pbakaus_impeccable/docs/COMP-FIDELITY.md

Comp fidelity: measuring the build against the comp

Status: shipped on feat/comp-fidelity (2026-08). Owner: skill (skill/scripts/comp-*.mjs, build-phase.mjs) plus two detector rules.

The problem

v4's direction round and comp round produce beautiful comps. The build that follows is a lossy translation of them: invented chrome the comp never showed, materials flattened to CSS, illustrations approximated as SVG or clip-path, produced textures buried under opaque washes, and a first viewport that has the comp's section order and none of its craft. The finish reviewer catches this and orders a rebuild; the rebuild has the same problem; runs hit the turn cap.

Two recent factory runs (07-vintage-moto-forum and 05-experimental-album, gpt-5.6-sol, 2026-08) show the shape:

• 183 KB of skill prose read before the first write; the page written in one 1,500-line write at turn 30; no reproduction phase, no hero-repro.png, no side-by-side; turns 31-61 spent on servers, screenshots, and reviewer plumbing until the cap.
• A torn-paper arch shipped as a 17-vertex clip-path: polygon; a vellum slip as a flat gray rectangle; both produced paper textures unused on disk.

The root: every fidelity check in the build phase was the model judging its own reproduction from memory of an image, and the prose kept growing to argue it into behavior it cannot perform. Code-led builds "look better" only because they have no target to fail against.

The change

Stop asking the model to reproduce pixels it can see but not render, and stop asking it to grade a reproduction it cannot see clearly. Make the translation mechanical wherever pixels are involved; keep the model's job to what it is good at (structure, semantics, controls, motion, responsive logic).

1. comp-diff.mjs: numbers and crops instead of conviction

Dependency-free (own PNG codec in lib/png.mjs). Given the comp and a build capture:

• aligns the build (scale to comp width, take the first-viewport rows; --align stretch|cover for other uses),
• scores structure (SSIM over blurred grayscale with a small translation search), color (quantized histogram intersection + Lab dominant-palette match), detail (high-frequency energy ratio per cell: did the material survive?), and bands (horizontal section boundaries line up?),
• per region (from the spec, or from the comp's own bands), with region-kind weights: a plate region is judged mostly on detail, a text region on structure,
• writes side-by-side.png, heatmap.png, regions/<id>.png paired crops at legible scale, and report.json with a verdict per region in the reviewer's vocabulary: match / drift / missing / contradicted,
• --threshold exits 3 below the bar.

Calibration on the moto run: comp vs itself 100%; comp shifted 12px 87% (match); comp with the illustration erased 90% overall but the plate region missing at 30%; comp recolored to navy 34% (missing); the real build 59% (contradicted, plate missing, index contradicted). Sibling comps of the same world score 55-59% against each other, so the metric separates "same design" from "same world, different composition." Runs in ~0.3-0.8 s.

2. comp-spec.mjs: the comp becomes a measured spec

--grid writes the comp with a labeled 10x10 grid; the model names regions by grid span (E0:J4) with a kind (plate / image / texture / text / control / chrome) in a small JSON file; --regions measures each region (normalized and pixel box, sampled palette, detail energy, aspect) and writes .impeccable/build/spec.json. Raster kinds get a plate path under assets/plates/. --crop <id> extracts the reference crop; --plate-prompt <id> prints the regeneration prompt; --print is the compact spec the build codes against. The spec is what "anything not in this list does not exist on the page" refers to.

3. build-phase.mjs: phases as a state machine on disk

.impeccable/build/state.json, phases spec → plates → hero → sections → motion → responsive → review, advanced only by the script:

• spec gate: spec.json exists, measures this comp, has regions.
• plates gate: every raster region's plate exists, decodes, is at least 1.5x the region's pixel width, and scores against the comp crop (cover alignment, kind-weighted, min 0.5).
• hero gate: .impeccable/review/hero-repro.png exists and comp-diff scores at least 0.72 with no region missing and at most a third contradicted. Writes .impeccable/review/diff/hero/. Attempts and scores are recorded.
• later phases record the moment; --force --reason is allowed and recorded, never silent.

status prints a NEXT line for the current phase, so the prose does not have to.

4. Plates: generate-image.mjs --plate <id>

One raster region end to end: crop the comp region, send the crop as the edits-endpoint reference with the spec's plate prompt (remove UI text and chrome, keep everything else), pick the closest supported size to the region's aspect, write to the plate path, embed the prompt, score against the crop, warn under 50%, refuse under --min. IMPECCABLE_IMAGE_GEN_FAKE=1 yields the crop at 2x so offline pipelines walk the plate gate. Harness-native image tools use the crop and prompt the same way.

The asset producer agent's job shrinks to: produce the spec's plates, one line per plate, blockers, assumptions. No inventory of its own (the spec is the inventory), no strategy taxonomy.

4b. Type: font-match.mjs and the catalog fingerprint index

Faces used to be chosen by name, and the first-round misses said so: headline wider and lighter than the comp, footer heavier. font-match.mjs --measure <region> fingerprints the comp crop with lib/font-fingerprint.mjs: per-line, size-invariant shape features (glyph width and x-height against the reference height, stem width, stroke contrast, serif ratio, ink density, vertical ink profile, run-length quantiles), all normalized so the same face gives the same numbers at any point size and on different text. The MEASURE line prints cap height, width class, weight class, and tracking, and the spec keeps the summary on the region.

--rank <region> no longer starts from a hand-written shortlist. skill/scripts/data/font-index.json holds the same fingerprint for ~3,100 Google Fonts faces (every latin family at 300 / 400 / 700 where shipped) rendered at two cap heights, 48px and 14px, because the features hold within a factor of two in size but not across that span; a crop under 22px cap queries the 14px index. The 25 nearest faces by a noise-normalized weighted distance (fitted on 299 held-out probes with different text; 42% top-1 and 72% top-5 family recall at ~30px cap, 52 / 71 at 14px) become the candidates, together with whatever names the model passes in. Those are then rendered with the region's own text at the comp's cap height, fingerprinted again, and ranked by the same distance, so the CATALOG line is the index's guess and the RANK lines are measured on the actual words. Below 10px cap the script says to size by the box and stops. The index is ~700 KB, packed base-36, rebuilt at release time by scripts/build-font-index.mjs (network + Playwright); the per-width-class shortlist stays only as the fallback when the index file is missing.

On the moto comp: headline (72px cap, condensed heavy mixed case) ranks League Gothic first with Karantina and Medula One behind it, where the old width/weight formula gave Anton SC and BBH Bogle; for the subhead the index puts Akshar 300 and Reddit Sans Condensed 300 on top, credible condensed light faces where before the class was wrong altogether.

5. Two detector rules

• organic-clip-path: clip-path: polygon() with 10+ off-grid vertices, or clip-path: path() with 3+ curve segments. Geometric clips (cut corners, diagonals, hexagons, arrows) pass; circle()/inset() pass.
• buried-raster: a url() layer under a gradient wash whose stops are all >= 0.9 alpha (or opaque), no blend mode; or a raster background / <img> at opacity < 0.15. Tints under 0.9, blends, and visible opacities pass.

Both in both engines (static jsdom + browser bundle), fixtures under tests/fixtures/antipatterns/.

6. Prose

new-work.md section 6 is now the phase list with its gates; the reproduction paragraph, the hero checkpoint paragraph, and visualize.md's inventory / medium-gate / produce sections are gone in favor of the scripts that enforce them. visualize.md dropped from 55 to 44 lines and new-work.md's section 6 from ~1,900 to ~1,300 words while gaining the actual mechanism. The finish reviewer reads the state file and the diff report first and starts its matrix from the measured verdicts.

What this does not do

• It does not judge lettering character, ornament, or motion. The reviewer still owns those.
• It does not decide plates for the model: the model still names regions on the grid. The gate only refuses to proceed when a named raster region has no plate.
• The hero threshold (0.72) and plate threshold (0.5) are calibrated on two runs and synthetic perturbations; they will move with evidence. Both are constants at the top of build-phase.mjs.
• Operate surfaces (dashboards, editors) have few or no plates; the spec/diff still apply, the plates gate is trivially satisfied.

Evaluating it: first sweep (2026-08-16, gpt-5.6-sol, openai lane)

Same niche (07-vintage-moto-forum), same approved comp C, main skill vs this branch, scored with comp-diff.mjs against the approved comp. Small numbers, one sample each; read as a smoke, not a verdict.

Run	Skill	Turns / cost	comp-diff overall	Notes
exec cut, packet C, "Continue."	main	9 / $0.88	55% (contradicted; plate + index missing)	one 45 KB write, no plates, generic split hero
exec cut, packet C, "Continue."	branch	17 / $0.95	54% (contradicted; plate missing)	the packet's prefix predates the phase machinery; the model never re-read new-work.md and behaved like main
exec cut, packet C, ask names the phased build	branch	96 / $5.24 (cost cap)	66% (drift; plate region 43%)	walked spec → grid → regions → plates → hero gate (72% fail, fix, 77% pass) → sections → motion → responsive; 12 turns lost hunting a screenshot the harness wrote host-side only (fixed in impeccable-evals); the exploded plate was produced (62% vs crop) but the page drew the region in SVG anyway (fixed: hero gate now refuses unreferenced plates)
full journey, comp-led	main	49 / $3.23	56% (contradicted; two bands missing)	dark comp with paper fiche rail; build keeps the section order and flattens the material
full journey, comp-led	branch (before the force/reference fixes)	61 / $3.04 (turn cap)	65-66% (drift)	forced past the plates gate with "single-file delivery" (now refused); hero 44% structure but 83% color, plate placed
full journey, comp-led (after fixes), sample 2	branch	60 / $3.00 (30-min wall clock)	59% (contradicted; hero gate 61 → 63 → 62%)	three plates produced (paper 52%, carburetor 61%, photo), hero gate failed three times, model asked the simulated user, got "truthful translation", forced with the user's words (recorded), wall clock ended it in sections
full journey, sample 1	branch	37 / $2.5	n/a	direction round, then wrote code with no comp round at all: a routing gap in the direction round that predates this branch (also seen on main in cf-full-branch-07b)
full journey, comp-led	main (2nd sample)	24 / $1.38	n/a (no comps: model went code-led)	same routing gap
exec cut, 01-observability composed checkpoint	main / branch	9 / $0.68 vs 10 / $0.84	52% vs 48%	composed checkpoint quotes the OLD visualize.md verbatim into the prefix, so the branch text never reaches the model; not a test of this change

Sweep totals: 12 runs, about $32 of OpenAI spend (gpt-5.6-sol + gpt-image-2).

What it says so far:

• When the phase machinery actually runs, fidelity moves from the mid-50s to the mid-60s on this comp, and the region rows say why the rest is missing (the exploded plate, the parts table, the CTA treatment). Same model, same comp.
• Execution-cut packets and composed checkpoints carry the old skill's text in their prefix; a resumed session follows the conversation it is in, not the mounted files. Comparisons of Setup-adjacent skill changes need full journeys or a fresh packet cut on the new skill.
• Two of the three run-time defects the sweep found were harness (screenshot not visible in the sandbox; packet workspace path) and are fixed in impeccable-evals paul/packet-niche-execution-preflight. The third (model forcing a gate, model ignoring its plate) is now refused by the script.
• Cost: the phased build spends more turns before the first write and more image calls (plates). The 96-turn run is dominated by the screenshot hunt and a font-inlining tangent, not by the gates. The 30-minute wall clock and 60-turn cap in the harness are tuned for the old one-write build; a phased build with three plates and a hero loop needs the execution cut kind's 100-turn budget or a longer wall clock.
• The hero gate at 72% is reachable (77% on the ask run) but the model's second and third attempts moved the score by one point each: it edits CSS values when the diff says a region is missing. The gate's message now names the region and the failure mode; the next lever is making the region crops the thing the model looks at (it opened the side-by-side once and the crops never).
• Whether a greenfield session enters comp-led at all is decided in the direction round, before any of this. Two of five full-journey samples (one per skill) skipped the comp round and wrote code; the config default is comp-led and image generation was on. That routing gap is separate from this change and worth its own fix.

Second sweep (2026-08-16, sol + opus-5, three niches, n=2-3): the packets, not the skill

37 execution-cut runs on 05-experimental-album, 07-vintage-moto-forum, 11-analytics-dashboard, main vs branch, about $210. Result: 33 of 37 samples never entered the phase machine (nostate: no .impeccable/build/state.json at the end), so main and branch scored the same (50-60% overall, mostly contradicted) and the sweep measured nothing about the change. The four samples that did run the phases (11-opus-branch, 11-opus-branch-b) reached hero 69-72% and 63-66% overall, the highest opus scores in the sweep, at 80-100 turns and $9-12.

Why the machinery was skipped, in order of blame:

1. The packets carried no state. The 07 packet was cut on 2026-08-12, before build-phase.mjs start existed; the 05 and 11 packets were cut on the branch, but the session generated its comps before running start, so pending.json was written and state.json never was. Every gate reads state.json; a resume with none has nothing to follow. Two fixes: generate-image.mjs refuses to write a comp under .impeccable/mocks/ while pending.json is set and no state exists (the direction pick must be recorded first), and impeccable-evals factory-validation fails a composition-approved candidate whose workspace lacks a closed comps phase.
2. Prefix inertia. A resumed model follows the conversation it is in. When the prefix ends on "translating comp C into HTML now", the mounted skill files are not re-read whatever they say. The procedure has to be on disk at the resume point (state.json + the NEXT line), which is what (1) restores.
3. WebP comps. gpt-image returned WebP for some cuts; comp-spec demanded PNG, so the session rewrote the .webp in place with PNG bytes, which broke replay ("a later step rewrites this path beyond the cut"). loadRaster() now converts through a sibling <file>.png cache and never touches the source.

Read the earlier "exec cut, packet C, ask names the phased build" row and this sweep's four phased samples together: same model, same comp, and the phased build lands 10-15 points above the one-write build every time it actually runs. The open question is not whether the phases help but whether a resumed session enters them; that is a packet property, and it is now validated at cut time.

Third sweep (2026-08-17, gpt-5.6-sol, re-cut packets carrying state.json, n=2-3): the phases run, and they win

Packets re-cut with the phase state reconstructed at the pick (replay now re-executes build-phase.mjs verbs and the OpenAI worker pulls the sandbox's .impeccable/build/ before close). Baseline = main skill via IMPECCABLE_SKILL_DIR, branch = this branch's dist. About $60.

Niche	main (n=3)	branch (n=2)	branch hero
05-experimental-album	53%, 53%, 56% (all contradicted)	66%, 77% (drift)	77%, 78%
07-vintage-moto-forum	46%, 47% (contradicted)	62%, 64% (drift; hero open at 63/68%)	63%, 68%
11-analytics-dashboard	66%, 61%, 66% (drift)	72%, 71% (drift)	76%, 80%

Every branch sample ran the phase machine (state.json at hero or later); every main sample resumed at comps and wrote the page in one pass. Mean delta on comp-diff overall: 05 +18, 07 +17, 11 +7. Branch runs cost 2-4x (turn cap at 100-110 on four of six; wall clock 60 min).

What the traces said, and what changed from them:

• Font ranking without a browser was a dead end. Sessions spent 6-10 turns installing Playwright or hand-typed a chosen face into spec.json. Now: the catalog index has an all-caps render (48c), non-text faces are excluded, the distance carries a gross width/weight gap, and with no browser --rank records the catalog's nearest face; the gate refuses a chosen it did not stamp. The eval worker lends its Playwright to the sandbox.
• Painted material filed as chrome. 07's exploded carburetor and rack drawing were chrome regions "drawn in code", then scored missing at the hero with no fix available. comp-spec now refuses a code kind whose note names painted material.
• A passed plate is placed material. With the plates referenced and passing the plates gate, comp-diff at the region box still called them missing on detail (the plate's carburetor is not the comp's carburetor at pixel level). The hero now scores a passed plate on placement (present in the box, at the box) and says the box as numbers.
• The control ink-box veto blocked a full-width bar six times ("1376x87 vs 1382x102"), unmovable by any edit. It now applies only to discrete controls.
• Plate generation polled turn by turn (8 write_stdin empty polls per plate); the NEXT line now says to wait long.

Fourth sweep (2026-08-17, gpt-5.6-sol, same packets, n=3 both arms, after the font/plate-placement/control-veto fixes)

Niche	main	branch	branch turns
05-experimental-album	52 / 43 / 50	64 / 63 / 58	101 (forced twice) / 79 / 29 (stopped at spec)
07-vintage-moto-forum	53 / 44 / 48	62 / 68 / 64	86 / 101 / 54 (hero open at 63-67 in all three)
11-analytics-dashboard	63 / 65 / 65	66 / 74 / 62	52 / 41 / 68 (all reached review; hero 74-75)

Branch over main on every niche, every sample; 11 now finishes the whole machine in 41-68 turns (was 68-101). The 07 hero sits at 63-68 against a 72 floor across five samples in two sweeps: that comp (a service-manual page with three plates and a rotated spine) is where the remaining points are, and the traces named the reasons:

• A body-copy region measured at cap 160px off the carburetor drawing sharing its crop, and a track list measured at 389px because staff rules and a black page edge fused eight rows into one line. font-fingerprint now drops full-height inked columns from the row profile, sets tall non-text runs aside, and measures the lettering class holding the most ink (multi-line first). Both crops now read 15px and 21px.
• Passed plates scored missing at the hero on content, then again at responsive. Both gates now score a passed plate on placement.
• One session forced two gates by quoting a brief line ("should feel like an extension of her artwork") as user permission. forceAllowed now requires the user's words reported or quoted, a downgrade verb, and the comp noun in one reason.
• One session spent 25 turns keying plates with magick after using the harness image tool; the plates NEXT line now names generate-image.mjs --plate as the tool and the harness tool as the fallback.

Fifth sweep (2026-08-17): claude-opus-5 arm (n=2) and a sol re-pass on 07 (n=3)

Same packets, both arms. Opus runs 2-3x the cost of sol ($9-15 per branch sample; turn cap 110 hit on four of six branch samples, salvaged and scored).

Niche	opus main	opus branch	branch hero
05-experimental-album	73 / 61	64 / 86	81, 87
07-vintage-moto-forum	59 / 60	67 / 74	72, 74
11-analytics-dashboard	61 / 64	70 (second sample lost to an SDK flake)	74

Opus on the branch produced the first match verdict of every sweep (05 sample 2, 86% overall, hero 87%) and cleared the 07 hero at 72 and 74, which sol never did. Opus on main writes in one pass like sol on main; its best one-pass sample (05, 73%) is above sol's best branch sample on that niche, which is the ceiling a stronger model reaches without the machinery.

Sol re-pass on 07 with the mixed-crop measurement fixes: 67 / 62 / 69, hero 63-70. Still under 72. The best sample's spec named seven regions for the whole page (parts-column chrome at 30% of the comp, live-thread chrome at 24%), so the hero gate had nothing specific to say. comp-spec now refuses a text/control/chrome region larger than a quarter of the comp (container: true opts out).

Both anthropic-lane readings of "skill loaded" were false-invalid: Claude Code 2.1.x stopped listing personal skills in the init payload while loading them. The evidence reader now counts a session that runs the mounted skill's files as loaded.

Where this leaves the numbers, all sweeps, comp-diff overall against the approved comp, main vs branch:

	sol main	sol branch	opus main	opus branch (sweeps 5-8)
05	43-56 (n=6)	57-77 (n=8)	61-73 (n=2)	64-86 (n=6; sweep 8: 84, 84)
07	44-53 (n=5)	48-69 (n=13)	59-60 (n=2)	43-79 (n=6; sweep 8: 79, 78)
11	61-66 (n=6)	62-74 (n=5)	61-64 (n=2)	70 (n=1)

The branch is above main on every niche and every model; the gap is largest where the comp is most painted (05, 07) and smallest on the flat dashboard (11). Cost is 2-4x in turns and image calls.

Sixth sweep (2026-08-17, gpt-5.6-sol, 05 and 07, branch only, after the first human review)

Paul annotated 12 sweep-3 builds with pins (fonts at the wrong size, weight, colour, or place; nav bars too tall; kickers and dividers the comp did not have; a footer strip pushed off the frame; a drawing filed as chrome with no note). Each became a hero-gate reading (lib/hero-checks.mjs): text cap height, line count, ink density, ink colour, and first-line offset against the comp crop; strip height off the first rule row; build ink over a calm comp cell; every region needs a note; a region with under 15% of the comp's detail is missing before any palette relaxation. Turn cap raised to 160.

Sample	overall	hero	what happened
05-001	57	59 (1 attempt)	readings were right (artist-name cap 10 vs 15.9, track-list 3 lines vs 4, listen rule 25 vs 60, colophon ink); the model forced with a brief quote, was refused, and stopped
05-002	64	64 (1 attempt)	same: one attempt, quit
05-003	62	73 → responsive 74 → review	walked the machine
07-001	68	72 at the turn cap, 28 attempts	three readings unchanged for 20+ attempts (browse-link underline read as a rule; right-part-code cap and ink); the score printed as "72% < 72%"
07-002	47	never entered (page at turn 5)	ignored the state
07-003	65	70 (7 attempts), then shipped	left the hero open and captured responsive anyway

Two lessons: the readings are the right numbers (they read as the pins did), and sol's discipline, not the gate, is the floor on this niche: it quits after a refused force, writes the page over an open phase, or ships from an open hero. Fixes from this sweep: readings print as an ordered "each one CSS edit" list capped at eight; a reading unchanged for three attempts becomes advisory and stops blocking; a refused force says the readings are the edits; a single link or button is not a strip; the overall shows a decimal near the floor. What the scripts cannot do is make a model keep going: that is the finish reviewer's backstop and, in the harness, a completion the run declared for itself.

The human review (2026-08-17): 32 builds, 230 pins

Paul reviewed every sweep-3/4/5 build against its comp on a click-to-annotate page (pin + note per spot, pass / unsure / fail per sample). What the verdicts said about the score:

verdict	comp-diff overall of those samples
pass (4)	73 (opus main 05), 70 (opus branch 11), 80 (opus branch 05, sweep 7: "by far the best result so far"), 68 (opus branch 07, sweep 7: "borderline pass")
"pass except one bug" (1)	86 (opus branch 05: cover arch clipped by its box)
unsure (10)	61-74
fail (27)	43-68

So the human pass line sits at about 68-73 on comp-diff, and HERO_MIN at 0.72 is inside it. Every main build was a fail except one opus sample; branch builds were the only ones rated pass or unsure on 07 and 11, and the sweep-7 opus builds (with the readings from this review) hold three of the four passes.

The pins, grouped, and what each became:

Pins (count, paraphrased)	Mechanised as
bad font / too thick / wrong size / wrong line height / wraps differently (≈40)	textRegionCheck: cap height, line count, ink density, line pitch vs the comp crop, per text region, as numbers
text in the wrong place / too much spacing above (≈15)	first-line offset in px
black text rendered white; text colour changed (7)	ink colour compare, also on unmeasurable (rotated) text
bottom menu / footer missing, content pushed below the fold (12)	detail under 15% is missing before any palette relaxation
menu too tall / header divider too far down (6)	strip height off the first rule row
hallucinated kicker / dividers / legend / button / squares / extra copy (≈25)	invented-ink cells over a calm comp; veto at 4% of the frame or two strongly inked cells
svg instead of asset, "terrible svg", drawing named as chrome (≈15)	painted-material note refusal; every region needs a note; code regions over 25% refused
shape cut off / cropped / bleeds into the next element / clipping bug (9)	spec refuses a plate box whose artwork runs off it (edge contact against the page ground)
button in wrong spot / not in its box (5)	control ink box and rule row
"white letterboxing" on the build (7)	a review artefact: the side-by-side drew the shift-padded copy; fixed
wrong / small / missing icons, arrow and dropdown style (≈15)	not mechanised: the icon concession stands; raise if icons should be held to the comp
shadow / depth the comp does not have; "flat on the comp" (3)	not mechanised
chart lines less dense (1)	not mechanised (a chart drawn in code)
"arguably better" deviations: a colour that fixes contrast, a label moved (3)	by design: the contract wins at the hero; a stated second pass after it may change it
a note by the model itself: "the grid boxes straddle two elements, CSS cannot fix the structure penalty"	it was right: text and control regions now snap to the largest ink mass in their span
"bad asset crop (crops are never allowed)" (2)	plates gate refuses a file that resamples the comp region (structure 95%+ against the raw crop)
"letter spacing way too wide" (1)	tracking reading (glyph gap in cap units)

Two verdict boundaries the review drew: close-enough icon glyphs are acceptable; arrows, chevrons, dropdown chrome, and control borders and fills are the comp's (controls are held like text at the hero now).

Seventh sweep (2026-08-17, claude-opus-5, 05 and 07, branch, after all pins, 160 turns)

Sample	overall	hero	what happened
05-001	67	73 in 22 attempts, turn cap	passed the hero, ran out of turns before responsive
05-002	80 (match)	81 in 13 attempts, then asked the user, was told to build as written, forced (recorded, legitimate)	stalled on eight per-row readings of the track list; those now fold into one line
07-001	43	39, one look	API connection dropped at turn 52
07-002	68	67 in 2 attempts, then declared done	wrote a note diagnosing the grid boxes as the structure penalty (correct; fixed by snapping)

Opus with the readings reaches the human pass line on 05 (73-81 at the hero, 80 overall on the second) at 13-22 attempts, and the model's own diagnosis of the remaining structure penalty pointed at the region boxes, which now snap to their ink.

Eighth sweep (2026-08-17 night): SVG ban, crop refusal, snapping, folded readings, control chrome, finish guard, scaffold

After Paul's full review and his rulings (close-enough icons fine; arrows and dropdown chrome are not; ban SVG illustrations; the scaffold as a reference, never the page), everything landed and this sweep ran with all of it. Turn cap 160.

Sample	overall	hero	notes
07 opus 001	79	79 in 12 attempts	scaffold used; turn cap in hero
07 opus 002	78	79 in 13 attempts, sections, motion, responsive 78	scaffold used; every region at its place, real plates at the right size
05 opus 001	84 (match)	85 in 10 attempts, responsive 84, review	scaffold used
05 opus 002	84 (match)	87 in 14 attempts, sections	scaffold used; turn cap
07 sol 001	48	never entered (page at turn 5)	ignored the state
07 sol 002	66	67 in one attempt, stopped	scaffold used: for the first time on sol every region sat where the comp has it (spine, headline, thread box, table, footer); the two carburetor drawings were still inline SVG, named "countable ... geometry" chrome, and the SVG ban had not run because state.artifact is null on a --direction start. Both fixed after this sample (the code scans default to index.html; the painted-note regex knows "geometry", "leader lines", "thumbnail").

Four of four opus samples above Paul's pass line, two of them match. 07, the comp that sat at 63-70 across every earlier sweep and both models, reads 78-79 on opus with the scaffold: above Paul's borderline pass (68) by ten points, at the level of the 05 build he called "by far the best result so far". The scaffold did on sol what no reading could: the positions are right; what remains on sol is the SVG reflex, and that is now refused.

Ninth sweep (2026-08-28): sol with the artifact fix, on the rebased branch

The branch was rebased onto main first (109 commits behind; main's GROUND matrix row grafted into the finish reviewer, main's two prose colour rules dropped as superseded by the measuring gates). This is the handoff's first paid check: does sol produce plates once its SVGs are refused? Four samples, n=2 per niche, $11.13, turn cap 160.

Sample	overall	hero	plates	notes
05 sol 001	54	never opened	3 produced, 0 placed	quit with plates open; 6.7 MB of correct plates sat unused while the page drew the aperture in CSS
05 sol 002	71	0.7086 in 6 records, 0 advances	3 produced, 2 placed	closest of the four; left two type findings unfixed across four attempts, then declared complete at 34 of 90 minutes
07 sol 001	63	0.6543 in 3 attempts	3 produced, 3 placed	shaded technical illustrations as real rasters where sweep 8 drew wireframes
07 sol 002	62	0.6053 in 2 records, 0 advances	1 produced, 0 placed	filed both carburetor illustrations as chrome with "countable ... line diagram" notes, got past comp-spec's refusal with codeDrawn and container, shipped 23 inline SVG paths

The artifact fix is confirmed in production conditions. All four packets start --direction with artifact: null, the state that silenced the ban in sweep 8, and the hero code scan now defaults to index.html and caught both of 07 002's illustrations by name ("artifact draws an illustration in inline SVG (rack-diagram)... 15 shapes, 227 chars of path data"). Plates moved with it: 4 of 4 samples produced real rasters, 2 of 4 placed them.

The finding is not about plates. Every gate that should have fired did fire, and every sample ignored it. All four received COMP_ROUND_OPEN ("a detector pass is not a finish") plus explicit gate failures, and all four declared completion anyway at 40 to 72 turns with most of the budget unspent. Sol's remaining failure is compliance, not knowledge or capability, so further sol rounds are not worth buying.

Two defects surfaced that belong to the skill rather than to sol. The spec gate's escape hatches hide their own use: codeDrawn: true and container: true in regions.json override the painted-material refusal, and neither key persists into spec.json, so the shipped spec shows a clean classification with no trace that a refusal was overridden. And font-match.mjs cannot reach a browser inside the OpenAI sandbox (browserType.launch: EPERM on mkdtemp /tmp/playwright-artifacts-*), so every sample fell back to an estimated size and rendered headlines at 186 to 247 percent of the comp's cap height, which is a large share of the structure gap the hero gate then reports.

Tenth sweep (2026-08-28): opus confirmation on the rebased branch

The handoff's second paid check, and the first frontier run on the rebased tree. Four samples, n=2 per niche, turn cap 160, wall clock 90 minutes. Zero forced phases across all 32 phase records; no --force or --min in any trace.

Sample	overall	hero	plates	notes
05 opus 001	90 (match)	0.9025 in 8 attempts, open	4 / 4	the highest fidelity score the program has recorded; held open by three text ink colours the gate calls "each one CSS edit"
05 opus 002	86 (match)	0.8647 in 4 attempts, closed	4 / 4	sections, motion, responsive 0.8144, review, all closed, finish disposition: ship
07 opus 001	78	0.7892 in 18 attempts, open	4 / 4	held by two contradicted text regions and one ink reading; cut off by the cost cap at turn 158
07 opus 002	76	0.777 in 10 attempts, open	5 / 5	held by a plate off its box, a plate clipped left, and 11 readings; cut off by the cost cap at turn 150

05 opus 002 walked the entire machine, comps through review, every phase closed and unforced, ending with a recorded ship. Of the twenty state files in the run corpus it is the only one past hero, and it is the first complete traversal in the program.

Plate discipline was perfect: 17 raster regions specced across the four samples, 17 files on disk, 17 referenced live by the shipped pages. The inline SVG on the 07 pages is icon-sized and legitimate (12 and 11 elements, one path each, 13 to 42px: crosshair, wrench, star, paperclip, book, person, tag). Font ranking worked on this lane, zero EPERM lines, so the estimated-size drag that inflated sol's headlines is absent from this data.

On the handoff's question, whether 07 clears 72 without a force, the answer is that its fidelity did and its gate did not. Both 07 samples measured above the threshold, 0.7892 and 0.777, with nothing forced, and no sample's reasons contain a "hero overall below 72%" line. HERO_MIN at 0.72 is one veto among many: the gate returns ok only when the reason list is empty (build-phase.mjs:82 and :651), so a build can sit well above the fidelity floor and still be held by per-region readings. Both 07 runs were then cut off mid-loop by the harness cost guard rather than by the machinery: "Error: Claude Code process aborted by user" is anthropic-native.ts:1288 computing sliceCapUsd * 1.15, $23.00 for this launch, and :2005 aborting on it. Replaying the raw messages against the same estimator puts 07 001 across on its final turn (turn 157 at $22.90, turn 158 at $25.27 on a 364k-token cache write) and 07 002 at turn 150 ($22.95 to $23.16). The turn cap (160 against 158 and 150), the wall clock (90 minutes against 60.4 and 70.2) and the stall guard (10 minutes against idle stretches of 5.3 and 7.1) are each excluded.

So 07's gate closure is unproven, not regressed. Fidelity is equal or better than sweep 8 on both niches (05 rose from 84/84 to 90/86; 07's hero readings sit at 0.789/0.777 against 0.79/0.79), plate discipline is perfect, the staged skill under each sample is byte-identical to the repo, and one sample carried a build through every phase to a ship. Settling the exact sentence takes a 07-only re-run at a realistic budget (--slice-cap-usd 35, roughly $50 to $70): opus costs $22 to $25 per sample on these niches, not the $15 the original estimate assumed, and --batch-budget-usd only blocks launching new slices rather than aborting running ones, so a four-slice launch's worst case is four times the per-slice cap.

One design question falls out of this round rather than out of any defect. A build measuring 0.9025 held open by three colour edits, and a hero loop that ran 18 attempts without converging, suggest the gate's all-or-nothing pass condition and its per-region reading list interact badly with real turn and cost budgets. The gate teaches well; inside a bounded run it does not converge.

Ninth and tenth sweeps, and the pass-condition decision (2026-08-28)

Abdul ran both handoff checks on the rebased branch (full write-ups in PR #599's comments): sol with the artifact fix (plates now produced, the SVG ban fires by name, 07's floor 48 to 62, but sol still declares done over open gates: compliance, not capability, and no further sol rounds are worth buying), and an opus confirmation (05 at 90 and 86, both match, with the first complete traversal of the machine ending in a recorded ship; 07 at 78 and 76, above the bar with zero forces, held open only by numeric readings and then cut by the eval cost cap mid-climb).

The decision that followed, made by Paul on return: above HERO_MIN, the numeric readings advise instead of block. Hard vetoes stay unconditional at any score (a missing region, a contradicted plate or text block, an inline-SVG illustration, a clipped plate, invented ink); ink colours, letter-spacing, line pitch, strip heights, and box positions print as advisories with the pass and belong to the polish pass before responsive. Under this condition every sweep-10 sample closes its hero, which settles 07 without another paid round.

Two ninth-sweep defects are fixed with it: the spec's escape hatches (codeDrawn, container, bleed) now persist into spec.json and announce themselves as WARN lines (an overridden refusal used to vanish from the record), and font-match probes os.tmpdir() before launching a browser and points TMPDIR at .impeccable/tmp when the sandbox's /tmp is unwritable (every ninth-sweep rank had silently fallen back to the catalog and set headlines at twice the comp's cap).