Wave 1 worksheet: the entangled cases

Working inventory for plan Wave 1, from a close read of the held-back files and the lineage-edge sweeps (2026-07-17). Authority: migration-plan.md. Coordination: the mechanical second wave (plan Wave 2 subset) is being executed separately from obvious-distillation-cases.md — do not touch its files from here.

Already executed

  • distillation-is-transformation-not-selection.md retired (757d6daa, operator decision). Its polemic target dissolved with the term; anti-mere-selection lives in the structure note, the condition-clause mechanism is inline in abstract-an-experience, substrate persistence in the structure note and a-derived-copy…. Backlinks repointed (two ingests cited it for ampliative evidence and now support abstract-an-experience); ADR 021's path mention is a syntax example, left as history.

  • COLLECTION.md gloss bug fixed (9e252b41): both kb/notes/COLLECTION.md and kb/reference/COLLECTION.md glossed derived-from as "abstracted from" — writers were being instructed to mis-label. abstracted-from is now authorized alongside the corrected derived-from in both. One mislabel-in-waiting in trace-extracted-memory… open questions fixed with it.

  • a-derived-copy… fixed and gated (b35ea92c): framing sentence split per the operator's correction — dependence and staleness machinery universal, copy identity and re-derive repair derived-only, judgment fidelity-or-support; "dependent" used as ordinary English umbrella, no coinage. Full gate battery ran: 39 pairs, 9 jobs, claude-opus-4.8 partition — 38 pass, 1 warn (sentence/clause-packing on the new sentence), fixed by splitting; fix report in kb/reports/fixes/. Two side-findings for later: the collection-conformance pass flagged that the notes COLLECTION.md label table doesn't enumerate kb/types/ as an evidence destination (table gap, not a violation); the sentence-split fix strategy is new, propose for the taxonomy on recurrence.

  • Retitle trio executed and renamed (f7aac9e6): the tradeoff note ("Constraining and extraction…"), the lineage note ("Artifacts produced from sources need lineage recorded at the source" — first carrier of the Derived into: footer), and "Evolving understanding needs holistic rewrite, not composition"; follow-ons task-fitted-structure and the note-refinement proposal reworded; renames via commonplace-relocate-note with corpus-wide backlink rewrites and redirects. Gate run was cut short by the session limit after 29 all-bundle pairs on the tradeoff note — 4 warns, all fixed (framing mismatch in the table, two stock phrases, footer capitalization, missing title-as-claim trait). The other two notes gate at the next sweep under their new paths. Sequencing lesson: rename before gating — baselines key on note_path, so a post-gate rename orphans them; for remaining rewrites, relocate first, then gate.

Semantic rewrites (review-gated unless noted)

File Entanglement Treatment Gate

Reclassified out of Wave 1 (nothing entangled remains; append to the staging file's second wave after the current mechanical batch completes): minimum-viable-vocabulary…, information-value-is-observer-relative.md, legal-drafting…. Deferred to Wave 3: soft-bound-traditions… (lists the term with definition links that break on deletion).

The definition's salvage map (input to Wave 3 deletion)

definitions/distillation.md instance classification: methodology→skill derived; article→summary, caller-context→prompt, observations→summary derived/selection; workshop→note mixed; repeated-failures→gate and "notice patterns, then write" ampliative — the definition's own Scope list still teaches the boundary leak. Salvage before deletion:

  • use-shaping / "distillate doesn't replace source" — already covered by the structure note; drop.
  • the Faithful-Self-Evolvers behavioral-influence caveat — needs a home; the previously natural successor was the retired transformation note. Candidates: knowledge-storage-does-not-imply-contextual-activation or claw-learning-loops…. Decide at Wave 3.
  • the constraining-orthogonality 2×2 — a line in definitions/constraining.md.
  • ML-knowledge-distillation instance — excluded by the structure note; drop.

Deletion itself is the Wave 3 ADR moment (large defined-in backlink surface).

Lineage-edge classification — executed (4175dbb3)

16 derived-from edges flipped to abstracted-from (self-identifying generalization lineage); three Distilled into: footers converted to Abstracted into: (the two persistence-boundaries synthesis feeds and the chat-history-model tradeoff). The four definitional syntheses keep derived-from (reflective-system ×2, self-improving-system, actionable-methodology ×2, reasoning-production — content worked out from the cited papers). Borderline calls classified abstracted-dominant per the bet doctrine: goedel-machines and adaptation-agentic-ai-analysis map their sources into KB frames the sources don't contain. The five confident Derived into: conversions are staged for the mechanical executor (staging file, fourth batch). Remaining semantic rewrites: memory-management-policy and write-instruction executed (4c0c3cf8); semantic-review… confirmed correct as quoted history.

Execution notes

  • Review gates per kb/reference/README-REVIEW-SYSTEM.md for the gated rows; batch the ungated edge flips separately.
  • Validate per collection after each batch; separate commits with explicit paths.
  • The edge flips are near-mechanical once the needs-read rows are settled: one read each, then label + context-phrase edits.