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
Edward Langley
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