How this repo is run

This page is about method, not about the pipeline. It is here because the method is load-bearing: an earlier arc of this project ran ten sessions in which each session judged its own output, wrote its conclusions to a shared memory store, and the next session read those conclusions as established fact. Nothing in that loop was checkable and nothing was gated on the Director’s eye, so errors compounded silently for weeks.

Every rule below was paid for. In the single session that produced this repository, six inherited or asserted claims were falsified — and every one of them took minutes to overturn because it sat next to runnable code.

Three roles, deliberately separated

role	does	must not
Director	sets direction; judges every artifact by eye	—
Advisor	writes specs, rules on reports, folds findings into the repo	execute, or grade its own rulings
Executor	runs the spec, measures, reports evidence	decide what results mean, or judge quality

The separation is the whole point: the session that designs an experiment does not grade its results, and the session that runs it does not decide their meaning.

The loop

spec written BEFORE the work  →  report written AFTER  →  advisor ruling LAST

A spec carries the question, hypotheses with predictions, arms varying one thing each, the metrics, the gates, an explicit out-of-scope section, and a standards compliance block. Amendments are appended in place with dates and reasons — a spec that hides its own corrections is the thing this repo is trying to get away from.

The rules that cost the most

An inherited claim is a hypothesis wearing a fact’s clothes. Checking one costs minutes; building on one costs a session. If a spec, README or handoff asserts a number, verify it before designing around it — including numbers written by the advisor.

State a prediction before you look, and disclose whether it was blind. A hypothesis with no prediction cannot be wrong, and one that cannot be wrong teaches nothing.

Stop at every gate; never improvise past one. A session that changed a parameter and re-ran when a gate fired hit the same gate harder.

A negative result is a full success. Say so plainly and stop, rather than tuning toward a number.

Correct in place, with the measurement that overturned the claim. Never quietly delete a wrong statement — the correction is more useful than the original.

A check that cannot fail is not a check. Before trusting a zero, ask what a non-zero would have required. A cull gate returned 1.00000 on a mesh with a hole clean through the torso, because silhouette IoU is structurally blind to holes behind visible surface.

When you fix a root cause, find its other consumers. One fix corrected the control-image path and left the same function on the same render still losing a quarter of the silhouette elsewhere. A root cause has as many sites as it has callers.

A global constant must not govern a local feature. Three instances, each costing a session: a rectangle measured on one silhouette applied to a mesh 38% narrower; an erosion tuned on a wide figure eating 480k texels where the surface turns edge-on; an edge-distance scaled by global figure width leaving a 15 px blade with no interior.

Canon is not a taste question to be routed around. When the real question is is this the right thing, a measurable proxy is not a conservative substitute for asking — it is a different question with a number attached. Ask, and show the artifact at full size.

A gate that a scripting accident can separate from the action it gates is not a gate. An invariance halt fired on stroke 7 and the commit ran anyway, because the check and the commit were chained in one shell call that walked past the failing exit code. The check lives inside the tool that performs the irreversible step, with no skip flag.

Judging artifacts

• Textures under flat light — a Workbench STUDIO render is not a texture readout.
• Geometry under clay — texture hides geometry.
• At the Director’s zoom, never from a contact sheet — the defects that decide acceptance are invisible at thumbnail scale.
• Beside the reference, with provenance. The cheapest diagnostic in this repo is a reference | asset | provenance | error sheet on one page. Build it before the metrics, not after them: a number tells you a region is wrong; the sheet tells you what it was supposed to be, which is the part that decides what to do next.

The advisor’s record, kept for calibration

A future advisor should know which parts of this repo to distrust. In the founding session the advisor was wrong about the shell-soup premise, the clay provenance, the double-subscribe diagnosis, the head-pixel multiplier, the halo hypothesis, and two pass conditions. In a later experiment it was wrong about two of its own gates — one measuring a proxy that inverted and halted a correct arm, one defining a pass condition as a fraction of a baseline nobody had measured. Both were caught by an executor who ran them as written and reported the evidence rather than tuning past them.

The advisor was useful at: ruling once evidence was in, killing options with reasons, refusing to commission a metric where no honest one existed, bounding an expensive arm before spending it, and correcting the record in place.

Deciding is the job. Predicting is not.

The full version of this page, with every rule and what it cost, is CLAUDE.md in the repo root.