Research operations that survive refute-by-default. One operator, several engines, a file tree; every loop, gate, and term on this sheet is drawn from a real operation's record, generalized so you can try it.
The plant converts ideas into exactly four products — verified claims, shipped tools, filed bugs, and honest negatives — and every structure below exists to keep those four honest. Scoring is infinite-game: there is no win condition, so there is no pressure to inflate a claim toward one. The system's credential is that it killed its own flagship: in the mid-2026 audits, every casualty was an internal abstraction validated against itself, and every survivor held an anchor outside the system that produced it. The machine survived the program it killed and transferred to new work the same week.
Refute-by-default verification, claim boxes, anchor rule, controlling artifacts. The tax is cheap once installed, and it is load-bearing.
Closure checklists, ledgers, registry scans, capsules. Nothing fires on its own — rituals are doctrine, not machinery.
Mixed payout cadences, a fixed exploration budget, lottery arms. The opponent that actually kills solo operations.
Four layers. Authority flows down as GO; evidence flows up as verdicts and gate counts; the two feedback paths that make the plant a learning system are drawn dashed — the strategy loop up the right edge, the lesson-promotion loop along the bottom.
Eight loops, nested by cadence: L1 runs inside a day, L7 spans months. Each card names its setpoint (what "in control" means) and its known failure mode with a pointer into the failure register (zone H).
The epistemic pipeline, serpentine like the paper trail it produces. Diamonds are gates — each can send a claim down, and down is a valid product. Demotion runs any time re-adjudication finds a weaker truth.
True by construction. Presented as bookkeeping, never as discovery — the lesson of the retired flagship metric.
Proved, with the hypotheses named and carried. Kernel-checked where possible.
Measured, with a named run behind every number and uncertainty carried.
Believed, stated as such, with the falsifier written down.
Two formalisms mapped, with regime and strength graded — never "same thing."
Promotion between boxes requires the controlling artifact — a clean story promotes nothing. Labels attach to the claim, not the document; hedged classes ("theorem-adjacent") are banned vocabulary. A claim's class is adjudicated, never split down the middle.
| Store | Role | Write cadence | Discipline |
|---|---|---|---|
| working note | Day log: carry-forward, session blocks, per-session anomaly lines, GO quotes. | continuous, daily file | One file per day; files to the archive at pickup; live state re-verified, never trusted as copies. |
| index | Locator over the notes archive: day headlines plus session one-liners. | at filing | Short lines by rule; history keeps its voice — no retro-edits. |
| anomaly log | Cross-session consolidation with pointers and status tags. | at close | Additive dispositions only, never strikethrough; the note block is the source of truth. |
| engine memory | Durable state for the assisting engines: an index over topic files. | per session | Index line = current state + next action + pointer; replace, don't append; history lives in topic files. |
| doctrine stack | The rules: global constitution → workspace contract → project-local files. | event-driven | Additions dated in place; the most local file wins on conflict; lessons enter via L6. |
| ledgers & maps | Claim standing: honest ledgers, run contracts, retirement notes. | per program / slice | Every cut carries a one-line recorded reason; settled ledgers do not reopen. |
| document registry | A hash-verified catalog of the document estate, indexed in place — no copies. | rescan at close | Clean exit gates the closure block; a missing entry means repoint or surface, never silent deletion. |
| capsules | Sealed archives of anything removed or closed. | event | Capsule-before-remove, always; restore only by deliberate decision. |
| snapshots | Backups of the working set. | at close | Manual by choice — doctrine, not machinery; tiered retention. |
| transcripts | Every engine session's scripts and outputs, greppable. | automatic | The archaeology of last resort; the birth-side rules exist to make it unnecessary. |
| Gate | Protects | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| operator GO | Scope, applies, sends, anything outward or expensive. | Verbatim quote recorded in the session header — the log is also the consent record. Naming a plan is not consenting to it. |
| push | Everything public. | A deliberate yes at the moment of execution, per-path policy from the contract. Penciled dates do not fire themselves. |
| commit | The record. | Per-path policy, read from the contract, never inferred. Messages and staged diffs scanned before they enter history. |
| verified | The word "done." | The board refuses it without a written verdict in the task directory, from someone other than the producer. |
| registry writes | Any curated corpus. | Human-approved adjudication only; engines rate and gate but never admit. |
| numbers into prose | Every document a reader might trust. | No number without a named, rerunnable artifact behind it — plans included. |
| claim promotion | The box ladder. | Controlling artifact required; a clean story promotes nothing. |
| release | Reputation, and the record's honesty. | Own initiative only; day-old results sit; no deadlines, no campaigns. |
| twilight fence | Closed programs staying closed. | No purges, corrections, releases, or revival; engineering reuse of parts allowed, claims stay buried. |
The register that wrote the rules. Corrections follow the house style: fix the input or the doctrine, never weaken a gate. Statuses are honest — some exposures are simply open.
| ID | Failure mode | Detected by | Correction | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F-1 | Self-validated abstraction — claims anchored only to the system that produced them; durable rules parked in perishable docs. | The audits that closed the program: every casualty internally validated, every survivor externally anchored. | Anchor rule + claim boxes + slice charter, promoted to constitution level. | CORRECTED |
| F-2 | Identity read as discovery — a metric true by construction celebrated as an empirical law. | The flagship metric decomposed into bookkeeping under triage. | The identity box; "validates the law" language banned; a demotion path that actually runs. | CORRECTED |
| F-3 | Lost provenance — numbers whose generating computation cannot be found. | Half a headline table traced to values hardcoded in a plotting script; the sweep that produced them was never saved. The headline did not survive recompute. | Numbers enter prose, plans, or ledgers only from named, rerunnable artifacts. | CORRECTED |
| F-4 | Circular labels — a classifier scored against labels derived from its own output quantity. | A "0% misclassification" claim unwound to a tautology in audit. | Tautology purge: anything validating the system against itself gets eradicated. | CORRECTED |
| F-5 | Ungrounded generation — a generator fed thin context produces confident junk at volume. | A strict refuter run returned 0 survivors from 20 candidates. | Ground the generator's inputs; keep the gate. Weakening a refuter manufactures belief. | CORRECTED |
| F-6 | Index layers absorb history — the always-visible summary surface accretes narrative until it stops summarizing. | An index re-bloated to its size limit ten days after being trimmed. | Replace, don't append: index line = state + next action + pointer; history lives one layer down. | PARTIAL |
| F-7 | Late-stop provenance gap — consequences land on the record with no session log behind them. | An evening session closed unlogged; reconstructed at the next pickup. | A defined late-stop minimum: anomaly lines plus a one-line stub, the rest at pickup. | CORRECTED |
| F-8 | Ritual text drift — duplicated doctrine copies age apart until the checklist describes a retired world. | A close checklist found describing a note convention retired a week earlier. | Single-source doctrine; link copies to one master instead of duplicating. | PARTIAL |
| F-9 | Silent ritual death — a layer stops running and strands its contents without any alarm. | A weekly checklist layer found dead a month later, its own filing ritual never once executed, live items stranded inside. | Every ritual gets a defined minimum and an explicit disposition: fold, revive, or retire — never fade. | OPEN |
| F-10 | Append-forever logs — locators outgrow their readers. | A notes index grew past what a reader (human or engine) can take in one pass. | Periodic rotation; the closed period keeps its voice, the live file stays small. | OPEN |
| F-11 | Mood-driven lesson promotion — confirmed lessons float in notes, unwritten into doctrine. | Doctrine-candidate tags found aging in the anomaly log. | The 2-for-2 rule: second confirmation promotes the same session. | CORRECTED |