The pair I shipped this iteration -- focus_persists on for main_menu, off
everywhere else -- reported both halves as agreement with the contract. Nothing
measured that extras does not persist. The corpus has EXTRAS' opening item from
one entry and (B) restoring the PARENT's focus 4/4; neither says what a submenu's
own cursor does on re-entry. Caught by the Decoder.
It is the mirror of the trap it was written to avoid. I refused to let a derived
menu-wide rule overwrite a measured value, then let 'not measured here' become a
positive assertion of the negative. Both treat a gap in the corpus as if it
carried information and differ only in which direction they fill it. And the
failure mode was the bad one: if the game does persist EXTRAS, the check holds
the port to the wrong behaviour and passes while doing it.
check_focus_persists now asserts only the measured half. The scope became a
separate guard with its own outcome word -- 'only main_menu, AUTHORED DEFAULT,
unmeasured elsewhere' -- which still fails if widened, since that should be a
deliberate edit, but can no longer be read as the game being known to reset.
focus_persists_why records the correction rather than being rewritten.
It also weakens a label. EXTRAS' initial_focus is marked measured and was taken
on a single entry; now that the main menu is known to remember its cursor, a
one-entry reading of any screen may be measuring history rather than what the
screen opens on -- the same objection that reframed the TUTORIAL/NEW GAME
disagreement. The observation stands, its reading as an initial focus does not.
Caveat attached, kind left as measured with a note that it changes if EXTRAS
turns out to persist.
Not building on the non-persistence half until their EXTRAS re-entry run returns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
f1e249a606