, find out which element moved. I reported a 13 % render change as evidence against a keyframe-time hypothesis, on a brightness argument about language twins. One element accounted for all of it, and that element is a transient flash with no resting pose — so the difference was our own rest() heuristic guessing, and it would have guessed under either reading. A whole-image statistic (pixels changed, mean luminance, correlation) tells you that something moved, never what, and an argument built on it can be entirely about your own code. Localise the diff to an element and read its keyframes first.
• A fallback that only runs when its precondition fails is not a fallback. rest() picks the longest-dwell keyframe when no plateau exists — but a dwell gap is time spent moving between two poses, and the only case where an endpoint is genuinely held is when the two poses are equal, which is exactly the plateau the first path already caught. So the fallback is guaranteed to be guessing every time it is reached. When a heuristic's justification is the same condition that routes around it, it has no justification.