b2e45f7f26
The 5-loop substrate's load-bearing gate is verified — playbook +
matrix indexer give the results we're looking for. Per the report's
rubric, lift ≥ 50% of discoveries means matrix is doing real work;
7/8 = 87.5% blew through that.
Harness was structurally hiding bugs behind a 5-daemon stripped boot.
Expanding to the full 10-daemon prod stack surfaced 7 fixes in cascade:
1. driver→matrixd: {"query": ...} → {"query_text": ...} field name
2. harness temp toml missing [s3] → wrong default bucket → catalogd
rehydrate 500 on first call
3. harness→queryd SQL probe: {"q": ...} → {"sql": ...} field name
4. expand boot from 5 → 10 daemons in dep-ordered launch
5. add SQL surface probe (3-row CSV ingest → COUNT(*)=3 assertion)
6. candidates corpus was synthetic SWE-tech (Swift/iOS, Scala/Spark) —
wrong domain for staffing queries; replaced with ethereal_workers
(10K rows, real staffing schema, "e-" id prefix to avoid collision
with workers' "w-"). staffing_workers driver gains -index-name +
-id-prefix flags so the same binary serves both corpora
7. local_judge qwen3.5:latest is a vision-SSM 256K-ctx build running
~30s per judge call against the lift loop; reverted to
qwen2.5:latest (~1s/call, 30× faster, held lift theory)
Each contract drift (1, 3) is now locked into a cmd/<bin>/main_test.go
so future drift fires in `go test`, not in a reality run. R-005 closed:
- cmd/matrixd/main_test.go (new) — playbook record drift detector +
score bounds + 6 routes mounted
- cmd/queryd/main_test.go — wrong-field-name drift detector
- cmd/pathwayd/main_test.go (new) — 9 routes + add round-trip + retire
- cmd/observerd/main_test.go (new) — 4 routes + invalid-op + unknown-mode
`go test ./cmd/{matrixd,queryd,pathwayd,observerd}` all green.
Reality test results (reports/reality-tests/playbook_lift_001.{json,md}):
Queries 21 (staffing-domain, 7 categories)
Discoveries 8 (judge ≠ cosine top-1)
Lifts 7/8 (87.5%)
Boosts triggered 9
Mean Δ distance -0.053 (warm closer than cold)
OOD honesty dental/RN/SWE rated 1, no fake matches
Cross-corpus boosts confirmed (e- ↔ w- swaps in lifts)
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.