5 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Edward Langley 4ca3a47b41 kb: refusal no longer offers committing the loss; skill and kb-tool.md describe the guard (improvise-za97)
The kb skill (both copies) now describes the HEAD comparison, the ledger,
exit code 3 and the recovery. kb-tool.md records the ih3k/yea8 arguments and
corrects the residue paragraph: .gitignore hides the leftovers, and there are
six, not one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VdfEGXA7aJ6ftMsCc9PJze
2026-09-22 21:17:17 -07:00
Edward Langley a55b3c7147 kb: refuse a write that leaves the kb short of HEAD; publish by rename
scripts/kb add wrote onto a working-tree kb.pl that had lost 276 of its 801
clauses and reported success, because kb_consistent checks consistency, not
completeness (improvise-usus). Every write now runs kb-merge.pl `complete`
on the candidate before kb_consistent. It refuses unless every clause HEAD
has is still present by key, or its removal was recorded by `kb rm` in a
per-worktree ledger in the git dir, which prunes itself on every write.

The candidate is now built beside kb.pl, so publishing it is a rename(2)
rather than a possible cross-device copy that a kill could truncate.

Exit codes: 0 done, 1 refused, 2 usage, 3 HEAD's kb.pl unreadable. kb-test.sh
now builds its fixtures from HEAD and adds cases 18-22. Argument in
context/code/kb-tool.md, evidence and rivals in context/test-evidence/tooling.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VdfEGXA7aJ6ftMsCc9PJze
2026-09-22 20:46:03 -07:00
Edward Langley 7fd57c06b3 docs: say what to do; attribute what agents post
Two user rulings.

Documentation should not spend itself on history -- that is bloat. Prose docs
now lead with the rule and keep only the line that stops it looking arbitrary;
the worked examples and the how-we-found-it move into doctrine/2 text, which is
what that predicate is for and where a reader goes deliberately rather than
while looking for a command. Trimmed: both skills, context/code/kb-tool.md, and
the kb paragraph in AGENTS.md.

Anything an agent posts to GitHub goes out under the owner's account, so every
comment, review and issue body now opens with a line naming the model and that
an agent wrote it. A PR body's generated-with footer already did this; comments
carried nothing, and an unattributed one reads as his own words to every reader
-- including a reviewer deciding how much weight to give it. The reply on PR #68
has been amended in place.

improvise-xfsb files the structural fix: a GitHub App or machine user so agents
post under their own identity. An attribution line is a convention an agent can
forget; a separate identity cannot be.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
2026-09-20 16:04:33 -07:00
Edward Langley 805bae7a15 kb: a clause can be retired, and the docs stop naming the MCP
Three gaps in the tool as first written, each found by asking what it could not
do rather than by running it:

- There was no way to REMOVE a clause. Every correction could add or overwrite,
  so a fact that went false could only be rewritten, never dropped. `kb rm`
  takes keys and refuses when any is absent -- a typo'd key would otherwise
  report success and leave the clause in place.
- `doctrine(kb_is_maintained_through_the_mcp)` is retired for
  kb_is_maintained_by_scripts_kb. The NAME was the claim that went false, which
  is the repair opfs_is_run_but_bindings_is_not needed for the same reason. The
  replacement records why nobody should go back, and that READING through the
  MCP is unaffected.
- AGENTS.md said kb.pl was "MCP-maintained, whole-predicate replacement" and
  told agents to strip host_rpc shims after each save. Both described the
  retired mechanism. This is a_fact_stated_twice_is_changed_by_grep landing
  inside the PR that depends on that doctrine being true.

Also fixes a printed value that was an unevaluated expression: `rm` reported
"530-529 removed" rather than 1.

kb-test.sh is 11 cases now, both new ones proved by injection.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
2026-09-20 15:58:34 -07:00
Edward Langley 3405fc4def kb: retire the Prolog MCP for a tool that costs the clause, not the predicate
loadProgram REPLACES a whole predicate, so adding one clause meant re-sending
every existing clause of it through an agent's context window. Measured on the
wave-3 batch: ~113KB read and ~113KB written to deliver ~25KB of new text. That
sets the behaviour -- writing becomes a thing you batch and do rarely -- and the
batch is where a short payload silently drops the rest of a predicate, which has
cost this repo 22 decisions and 19 doctrines once already.

scripts/kb reads clauses as DATA and never consults them, so the cost of adding
a clause is the clause. Canonical form is read_term in, portray_clause out --
measured, not designed: all 495 existing facts round-trip byte-identically and
the form is a fixed point in one pass. Rules move to one line, which is why the
reformat lands here rather than earlier: the MCP would re-expand them on its
next save and the two would thrash.

trealla moves into the devShell. Reaching it through `nix shell` per invocation
took the tool's first real use past a two-minute timeout for a write that takes
0.42s with tpl on PATH.

Four guards, each added because injecting its fault showed the tool accepting
what it should refuse. None was found by reading:

- an unparseable delta dropped trealla into its REPL, which HANGS with a
  terminal and EXITS 0 without one -- a refusal that reads as acceptance
- `-g main,halt` exits 0 on a throw AND on a failure, because a goal that fails
  never reaches the halt beside it; halt(2) alone exits 2, so the default is the
  hazard. The goal now guarantees a halt on every path (0/2/1)
- `42.` parses, is not callable, and landed as a fact whose head is a number;
  kb_consistent has no opinion about stray terms
- fmt discarded the merge's exit code and would have committed a failed
  canonicalization

Plus the two that were designed in: the result is read back and required to be
the clauses intended (variant equality -- == compares variable identity and
reports every rule as different), and kb_consistent runs on the CANDIDATE, so a
bad delta leaves the knowledge base untouched rather than needing a revert.

scripts/kb-test.sh proves all nine by injection. context/code/kb-tool.md carries
the argument, including what it does not reach.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
2026-09-20 15:54:39 -07:00