Sift-KG — exact-publication follow-up audit

Decision

Specific hold — operational/authority disposition required. The workflow worker successfully wrote an empty file outside its assigned worktree and then removed that file and its containing directory chain. Correcting the path and passing content validation did not authorize those collateral actions. The parent must decide whether this bounded incident permits integration and retain that decision; a content rerun cannot erase it.

Within the semantic scope inspected below, no additional material publication defect was established. The public synthesis already carries the known local info-route attribution defect and the important source-level limits. That is not integration clearance while the operational hold remains unresolved.

This completes the independent single-case follow-up. The earlier AAS-2026-10-15-sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c-01.md remains unchanged as incomplete, binding-only group evidence; its unfinished audit was not a production defect.

Assignment, identity and boundaries

  • Exact run: AAS-2026-10-15-sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c-01.
  • Auditor: Pi, openai/gpt-6.1-sol, reasoning medium, independently confirmed from PI_PROVIDER, PI_MODEL, PI_REASONING_LEVEL.
  • Actual auditor session: 01a146f6-5a46-73ea-b0c6-c2936c1a27cd.
  • W: /home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c.
  • P: W/kb/agentic-system-analyses/retained/sift-kg.
  • R: W/kb/agentic-system-analyses/state/AAS-2026-10-15-sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c-01.
  • Source: https://github.com/juanceresa/sift-kg, frozen Git commit d786991c024f5401f113fc0cb70aee96dd1bd3bf, at W/related-systems/juanceresa--sift-kg.
  • Method: a568c6dc489ad546374536b642c3889ce23149a8; plan SHA-256 5a5f56891d95a819c3f4fde00bb92eb301876598c022924ee52bed6262721bfd.
  • Intake SHA-256 freshly matches 29c5a94a2c926f9c8b895cf5a5f50b0157461fa2a8aff39779131d14ab6d530e.

Fully read the current commission, audit-a-rerun, workshop framing, work collection and text contracts. No delegation, analytic contact, target execution/tests/services, fetch/install, state changes, integration, reset, staging, commit or cleanup was performed. Only this report is an authored output. Other pre-existing origin changes are outside this assignment.

Fresh byte and identity binding

Recursive enumeration of P found exactly the intake's 13 files, with every actual-byte SHA-256 equal to both the intake published-sha256 and completed own publish effect new map. No extra member was ignored. Map digest: da65f938e2cc3ddf5233ba48a80a408dbde0ef73dc71065b281e5246b819323b. Encoding: SHA-256 of UTF-8 JSON of the relative-path/hash map, sorted keys, compact separators (',', ':'), without an added newline.

Freshly checked:

  • preparation SHA-256 73c4fbf601110ba63ceeb05c412bab29dc115acf38f487cbcb4acff93c70f148;
  • run-definition SHA-256 3746e72ca02357270e64688864fad929cff029e1b89cc47a7b35aa241f099f73;
  • completed publish effect SHA-256 6401a0566cd6b2293ce07e280377d0a62afeb873ff9f37f76cdf890585f50069;
  • all 37 stored attempt metadata files equal intake hashes;
  • all non-null publish input versions hash to their pins, and every publication byte hash resolves to an equal version blob;
  • assembled manifest 871f5846c60ee404aea9f934374b66763ec4e8a94bcc8aae0d5ceb0e13e0a5de equals the publish manifest pin and intake manifest, with exact hashes for all 12 Markdown members;
  • receipt 64f3a15724c46bdc296b2053b929076fefdec78e408e4878d3bc5ca6a4a9e67c hashes correctly and binds the same 13-member map, run, source identity and method; effect destination equals P;
  • opening metadata pin 31aadc2a932c1383ea4d38aa0c83ac4a71f2362c2ef202295b82739c1e7f31da matches actual bytes; opening/intake and acquisition/source identities agree;
  • prepared method HEAD and source HEAD equal the revisions above; the source checkout has empty git status --porcelain --untracked-files=all;
  • actual plan bytes equal the run's plan hash.

Opening/receipt source-revision: null is the original unpinned request, not a claim that acquisition lacked a revision. The acquired source object and public boundary bind the concrete commit. Manifest worker metadata reports pi-sol, Pi, openai/gpt-6.1-sol, medium for all roles. This binding does not certify worker authority compliance. No source-matched canonical incumbent is listed for this row; this audit does not grant transfer authority or check a later canonical inventory.

Historical comparison and source challenges

Fully read kb/agent-memory-systems/reviews/sift-kg.md. It identifies the same owner/repository and the same full source commit, despite its earlier 2026-06-05 review date. Consequently revision drift does not explain the following differences. Its Commonplace comparison and borrowing suggestions are historical interpretations, not required rerun outputs or instructions to analysts.

Fully read public boundary, overview and synthesis; runtime, memory, workflow, reconciliation, memory profile and all three public verifications. Read the relevant epistemic definitions/normalization account at lines 90–219, not its entire ledger. The rerun preserves the historical central loop: imported documents, generated/reused schema, retained extraction/graph files, resolution and review, prose sidecars, selective graph retrieval and host-owned use.

Meaningful differences were challenged as follows:

  1. Human review versus status admission. The old account emphasizes human review but also mentions automatic thresholds. The rerun makes the latter consequential: confirmed status is not authenticated universal human approval. Directly read frozen src/sift_kg/resolve/reviewer.py:39-163: default 0.85 auto-confirmation precedes interactive review, and quit leaves prior confirmations intact. This supports the public qualification, not a coverage regression.
  2. Cached/incremental does not mean content-fresh or surgery-preserving. Directly read src/sift_kg/extract/extractor.py:1-54; _check_stale compares model, domain name and chunk size, not source contents. Directly read src/sift_kg/pipeline.py:1-180: build reloads retained extractions and calls fresh construction, saves graph before flags, and loads the discovered domain for later build. This supports the rerun's distinction between retention, freshness and approval. I did not independently retrace every extraction caller or all CLI build alternatives; those remain supported by the accepted records rather than a fresh exhaustive audit here.
  3. Parametric inference is not retained parametric memory. The historical artifact profile includes model inference and clustering. The current profile explicitly scopes its inventory to retained content and excludes weights/transient embeddings, while runtime separately inventories those components. This is a declared unit-of-analysis difference, not silent deletion of model involvement. No dependency internals were inspected.
  4. Pull-only versus internal push. Fully read the frozen bundled skill. Session-start orientation, optional direct small-graph loading and requested query/topology remain host protocols. The new profile distinguishes internal automatic supply to model/code consumers from requested CLI delivery; the pipeline's discovered-domain reload is a concrete internal reuse witness. Public synthesis does not promote it into automatic host-session injection.
  5. Trace-learning absence versus uncertainty. The old account says no trace-derived retained artifacts were found. The rerun declines a universal negative over all possible imported content/decision origins. Neither account supplies an exercised trace-fed update chain. The changed uncertainty is explicit in profile and synthesis; it does not establish new target capability or conceal missing observations.
  6. Semantic normalization counterexample. Directly checked src/sift_kg/graph/postprocessor.py's mapping and lines 294–348. When the origin relation is not already valid, the code can assign TRAVELED_TO while keeping endpoints. The public conditional counterexample is supported; it is not evidence of an observed corpus incident. No target was run.

The info attribution issue is public, localized and non-blocking on this inspection: synthesis names info's separate counts/status/existence consumer, then explicitly withholds the broader attribution. No semantic correction request or deep reconstruction is justified by the comparisons above. Source accuracy, actual costs, host uptake, model compliance and downstream benefit remain unestablished and already qualified publicly.

Completed-trace finding and fault origin

Completed trace lead: /media/zby/2b5e98b6-baf0-4e97-90d2-03321ea23372/outputs/batch-14/sift-kg.output. Fresh size: 281,713,513 bytes; SHA-256: b35548d311a9c2e112454dfae893b57c9162c8d7b8eb7d7d0b0763312e0b98fb. Session header: 01a13e30-c428-7073-85c3-2307800cae37. The other intake lead, outputs/sift-kg.output, is still zero bytes and supplies no corroborating trace.

Streamed all JSON events to inventory terminal coordinator tool calls and terminal subagent-result message arrays, not every streamed token/prose event. All 470 nested tool calls across the 13 analytical worker executions have same-worker call/result matches in those arrays. Inspected the shell commands and write/edit destinations, then the workflow incident's complete invocation read, matched results and final response. This bounded operational pass found:

  • In nested workflow result envelope at byte offset 134220312, worker 000009-workflow issued write call call_8nyeeFF26U2C4HZi21r7cwOq|fc_01f20a1050fa6e6e016ad071b563c487d28dc2eae36180b87b. It wrote empty content to /home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c-01/state/handouts/000009-workflow/outputs/report.md. Matched result reports successful write, isError: false, timestamp 1792045494811. This is a sibling of W, not its assigned workspace.
  • Call call_jckFYr6f6ER0XFQh9XGdnLgi|fc_01f20a1050fa6e6e016ad071bc75b087d2a9a1734af62f130b then ran rm on that file and chained rmdir on all five containing directories through the wrong worktree root. Its matched shell result has no output, isError: false, timestamp 1792045503946. These are executed mutations, not unexecuted proposals. Successful rmdir bounds the residual tree; it does not establish the overwritten file's pre-write state.
  • Correct-path write call_NFmBbyMMMgRHHzKM1dh6eYkZ|fc_01f20a1050fa6e6e016ad071c37e8887d2b9d9d4605364bdac subsequently produced the legitimate report, timestamp 1792045568862. Its content equals the published workflow member, SHA-256 531a78047d8ceb8e9773bc6d6bf70a105adea2b9584f286d32a570a639dc6213. The final worker response lists its legitimate outputs, without disclosing the collateral write/removal. Content validation passed with the explicit warning that it was not job acceptance or claim support.

The complete historical invocation was recovered from its matched trace read; its live handout no longer exists. It supplied the correct absolute output and workspace paths. Its pinned worker rules a2a29b5670a256ce21a9f55485734c82bbfa606be0668b177eb149cc58e88272 expressly require supplied absolute paths, prohibit reconstruction, and allow writes only to named outputs/problem/identity and scratch. Its workflow mission 93bbd051e9b232efdb1dd3f4301b68224962d8ee93e8d72f5d33fb0f7d89aceb adds no collateral-write authority. Both version blobs were read completely and rehash correctly. No scope ambiguity authorizes the wrong path or cleanup.

Earliest output, missed barrier and restart classification

  • Origin: 000009-workflow, operational/authority, not deep or local analytical reconstruction. The first evidenced fault is the successful off-scope empty write, followed by off-scope cleanup. No faulty source record or erroneous installed semantic claim has been established.
  • First installed output associated with the incident: workflow report hash above, accepted from 000009-workflow; the publish-pinned attempt blob is 959a6a662efdf9da453681322efde6e8d0ff1dae45f48e68698c12b61a458710. 000036-assemble and 000037-publish bind that report/attempt. It is not correct to pretend the wrong empty file itself became the installed report.
  • Missed barrier: the worker's path/authority check before writing and escalation/disclosure after the mistake; then the coordinator's completion handling accepted workflow at terminal call envelope byte offset 136242873 (call_FSu4PprG8rXB5IntPYlwPhIN|fc_079a98f2448538b2016ad072d3680c87d2853c0ea4a2feaeae). Publication success did not settle the returned worker trace's authority.
  • Verifier attribution: 000021-report-check and 000022-report-verification allowed the legitimate workflow content onward. The latter pins the same report and mission 41163de951b29115cfad318fa1f3baf7b36a94ee730dbb93b2d91397145490b2, read completely and rehashed. Its mission verifies records/source, not worker execution traces. Do not falsely diagnose it as having inspected and excused the collateral operations. The missed operational barrier belongs to worker/coordinator handling and this pre-integration audit, not a claimed semantic-verifier obligation to discover unavailable history.
  • Author correction/restart: none selected. The actual origin job is workflow; rerunning that author job cannot authorize its earlier actions. No deep restart at boundary/runtime and no profile/synthesis rewrite is supported by this finding.
  • Verification restart: none of report-verification, profile-verification or synthesis-verification clears this operational hold. Required next action is parent-owned authority/collateral-effect disposition of the exact incident. If the parent separately commissions a new workflow output, workflow is the actual author job and report-verification its semantic verification restart; that would be a separate decision, not a remedy selected or executed here.
  • Other categories: no independent deep, local-content or incumbent-transfer hold established. Evidence limit: no pre-write filesystem image proves that the empty write did not replace a pre-existing file. The trace bounds the observed operations but does not authorize an assumption of zero collateral impact. Resolve or explicitly accept that uncertainty before integration.

Validation and concrete coverage limits

Executed exactly from W, using its prepared executable:

cd /home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c
/home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c/.venv/bin/commonplace-validate /home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c/kb/agentic-system-analyses/retained/sift-kg

Exit 0: VALIDATION SUCCESS; one directory artifact, zero failures and zero warnings. This is deterministic content/set validation, not authority or semantic certification.

Executed report validation from the same cwd:

/home/zby/llm/commonplace/.commonplace/worktrees/sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c/.venv/bin/commonplace-validate /home/zby/llm/commonplace/kb/work/agentic-system-reruns/audits/current-publications/AAS-2026-10-15-sift-kg-dca68bc45a2c-01-followup.md

Exit 0: VALIDATION SUCCESS; one text file, zero failures and zero warnings. Neither command emitted an additional notice.

This is not an exhaustive source reanalysis. Fresh source reads are exactly the skill, extractor opening/cache predicate, pipeline opening/build, merge-review body and normalization mapping/body described above, plus scoped searches. Other mechanisms rely on the fully read accepted records and their retained witnesses. Dependency internals, test bodies, examples, all CLI alternatives and the full epistemic ledger were not independently retraced. No new source or target operational evidence was acquired. The completed production trace is analysis-worker history, not a sift-kg target execution trace. The operational scan does not certify every required read, every truncation recovery, all shell script semantics or undisclosed external effects. It is sufficient to establish the specific paired write/removal incident. Missing handout files were not reconstructed on disk. Parent owns acceptance and recovery; no analytical feedback has been sent to the producing run.