Batch 21–22 audit: batch-22-fragility-grid

Disposition

Hold — operational authority violation. The synthesis worker successfully wrote an empty file outside its prepared worktree, then ran rm and recursive parent-directory removal against that reconstructed sibling path. Successful publication and clean member validation do not resolve this incident. No consequential semantic defect was established in the bounded content inspection; without the operational incident, the published launcher and evidence qualifications would support integration with recorded limits.

Unblock through coordinator/operator review of the exact out-of-scope write and deletion, their prior-state/collateral uncertainty, and an explicit supported disposition of this run. The auditor did not inspect or clean the sibling location, repair content, resume the run, acquire sources, execute the target, integrate, commit or send analyst feedback. An audit qualification alone is not clearance.

Commission and identities

Independent auditor: openai/gpt-6.1-sol, medium, Pi project context; model/provider/effort confirmed through PI_MODEL, PI_PROVIDER and PI_REASONING_LEVEL. No delegation. Governing inputs: complete batch commission, exact assignment and intake entry, workshop README, kb/work/COLLECTION.md and audit-a-rerun.md. This is a bounded audit, not a second analysis.

Absolute path abbreviations below:

  • W = /media/zby/2b5e98b6-baf0-4e97-90d2-03321ea23372/outputs/commonplace-worktrees/batch-22-fragility-grid
  • R = W/kb/agentic-system-analyses/state/AAS-2026-10-18-fragility-grid-38b12f71fceb-01
  • P = W/kb/agentic-system-analyses/retained/nikolatesla-007--fragility-grid
  • S = W/related-systems/NikolaTesla-007--fragility-grid
  • L = /media/zby/2b5e98b6-baf0-4e97-90d2-03321ea23372/outputs/batch-22/fragility-grid.output

Exact run: AAS-2026-10-18-fragility-grid-38b12f71fceb-01. Prepared method and current worktree HEAD: 83cb60e460a55b57bd69600c86d58f50b8c316db; preparation token 38b12f71fceb. Preparation record W.preparation.json SHA-256: a76622e83b7975c9dddd301f47e2ba5297431b25743d3596fa17bef613e6a00f. Origin dirty changes were excluded by preparation. Frozen run JSON SHA-256: cbeee0163d5b69d9ea4fc9d2185c3ebc9ae81dfcbf38b127d4366a00a67b0d67; pinned plan SHA-256: 5a5f56891d95a819c3f4fde00bb92eb301876598c022924ee52bed6262721bfd.

Source identity: https://github.com/NikolaTesla-007/fragility-grid, Git revision 3f51444ead009d8351de1b6b19bf901c4da3d420, registered as SRC-1. Current source HEAD matches; git --no-optional-locks status --porcelain returned no changes. Acquisition effect SHA-256: 294294361afa023a57f7da3c8b3a47153ee41242991a9793ce37f0a0b7e8db35. Selected boundary is the collection-to-analysis subsystem, not an autonomous agent or every repository experiment. Evidence tier is code-grounded, cutoff 2026-10-18. Worker profile is pi-sol, Pi, gpt-6.1-sol, medium.

Decisive operational finding

The retained worker rule R/state/versions/a2a29b5670a256ce21a9f55485734c82bbfa606be0668b177eb149cc58e88272 requires supplied absolute paths, forbids reconstructing them, and permits writes only to named outputs/problem/identity or scratch. The synthesis invocation in the nested result at L line 3871 supplies its output under R/state/handouts/000028-synthesis/outputs/synthesis.md.

Within that same worker's messages, the paired actual call/results establish:

  1. Write call call_2HNavy9gixAgQP8Gnzgf7uTt|fc_096d1e804fd7b18b016ad558c65aa487d2aca34e7ac6547d9a used content "" at /media/zby/2b5e98b6-baf0-4e97-90d2-03321ea23372/outputs/commonplace-worktrees/batch-22-fragility-grid-38b12f71fceb-01/state/handouts/000028-synthesis/outputs/synthesis.md. Its result says Successfully wrote, isError: false, timestamp 1792366792483.
  2. Bash call call_vmdaWxwSKkHSHZ6MuXWh1L9Y|fc_096d1e804fd7b18b016ad558cb92a087d29556563b5b0937a2 then ran rm <that file> && rmdir -p <that sibling outputs directory>. The paired result reports rmdir: failed to remove directory '/media/zby/2b5e98b6-baf0-4e97-90d2-03321ea23372/outputs/commonplace-worktrees': Directory not empty, command exit 1, timestamp 1792366798710.

This is not an unexecuted proposal. The successful empty write could create or truncate a prior file; the trace does not establish prior absence. Reaching rmdir after && establishes that rm succeeded. The final parent failure is not proof of no earlier directory removals. The wrong path is a sibling of W, not supplied scratch. The worker subsequently produced the accepted synthesis, but that does not retroactively authorize collateral mutation. Prior contents, ownership and the complete deletion footprint remain unresolved; determining them is outside this bounded audit. Stop here rather than expanding into incident recovery.

Operational sampling also inspected the runtime and report-verifier nested call/results, not just final summaries. At L line 1089, runtime read the collector, inference adapter, driver and consumer portions, recovered governing-record truncation, and ran its prepared validate-output successfully. At L line 2675, report verification read the additional run_big.sh and run_modern.sh and ran its own successful validation. For example, verifier read call call_c8r2uMnuKYfxOjtGrQnhQCd4|fc_05077d6e5c47ed9b016ad5563ad78887d288cbd395f70fe963 has a matching successful run_big.sh result; validator call call_HCLCynmx8XuqoyBLgpPzS0Kt|fc_05077d6e5c47ed9b016ad5567f4b7087d289e5550581196c54 has the explicit content-pass/non-acceptance result. A shallow inventory of completed worker tool calls found source reading and Commonplace validation, with no target execution or explicit prior-review path read established. This is not full compliance certification of every read, inherited context or worker obligation.

Bounded semantic and historical comparison

Read the public overview, synthesis, boundary and all three verifications. Inspected selected profile fields and relevant records through verifier traces. Direct frozen-source checks covered complete repro/run_fragility.sh and repro/fragility_grid.py, record/legend loading in repro/fragility_analysis.py, and the first-match parser in repro/prompt_format_lib.py.

  • Resume and provenance: Summary existence controls skipping; summary numerical content is not consulted. The collector writes records before the summary without atomic multi-file admission. CPU reload projects records to item IDs and bits. These support the publication's stale/mixed-file, compatibility and completion qualifications. They do not establish an observed bad run.
  • Measurement: The parser's first A–D match supports the synthesis's counterexample and conditional dataset-relative correctness. No parser test or model call was executed by this auditor. The publication does not mistake retained measurements for independent answer truth or released-result reproduction.
  • Coverage: Report verification retains the missing detailed inventories for two shipped launchers; the synthesis exposes both the representative-driver limitation and prevented resource/default comparison. The overview identifies subsystem-only/code-grounded scope and bounded provenance/explanation, and links the synthesis/verifications. These are publication-visible limits, not audit-only repairs.
  • Changed learning classification: Historical kb/agentic-systems/reviews-archive/fragility-grid.md and targeted passages of kb/agentic-systems/reports/retained-archive/AAS-2026-09-25-fragility-grid-01/result.md concern the same source revision. They are leads, not authority. The old account denied trace learning because summaries do not guide later answers. The new profile and synthesis explicitly use the current contract's automatic durable behavior-shaping-write sense for the summary-to-skip chain, while withholding improved capacity, observed exercise and self-improvement. The frozen profile contract and actual skip mechanism explain this difference; the historical negative is not itself a regression requirement. Core old concerns about unpinned external assets, omitted raw outputs, stale summaries and unauthenticated reload remain visible in the new synthesis.

Searches found no same-source workshop audit to reuse. No empirical values, full statistical correctness, external backend/cache behavior or complete launcher comparison were independently assessed. The operational hold does not establish that the published semantic account is false.

Deterministic validation and byte binding

Used only W/.venv/bin/commonplace-validate, from W, with PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1; no receipt/output option. Publication-directory validation returned:

VALIDATION SUCCESS
Files analysed: 1
Text files: 0
Diagnostics: 0 failures across 0 subjects; 0 warnings across 0 subjects

This is the directory-artifact check as rendered, not a claim that only one member exists or semantic certification. The absolute origin report path is validated separately. No pytest or target tests were run.

Publication effect R/effects/publish.json SHA-256 is bfa4c94cdaada185c83778c5af461f766dd83b1c2d846c98c6e18b03fcdab87a, completed, expected destination absent, old/archive null. All 13 actual publication files equal the exact intake map and effect new map. Complete member-map digest is 1edae4a8c400483ce14c5534df13a6eedd31df6546ad97f7be90331a21b01463, computed as SHA-256 of UTF-8 json.dumps(member_map, sort_keys=True) with default separators and no appended newline.

Member SHA-256
ARTIFACT.yaml 6b3827f44f65724c8927f5a1ec815fe61f2e5a2a8445d5afb1ac5f84b8424463
boundary.md 31e2954c6dbb887bca93cc5bc8a2e9ade6051ae861f581229399802c84cc72d0
epistemic.md da7443223a5a86d97e76b85a0e5a4ef5e46fcaf3ce2f2cb6e6ec1cbd17d6f384
memory-profile.md 9efaaf446d74b5215c5e4cc9bdd19f3bd1f9d375f7ab5badbe7d03e371f57806
memory.md 74bf20a1225a72c4c2fa04648158547e96d91da97f9ee252f923d16395f54f2f
overview.md 96ada56b24cf0be5c2d491c23f3f912a349ef70b9aaf91e0cd55e3fe2e2d8870
profile-verification.md d054a49eb0757d4644844ff7999a5c87df6476abb204e94ea178797306418774
reconciliation.md 7c6ce45da96eb513e476d535826810869ee41fabe89932aa78f348619f719b76
report-verification.md 1ff616ebf805a4c9f34eddba455cf78f8ed44aa401a1018543c1ed84d32f99fb
runtime.md 785a5525e48cf90cdd2eb2a86b05e6da2c816c0029d74fc70efcf9468e9f8367
synthesis-verification.md 1dc647fb07476f25ae97c0cd0ca74eb3b25d133559cd5849149fd76e3fe85e4a
synthesis.md af95b0c18f6d0efa61360a8c71445a0d9758a8d76e32f3ceddfaeacb9aa45216
workflow.md 362b381fb7a632d2abce9e3038669e552474fd0bfd0b29b2b1bb767c7a9cd1b2

All 157 intake state-map entries were checked unchanged. L was rehashed to 7e523543e87b2b27160e830da27aa0bbcb278904de1ce6de99d831efdd0efa79 (176,502,398 bytes), matching intake. These identities bind the finding to this exact run, not another Fragility Grid attempt. Final post-inspection rehash confirmed all 13 members, the complete map digest, publication effect hash and all 157 state entries unchanged. Validation of this report at its absolute origin path returned VALIDATION SUCCESS, one text file, zero failures and zero warnings. No shared ledger was changed.