Turn 2 integration: select reachable changes in understanding

Decision

Close the recovery-attribution branch for now. Carry forward a bounded, contrastive question-selection mechanism, not a compression objective. The next consequential question is: can successful changes in verification originate a question that changes an explanation, rather than merely correcting its evidence? Use that opportunity to make the selection reasoning explicit, including why it beats a currently unreachable attribution question.

This integrates A's comparison, B's independent case, the critic, and the prior integration, under the current coordination. Findings below are documentary judgments about those records. Proposed steering and acquisition mechanisms are conjectures. No behavioral experiment, causal intervention, search advantage, or task benefit was demonstrated. No external-source claim is needed for this integration; the prior turn's source discussion is not being treated as independent support.

What changed, and what resisted

The prior integration distinguished three possible outcomes: explanatory revision, correction of support, and missing acquisition. This turn resolves that choice mainly toward correction of support plus specific acquisition gaps.

A's comparison separates three records previously liable to be grouped under continued success. The tag chronology records human recognition and construction of verification machinery, not an established history of readers compensating for incomplete retrieval. The review log names an obstruction and substitutions, including moving deterministic execution to the parent. The linking-contract workshop describes contradictions outside the validator's checks. The last explains acceptance under limited checks, not achievement of the full knowledge-work purpose. These are not three independently established causes of successful work.

The recovery account survives in its actual scope: detected blockage followed by rerouting. Removing an unsupported example weakens its historical support; it does not refute that mechanism. The parent/script distinction identifies where a feasible alternative existed, but the present comparison does not show that this adds a condition absent from the incumbent. Nor does the reported reviewer duration measure recurring workaround cost. A causal discovery would require evidence beyond correcting these classifications.

B broadens the inquiry to productive revision involving retained knowledge and operator feedback. Its historical retrieval reportedly recovers accepted changes and an earlier episode account. That improves access to the documentary record. It does not establish that retained material caused the revisions, and I have not independently reconstructed B's Git comparison. More importantly, the actual retained account already distinguishes computational search, human selection, and missing causal controls. B's deliberately coarse comparison column is a foil, not the historical prior. Replacing it with the careful column cannot count as a new advance in the KB's explanation.

The strongest case-level rivals therefore resist: the scoped recovery account with corrected attribution, and operator-guided generic synthesis for the revision episode. The strongest steering rival also survives intact: ordinary explanation-seeking inquiry with explicit alternatives could produce this entire result. Learning value here is a corrected judgment about support and a better-located limit on inquiry. Delivery savings, autonomous learning, and superiority of curiosity remain unestablished.

A practical mechanism worth carrying forward

The candidate mechanism is bounded comparison of questions generated from unresolved explanatory contrasts. It need not begin with an error. A successful change can supply a contrast: something now works, is detected, or is accepted differently, while the contribution responsible remains unclear.

To originate questions, inspect a small set of successful changes or recurring outcomes against the explanations already assigned to them. Ask which difference those explanations leave unresolved. Candidate forms include: what changed besides the outcome; which distinction became checkable; why one case needs a condition another does not; and whether an apparent common mechanism preserves those differences. These are prompts for generating candidates, not requirements to manufacture an anomaly.

To select among candidates, retain the actual incumbent, its strongest rival, a distinction that would change the judgment, and a plausible evidence route. Compare prospective consequence for understanding, evidence accessibility, effort, and authority qualitatively. Prefer a question whose resolution could alter a reusable explanation over a merely unfamiliar topic when the evidence route and costs are otherwise comparable. A blocked high-value question can remain live without consuming the next allocation. Where these considerations conflict, record the choice and uncertainty rather than inventing a total score.

To compare progress, keep the same initial cases and actual incumbent visible. Ask whether the result changes warranted attribution, rules out an implication, supplies a missing condition, or merely restates an existing qualification. Also check whether it loses a distinction the incumbent preserved. New cases may challenge the comparison, but must be identified as additions rather than silently replacing inconvenient old cases. A longer explanation can improve understanding; fewer words or files establish nothing by themselves.

Finally, retain what the selected question actually yielded and why alternatives were parked. That could inform later selection, but this run has not demonstrated that such feedback improves it. The mechanism is practical because its inputs are inspectable arguments and records, not an unspecified prose compressor. Its vulnerability is equally explicit: fluent researchers can overstate both expected consequence and evidence reachability.

Next consequential question and strongest alternative

Recommend a bounded documentary inquiry into what moving a completeness requirement into validation changed: its statement, its checkability, or the evidence available to challenge compliance. The tag chronology offers a positive change, contract evolution, and a later detected omission. This is not another attempt to infer hidden reader recovery.

The rival accounts should remain genuinely different. One says the change mainly enforced an already explicit obligation. Another says it also changed what could be established about particular artifacts by making omissions discoverable through a broader check. These may prove compatible at different levels; the inquiry should not force opposition. Compare the requirement and checking method before and after, including the documented search recipe's missed case. If the incumbent already explains all consequential differences, report that resistance rather than declaring discovery.

The strongest immediate alternative is B's question about which project-specific distinction appeared before operator correction. Its possible learning value is substantial: it bears on knowledge-guided proposal generation. But its decisive conversation sequence is missing, and no new recovery route is supplied. Prefer the verification question because its documentary distinctions are more reachable, not because attribution lacks importance or immediate service payoff is mandatory.

This narrowing serves the larger purpose by examining how a system can originate an explanatory question from successful methodological development and judge qualitative progress. It leaves automatic proposal generation across the KB, comparative search yield, operator dependence, and general resource allocation unresolved. It changes the route within the commissioned purpose, not the purpose. No implementation or experiment follows from the recommendation.

Acquisition, retention, and stopping limits

Acquisition must follow the selected distinction. For verification, recover the earlier requirement, actual checking coverage, changed coverage, and the omission that discriminates them. Accepted outcomes alone cannot establish what a check examined. For attribution, a passage-to-proposal sequence before operator correction would strengthen involvement, but would not eliminate redundant inputs or establish necessity.

Retain exact versioned passages when wording or chronology matters, alongside the comparison and its uncertainty. In this turn, keep the recovery scope and stronger historical claims together; tag chronology and negative findings; review substitutions and actor boundaries; validator coverage limits; and B's missing-transcript qualification. These permit future disagreement with the integration. A summary is not a lossless residual, and Git recovers committed artifacts, not unrecorded recognition or uncommitted proposals.

Distinguish never-acquired information, discarded information, and retained information not consulted. An unfound transcript does not tell us which state applies. Stop retrospective attribution when no bounded recovery route remains; future comparable encounters would supply new evidence, not repair the old record retrospectively. Full-history acquisition and retention are neither feasible assumptions nor requirements here.

Park numerical compression because no prose coding interpretation supports this comparison. Park general storage design because these question-relative needs do not select an architecture and adjacent work owns it. Park recurring-cost models for missing attributable repeated effort, and causal intervention because it is unauthorized. Causal-credit literature remains an ungrounded lead. Broader connection discovery through cp-skill-connect is a possible separately authorized follow-up, not the next obligation.

Costs remain unaggregated in coordination and unknown to this worker. No operator intervention since authorization is recorded there. The documentary synthesis is complete within these limits; causal attribution and comparative steering performance remain partial. Only this integration file is owned.