v28 to v29, and v29 to v30

Original document, reproduced unchanged. Exact Markdown. Copied from the R6 checkpoint of r/PlaceNL (community--PlaceNL--R6.tar.gz, workspace/room/instrument/). Instrument v30 coded 102 of the 705 communities, r/PlaceNL among them. It is not in the repository. sha256 487157dd826fd4e2. These instructions govern research runs, not checkpoint interviews. They keep the run's own words: a room is a community, a mark an artwork, the analyst the aggregator, the case lead the community coder and the global model the population model.

Written 2026-09-04, Layer A. Two changes and one tool.

1. The case lead, and two branches

The coder contract assumed one reader reads the room whole. That holds to about 250 items; the largest coded room in the census is 246, and rule 12's candidates run past 200,000. v29 adds a case lead who reads the room whole when it fits (branch A) and runs a serial fleet when it does not (branch B), then does step 4 and step 5 either way.

The branch is recorded per community as a covariate, with the counts it was decided on. Two branches is two instruments over one census, and the lesson from this study's own coder tier is that an unrecorded instrument change is invisible afterwards and contaminates everything computed across it.

What branch B gives up is written into the contract rather than left to be discovered. No reader holds the week; there is one coder per slice, so the largest rooms have no agreement measure at all; and slice boundaries cut the material arbitrarily. All three go in notes.md.

2. The forest

tools/tree_builder.py joins first-order codes onto each coded thread's reply tree and emits trees/<sub>.md, package/forest.jsonl and package/tree_index.json. Deterministic; no agent draws a tree.

Four node states — coded, bridge, pruned, collapsed — and the dropped are counted in the header, per thread and per community, so nobody mistakes what was not coded for what was not said.

Coordinates are pure Dewey: the submission is 0, its replies 1, 2, …, theirs 1.1, 1.2, …, to any depth. Depth is the segment count and siblings share every segment but the last. A draft scheme that made the top level 1.0, 2.0 and hung 1.1 beneath 1.0 was rejected: it makes [1.1] a child in one place and a sibling in another, and the worked example circulated with it did not match what its own code produced — the demo output was written by hand, not run. This one is tested; --demo prints the tree, the counts and an index lookup.

A limit is written into both contracts. A reply is a reply. The tree shows that one turn was posted after another and how long after; it does not show that the first caused the second. No relation may rest on adjacency alone, and latency is elapsed time between two posts, not the speed of a decision. The forest was proposed as proof of causal direction, and it is not that.

2a. Additions of 2026-09-05

lexicon.md travels between coders with timeline.md, both facts and neither a reading, so the room's own words reach every slice. The forest carries the record's metadata on each node beside retrieved_on, with stickied marked as a retrieval-time snapshot, and a removed state for platform removal notices, which are the platform speaking and not a participant. tools/audit_fleet.py is the gate the case-lead contract names before step 4; it reports a check that could not run as failed, never as passed.

3. Unchanged

Method, register, the citation rule, the five steps, the brief writer, and every output of v28. Small rooms run as they did, now with a forest.

2026-09-05, afternoon: audited, made runnable, tested on r/liverpoolfc

Two auditors read the v29 files against the v28 harness before any run. Their finding, in one line: v29 as shipped could not be run, in either branch. newrun.py dispatched v28's contract and none of the v29 files; the harness carried three version strings; nothing cut a slice, nothing consolidated a fleet, emit could not theme a pooled code, the forest command was fed a file of dispositions and rendered blank labels, audit_fleet.py failed every correct run on one check and passed vacuously on three, and the two role contracts named files nobody creates.

What changed:

• v29 ships its own harness. read.py, cite.py, emit.py, close_run.py, newrun.py, newbrief.py, read_brief.py, render_corpus_v29.py, cut_window_v29.py, all stamped v29. newrun.py dispatches the coder contract, the case lead's contract, AGENT.md, the three tools and tools/, substitutes the role placeholders, and writes corpus_manifest.json with the counts the branch gate reads.
• tools/fleet.py is the case lead's harness for branch B: plan decides the branch, cuts whole-thread slices in corpus order and writes out/_gate.json; dispatch builds a coder's directory with its slice, the openings of earlier slices' threads still active in its span marked as context, and ids continuing from the previous coder; consolidate closes each batch, writes staging/ and package/, and gives the lead a journal holding every code.
• emit.py: ids continue across a fleet from _manifest.json; a code or pointer on an earlier slice's opening is refused; duplicate detection survives across processes; close() carries out/_gate.json into _run.json.
• tools/tree_builder.py: --record coder_corpus.jsonl builds the forest from the run's own record; first_order is read where label is absent; retracted codes are not codes; a re-run replaces the community's forest lines instead of appending; every THREAD line carries its item, coded and dropped counts.
• tools/audit_fleet.py rewritten: seven checks that read what the tools write, a branch-A mode, and no check that can pass without its inputs.
• close_run.py --role fleet|lead: a fleet coder's directory holds no theme by contract; the lead's C6 reads the fleet's read logs from staging/.
• The contracts. The case lead's and fleet coder's contracts rewritten to the procedure the tools implement: the order of the work in both branches (steps 1 to 3, emit.close(), forest, gate, step 4, step 5, emit.close(verdict)), the slice rule and the context openings, the two facts files, the tags, the pool, the lead's step 5, every output by path. The precedence between the files is stated. AGENT.md carries the role, the batch and the slice in STATE. The coder contract's preamble says the one rule v29 adds inside it.
• removed stays what it was: a distinguished comment saying a post was removed. A body that reads [removed] or [deleted] is an absence and is rendered as one, not a removal notice.

2026-09-05, evening: the two runs, and what they found in the instrument

Fingerprint e6a5732e7e854df9 for both runs; every coder and both leads on claude-sonnet-5.

r/liverpoolfc, branch B, 33 slices, stopped after batch 07 (50_coding_runs/run_v29_liverpoolfc_partial/). Seven coders, 12 to 26 minutes each, contexts of 202k to 296k tokens, 74 codes in all (3, 1, 0, 54, 16, 0, 0); batch 06 read the 2,030-item derby thread whole and recorded it out of scope. Every batch's read claims hold against what read.py served. Stopped for time, not for a defect: thirty-three serial coders is nine hours. The lead holds its journal at batch 07; the run resumes from dispatch --batch 08. Three Fable coders ran slices 01 to 03 before the model was corrected (_lfc_v29_fable_partial/): Fable minted 49 codes on slice 01 where Sonnet minted 3. Examined 2026-09-06: all 49 sit in 62dd8q, the derby pre-match thread, and are line-ups, alarms and pub talk, coded against scope; Sonnet's 3 there are the sub's restyle, coded as the contract asks. The gap is a Fable scope failure, not a reading.

r/muse, branch B, 2 slices, complete (50_coding_runs/run_v29_muse/). 442 items, 62 threads; coders of 38 and 30 minutes, 176 and 173 codes; the lead consolidated, built the forest, passed audit_fleet (349 codes at their offsets, 349 on nodes, both slices disposed exactly), grouped 21 themes, ran a 32-query counter-reading and closed full. close_run 7 of 7 for the lead and both coders. Against the v27 single reader of the same cut: 34 coded threads to v27's 36, 286 coded items to 306, every fleet-coded thread and item inside the v27 set; the two threads only v27 coded are the sub's own April Fools jokes, which the batch 01 coder ruled out of scope citing the Setting section; the section says to code such talk as conduct not about r/place, so this is a coder's misreading and the wording wants tightening. Ninety-six minutes end to end.

Defects found, not fixed, so that the fingerprint above is the instrument that ran:

• read.py audit reads out/threads.jsonl, which only emit.close() writes; in a fleet batch before consolidate it reports checked: false and 0 mismatches, which is not a pass. It should fall back to the journal's thread records. A scratch checker that does so found 0 mismatches in 89 dispositions across nine batches.
• Coders write working scripts to the scratchpad directory the harness names in their environment, which is shared across every agent of the session, against AGENT.md's scratch rule. The dispatcher's prompt for the muse batch 02 coder forbade it and that sufficed; the sentence belongs in AGENT.md.
• Coders read the tools' source (emit.py three times, read.py, cite.py): about 49k chars, 18k tokens, per coder, for nothing AGENT.md does not say. One line in AGENT.md.
• fleet.py plan closes a slice when the next thread would overflow the budget, so a slice can be one thread of five items (liverpoolfc slice 09) ahead of a 433-item thread. A slice under some floor should fold into its neighbour.
• Late slices carry many context openings (liverpoolfc slice 33: 169 openings for 85 items of its own). Bearable at one line each; the first thing to trim if a run must be cheaper.
• The lead wrote its step 4 with a script in its run directory and deleted it after; the record keeps the themes and not the script. Harmless, and worth a sentence in the lead's contract either way.

v29 to v30 (2026-09-06)

Cut for the run yard, after the r/muse pilot and the seven liverpoolfc batches. Every file renamed from .v29. to .v30.; every label v29 in the tools now reads v30; the fingerprint moves. What changed in substance:

• Threshold and budget 500. fleet.py plan defaults to --threshold 500 --budget 500, and the case lead's contract says 500. Grounds: the frame's 300 rooms stop at 501 items; on v27 one reader read 91 per cent of the threads whole across the 250-to-501 band with no decline toward the top; a whole room at 500 items is about 100,000 tokens of corpus. Recorded in claude/fleet-token-budget-and-the-two-slice-pilot.md.

• A slice floor. plan --floor 25: a slice under 25 in-window items folds into the slice before it (the first, into the one after). liverpoolfc slice 09 was one thread of five items. _gate.json carries floor_items and the rule names it.

• read.py audit reads the journal when out/threads.jsonl is absent, so a fleet coder's reading claims are checked before consolidation; the result carries source and declared. On the nine fleet batches run so far: 0 mismatches.

• AGENT.md forbids the session-level scratchpad an environment may name, and forbids reading the tools' source (about 18,000 tokens a coder, for nothing).

• The community's own April Fools joke is disposed coded, never out_of_scope for being a joke; the r/muse batch 01 coder read the old wording the other way.

• The case lead's step 5: every time and interval computed from package/tree_index.json or quoted with the coder's own figure (the r/muse lead turned 51 minutes into "roughly nine hours" by restating); ## Counter-reading names the strongest contrary item with its id before reporting the search; the chronology carries the first and last coders' edges; a lead's helper script stays in the run directory under _lead_.

• fleet.py redispatch --batch NN --model <id> sets a failed coder's directory aside under fleet/_failed/ and dispatches the slice again with the same ids; only the last, uncollected batch. The gate record keeps the set-aside under redispatched.

• The openings file (render_openings_v30.py; asked for by J on 2026-09-06). newrun writes openings.md into the case lead's directory: every thread in time order of its opening post, with the metadata line, a counts line over the whole thread (comments in the window and in all, branches, depth, distinct authors, the sum of scores over every scored item), the title and the opening post's text cut at 500 words. Rooms over 1,500 threads also get openings_titles.md and openings_digest.md. The lead reads it in step 1; the contract's new §1a says what it is for and what it is not (orientation; nothing coded or cited from it but a title; not served through read.py). Fleet coders do not get it. AGENT.md's STATE block names it. In the fingerprint.

• The timeline is seeded by the harness. fleet.py plan starts out/timeline.md with every stickied or moderator-distinguished post, hour, author, title and id, from the record's metadata, so coders extend a record of facts instead of starting one.

• The lead's memory (J, 2026-09-06). collect keeps out/ledger.md: per batch the slice, the counts, the facts lines added, the coder's final message when saved, its [unresolved] and [inherited] episodes and its anomalies and data problems copied from its case and notes; the lead writes its strikes under the entry at collect. consolidate writes package/codes_by_thread.md, the pool in reading order, and step 4 reads it one slice at a time. The lead keeps out/_lead_notes.md. A fork's lead reads the ledger and the notes first. Fleet coders get no such file: what travels between coders is facts, not readings.

After the audit (2026-09-06, evening)

Four auditors read the contracts against Gioia, Corley and Hamilton (2013), Eisenhardt (1989) and Langley (1999), and the tools against the contracts (a Sonnet and a Fable each; the reports are in Layer A/10_instrument/v30/audit_20260906/). What changed, and why:

• Contracts. §1 no longer describes the coder's themes with Gioia's words for his second order ("researcher-centric ... abstraction"); themes are "still descriptive", his first-order concepts, and the second order and the aggregate dimensions belong to a reader the coder is now told about: §1's "Write so another reader could follow you" says the outputs go to a reader that builds the account across three hundred communities and does the abstracting. §7: a theme names the doing, not how it came out. §8 Relations: a link needs a passage in which the later turn answers, names or recalls the earlier; order alone is reported as follows. §2: day markers are the corpus's (d0 from 03-31 16:00, twenty-four hours each, as printed on every item line), written only in the form d1 04-01 16:08; the earlier sentence called them calendar days, which the corpus never did. §9 maps the seven emit.stage names onto the steps (step6_account is case.md, step7_write is notes.md). §0 says in one clause what a fleet coder does not do. The lead file: §1a (openings) now precedes §1b (the gate) on the page as it does in the work; precedence in one form; branch A says in ## Selection that the openings were read before the triage; branch B carries ## Posts against comments from the slice cases; a counter-search hit in a thread no coder read whole may be read with read thread; the _lead_ script may read times from tree_index.json, the one exception to §10; the fold rule says which neighbour. The fleet file: "no theme" rather than "no pattern above a code"; the two-themes question is not asked; step6_account and step7_write are announced; the corpus's counts include the context openings. AGENT.md: scratch goes under out/ or the run directory; the tally has threads_undisposed; emit refuses what it now refuses.
• emit verifies every quote against the record as it arrives (a code, a pointer, an excluded_quote): the text is a non-empty slice of the item's body, the item is in the thread named, the body is not [deleted]/[removed] (Rule 7). It refuses a code or a pointer on an item read.py never served (a thread read whole, a window's items, or an item read; read.py now logs window_items). close() is a journal record, so close_calls and the verdict outlive the process. A refused code() no longer registers its duplicate key first. theme() refuses an empty code list; thread() needs a stage and a thread of the corpus. item_kind, author and created_utc are on every code, as §9 had promised.
• close_run C8 (pointers and exclusion quotes verified), C9 (every live code and pointer on a served item), C10 (nothing after the last close); C3 no longer passes an empty text at an out-of-range offset; the verdict is read from _run.json first; --help. audit_fleet verifies pointers and exclusion quotes too. newrun hashes tools/ into the manifest, so C7 sees an edit to fleet.py. consolidate marks the coders' stage and close records coder_stage/coder_close, so the lead's journal starts with no stage and its _run.json reports the lead; it catches an overclaim with a sentence instead of a traceback. collect refuses a second call without --force; the context span ends at the window's end; fleet.py --help explains every flag. cite's shell form prints a refusal and exits 2 instead of a traceback, requires a quote, and its normalised path refuses an ambiguous quote. read.py has no --out (the environment variable READ_LOG_DIR is the scheduler's). tree_builder opens files as UTF-8 and prints usage on missing arguments instead of running the demo. emit.py --help lists the calls.
• Yard tools. room.py check --fork checks the fork; room.py fork recomputes the hashes of the files it rewrites and records the parent's, so a fork passes C7; B5 uses the record's id shape; E3 reads the query log too, and counts the consolidation second as before; the self-test's scripted case passes B4.

Fingerprint after the audit: 17ae5d4fb7912406.

J's three answers (2026-09-06, later): the room's own April Fools joke is in scope as conduct, §5 now says so beside §2, with the note on every such code mandatory. A score is a number taken at retrieval; it may be reported beside an item and is never coded as something these people did (§2). And instead of defining an episode, the thread tree is coded: every code is a cited chunk of an item (a sentence or a paragraph, cited whole), and the forest now shows each coded item as its chunks in text order, [c0012 na c0015], with na for a stretch of forty characters or more that no code covers; the index carries the sequence and each item's coverage, the header the count of na stretches and the mean coverage. §6 says a passage is cited whole and that an uncoded stretch is a visible choice; §8 says an episode is a stretch of the coded threads bounded by item ids and resting on the codes in the forest; the lead's §4 describes the sequence line. Fingerprint: 6560df4fd13c1618.

Not changed by the audit: the citation rule, the append-only journal, the counter-reading procedure, Rule 6, "a reply is a reply", the pointer schema, the forest, the slice rule, the seeded timeline, the ledger. Open, J's to decide: the community's own April Fools joke against §5's scope test; whether a score may be coded as conduct; whether an episode is defined.

The brief stage and the tools aligned (2026-09-06, night)

J asked for the equivalent of the yard for briefs and for the tools of the brief writer, the coder and the aggregator to be defined the same way unless there is a reason. Every room already carried the brief stage; what it lacked was the scheduler's side. Added: verify_room --brief (F1 to F6: the brief over 300 words unless harness-written, the nine headings, a read log opening with header and a note on the days touched, every quoted string of twenty characters or more verbatim in the pre-week record against the item id written beside it or anywhere, one in ten tolerated and listed; the transcript; the manifest's hashes), room.py check --brief, the stages brief to write and brief built, writer to run with their next steps, the scheduler contract's brief cycle and F rows, simbrief.py and selftest_brief.py.

The tools: TOOLS-SPEC.md says what the reading, citing and searching tools do the same way and what differs with reason. read_brief.py now logs to out/_read.jsonl with read.py's record shape (a thread read carries thread_id), has the item verb, no --out (READ_LOG_DIR), the same state keys, and prints ReadError: like read.py. cite.find returns a FindResult with truncated, limit, scanned, not_scanned, as the aggregator's does, and logs kind: find, tool, items_scanned, items_not_scanned. The aggregator's cite_case.py and mem.py are left as v36 built them, with their differences listed in the spec for v37. The brief writer's contract, read_brief.py and newbrief.py are in the fingerprint now. Fingerprint: 1d758e5427e622df.