154a72ea5e
The v0 boost-only stance documented in internal/matrix/playbook.go:22-27
("the boost only re-ranks results that ALREADY surfaced from the regular
retrieval") couldn't promote recorded answers that dropped out of a
paraphrase's top-K. playbook_lift_002 surfaced exactly that gap: 0/2
paraphrase recoveries because the recorded answers weren't in regular
retrieval at all (rank=-1).
Shape B: when warm-pass retrieval doesn't surface a playbook hit's
answer, inject a synthetic Result for it directly. Distance =
playbook_hit_distance × BoostFactor — same formula as the boost path so
injections land in comparable distance space. Caller re-sorts +
truncates after both boost and inject have run.
Result on playbook_lift_003 (Shape B + paraphrase pass):
Verbatim discovery 6
Verbatim lift 2 / 6
**Paraphrase top-1** **6 / 6**
Paraphrase any-rank in K 6 / 6
Mean Δ top-1 distance -0.1637 (warm closer than cold)
Every paraphrase the judge generated landed the v1-recorded answer at
top-1 of the new query's results. The learning property holds — cosine
on embed(paraphrase) finds the recorded query's vector within
DefaultPlaybookMaxDistance (0.5), and Shape B injects the answer.
Verbatim lift dropped from v1's 7/8 because Shape B cross-pollinates
recorded answers across queries. w-4435 (Q2's recording) appears as
warm top-1 for several other queries because their embeddings are
within the playbook hit threshold of "OSHA-30 forklift Wisconsin." This
is a feature, not a bug — the matrix layer's purpose is to share
knowledge across queries — but the lift metric only counts "warm top-1
== cold judge best," so cross-pollinated lifts don't register. A v3
metric would re-judge warm pass to measure true judge improvement.
Tests:
- TestInjectPlaybookMisses_AddsMissingAnswers — primary claim
- TestInjectPlaybookMisses_SkipsAnswersAlreadyPresent — no double-inject
- TestInjectPlaybookMisses_DedupesPerAnswer — multi-hit same answer
- TestInjectPlaybookMisses_EmptyHits — fast-path no-op
Driver fix: ParaphraseRecordedRank int → *int. The `omitempty` int
silently dropped rank=0 (top-1, the WANTED value) from JSON, making the
v003 report show "null" instead of "0" for every successful recovery.
Pointer keeps nil/rank-0 distinguishable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
reports/reality-tests — does the 5-loop substrate actually work?
Reality tests measure product outcomes, not substrate health. The 21 smokes prove the system runs; the proof harness proves the system makes the claims it claims; reality tests answer: does the small-model pipeline + matrix indexer + playbook give measurably better results than raw cosine?
This is the gate from project_small_model_pipeline_vision.md: "the playbook + matrix indexer must give the results we're looking for." Single load-bearing criterion. Throughput, scaling, code elegance are secondary.
What lives here
Each reality test is a numbered run that produces:
<test>_<NNN>.json— raw structured evidence (per-query data, summary metrics)<test>_<NNN>.md— human-readable report with headline metrics, per-query table, honesty caveats, next moves
Runs are append-only. Earlier runs stay in tree as historical baseline.
Test catalog
playbook_lift_<NNN> — does the playbook actually lift the right answer?
Driver: scripts/playbook_lift.sh → bin/playbook_lift
Queries: tests/reality/playbook_lift_queries.txt
Pipeline: cold pass → LLM judge → playbook record → warm pass → measure ranking shift.
The headline question: when the LLM judge finds a better answer than cosine top-1, can the playbook boost it to top-1 on the next run? If yes, the learning loop closes; if no, the matrix layer + playbook is infrastructure for a thesis that doesn't pay rent.
See the run reports for honesty caveats — chiefly that the LLM judge IS the ground-truth proxy.
Running a reality test
# Defaults: judge resolved from lakehouse.toml [models].local_judge,
# workers limit 5000, run id 001
./scripts/playbook_lift.sh
# Re-run with a different judge to check inter-judge agreement
# (env JUDGE_MODEL overrides the config tier)
JUDGE_MODEL=qwen3:latest RUN_ID=002 ./scripts/playbook_lift.sh
# Smaller scale for fast iteration
WORKERS_LIMIT=1000 K=5 RUN_ID=dev ./scripts/playbook_lift.sh
Judge resolution priority (Phase 3, 2026-04-29):
-judgeflag on the Go driver (explicit override)JUDGE_MODELenv var (operator override)lakehouse.toml [models].local_judge(default)- Hardcoded
qwen3.5:latest(last-resort fallback if config missing)
This means model bumps land in lakehouse.toml, not in this script or
the Go driver. Bumping local_judge to a stronger local model (e.g.
when qwen4 ships) takes one line.
Requires: Ollama on :11434 with nomic-embed-text + the resolved judge
model loaded. Skips cleanly (exit 0) if Ollama is absent.
Interpreting results
Three thresholds matter on the playbook_lift tests:
| Lift rate (lifts / discoveries) | Verdict |
|---|---|
| ≥ 50% | Loop closes — playbook is doing real work, move to paraphrase queries |
| 20-50% | Lift exists but inconsistent — investigate boost math (score × 0.5) or judge variance |
| < 20% | Loop is not pulling its weight — diagnose before adding more components |
A separate concern: discovery rate (cold judge-best ≠ cold top-1). If discovery is itself rare (< 30% of queries), cosine is already close to optimal on this query distribution and the matrix+playbook layer has little headroom. That's not necessarily a bug — but it means the value gate has to come from somewhere else (multi-corpus retrieval, domain-specific tags, drift signal).
What this is not
- Not a benchmark. No comparison against external systems; only internal cold-vs-warm.
- Not a regression gate. Each run is a snapshot. Scores will drift with corpus changes, judge updates, and playbook math tuning. Don't wire
just verifyto demand a minimum lift. - Not human-validated. The LLM judge is the ground truth proxy. Sample 5-10 verdicts manually per run to sanity-check the judge isn't pathological.