The maintainer's field run took five and a half minutes from the prompt to variants on screen. Two baseline runs on the same repo reproduced it (356 s mean): 68 KB of skill text read before the first variant (a 36 KB live.md among it), six to ten tool calls spent finding the dev URL and the selector, 9 to 10 KB of variants carrying tune knobs, and a document read plus a detect pass after the accept. generate.md is now the whole contract for the lane and never sends the agent to live.md, craft-floor.md, or the action reference on the happy path; the floors are inlined. The engine carries the rest: a generate started by live-generate is journaled and queued with origin "agent", and its poll instructions hand out the fast path (identity from the event's computed styles and custom properties, the action's three dimensions, no knobs unless asked, one edit, reply done) instead of the interactive planning pointer. `impeccable live --allow-missing-context` boots without PRODUCT.md or DESIGN.md, naming what is missing, so the lane never falls into the init interview; the boot also reports devUrl, the origin whose page carries the injected tag, so the agent opens the page instead of reading terminals. Accept is a bake and live-complete is its verification: no detect pass, no document read. Three trimmed runs (one without any context files) averaged 179 s from prompt to variants, 21 tool calls and 106k tokens against the baseline's 356 s, 30 tool calls and 144k tokens; the accept bake went from 67 s to 41 s. Method and numbers: tmp/questionaire/plan41-field-tests/SNAPPY-REPORT.md in the maintainer's checkout. Tests: dev_url probe unit tests, a fast-path instructions unit test, the origin marker in the protocol suite, and tests/live-boot-fastpath.test.mjs (flag, contextMissing, devUrl through a stand-in dev server); contract doc updated. Written with AI assistance (Claude). Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Oracle: behavior goldens for every impeccable verb
lib.mjs runs each case (verb + args + staged workspace + stdin) against an
implementation and captures stdout, stderr, exit code, and named files, with
machine-specific paths and timestamps normalized.
- The goldens are frozen JS behavior: they were recorded from the Node
scripts (
skill/scripts,cli/bin) before those left the tree with the launcher swap, plus the reviewed deltas inDELTAS.md. They are the behavior contract the engine binary is held to. record.mjs --bin(with$IMPECCABLE_BINor--bin=/path) writes goldens from the binary, for new cases or a delta a review accepted. Plainrecord.mjsstill targets the JS scripts and only works on a checkout that has them (history before the swap).run.mjsreplays the corpus against$IMPECCABLE_BIN(or--jsfor a self-check on a pre-swap checkout) and diffs. Byte-equal is the bar;DELTAS.mdlists reviewed exceptions.tests/oracle.test.mjsrunsrun.mjsunderbun run testand skips when no binary is found (IMPECCABLE_BINorskill/scripts/bin/<os>-<arch>/, filled bybun run fetch:engine).cases/*.mjsdefine the corpus (default export: array or async function returning an array).workspaces/holds project fixtures that are copied to a temp dir per run, so cases can write freely.
Adding a case: append to the matching cases/*.mjs, run
node tests/oracle/record.mjs --bin <prefix>, review the golden by hand
(the binary is now the recorder, so a bug in it would be frozen too), commit
the golden.
Verb names are the binary's subcommands. cli-help and cli-version map to
impeccable --help / --version. lib.mjs still carries the JS_VERBS
table that maps each verb to the script it was recorded from.
vectors/ holds the function-level vectors recorded from the JS engine's pure
functions; see vectors/README.md.
Corpus files
cases/detect.mjs:detect,cli-help,cli-version,ignores.cases/hooks.mjs:hook,hook-before-edit,hook-admin.cases/context.mjs:context,doctor,pin,surface-brief,critique-storage,palette,embed-prompt,context-signals(id prefixsignals-),detect-csp(csp-),concept-seed(seed-),generate-image(genimg-),serve-question(question-). Only offline paths: the local catalog fixture or an unreachable roll API, fake image generation, and serve-question modes that never open a browser or listen. Workspaces areworkspaces/ctx-*; the header comment in the case file describes each one. Machine-specific env (OPENAI_API_KEY, catalog and context overrides,CI) is pinned per case so the recording host does not leak into goldens.
Normalizations
Beyond paths and ISO timestamps, normalize() masks these run- or
machine-dependent fragments. Each is targeted at one script's output:
IMAGE_TOOLS: <IMAGE_TOOLS_PROBE>:contextprobeswhich cwebp sips magick ffmpeg; the set found describes the machine, not the script."devServer": <DEV_SERVER_PROBE>:context-signalsprobes localhost ports 4321/3000/5173/5174/8080/8000/4200; whatever is listening on the recording host is not part of the contract.<STAMP>:critique-storagestamps snapshots with the wall clock in dash form (2026-05-12T18-30-00Z), in the file name and thetimestamp:frontmatter it writes. Cases that write a snapshot do not snapshot the file; they runlatest/trendafterwards instead."<finding-id>": <EPOCH>: the staleness notice cache (~/.impeccable/staleness-check.json) keys epoch stamps by finding id.<IMPECCABLE> <verb>/<HOOK_ADMIN_CMD>: self-referential command lines.
Not covered on purpose: palette with no --id / --from / env seed (random),
concept-seed against the live roll API, generate-image real mode,
serve-question --start / blocking mode (opens a browser and binds a port),
and unhandled-exception paths whose stack traces carry Node line numbers.
Live-mode cases (cases/live-*.mjs, workspaces live-*)
Helpers live in live-helpers.mjs (staged journals, buffers, wrapped source
files with the fake-agent variant block, a .git FILE pointing at a non-repo
gitdir so roots resolution sees a git boundary while git check-ignore exits
128 everywhere and the ignore block lands in the snapshotable
.gitfake/info/exclude). Svelte component preview cases symlink this repo's
node_modules/svelte into the staged app, exactly like the unit tests.
Harness additions made for live:
steps[]entries may carry their ownsetup(ws)(run right before that step) anddaemon: truewithreadyFile/readyTimeoutMs: the verb is spawned detached, the harness waits for the ready file, later steps run against it, and teardown SIGTERMs (then SIGKILLs) it. Its stdout/stderr land in the golden asdaemon: [{stdout, stderr}].normalize: [[regexSource, flags, replacement], ...]on a case applies extra masks to that case only. Live uses it for the dynamic helper port (localhost:<PORT>,"port": <PORT>), lease and phase stamps (<EPOCH>), and float durations (<N>).- Global masks added:
"pid": <PID>/(pid <PID>)and UUID tokens<UUID>. snapshotFileswalksnode_modules/.impeccable-live(the Svelte preview tree) and nothing else undernode_modules.
Deliberately not covered here (rely on tests/live-e2e): the browser
handshake and /live.js bundle, SSE, generate/accept round-trips through a
real browser, variant_mount_failed republish, manual-edit chat routing and
the codex/claude subprocess providers, Svelte revision-dir publishing, and
live.mjs's dev-server-dependent flows. Lock-file names hash the absolute
source path, so lock cases do not snapshot .impeccable/live/locks/.
live-poll-*-connection-refused assumes nothing listens on 127.0.0.1:65531.