C4's route work is complete. Records the landings, corrects the campaign
plan's now-false claims, updates the roadmap, and writes the successor
handoff at docs/research/2026-08-05-c4-closeout-handoff.md.
Routes, with review rounds and gate status:
4a 44830a0e | 4b-1 2e8e09ac
4b-3 6dc7ba51 2 rounds; gate PASSED-partial (21cd6e9b), cellless unexercised
5 36255af0 3 rounds, 8 MAJORs; NO live gate possible by design
6 1b484937 zero production lines; its tests found #314
7 cd3129e9 2 rounds + a required third pass, 5 MAJORs
3 e0f96a55 3 rounds; found a 100%-dead production path
plus edc911b0 (the OnPosition dual-tail collapse), aaf0811f (#315),
daef7c98 (#314), a89bcb39 (#316 filed).
Suite 11,027 -> 11,090 passed / 4 skipped / 0 failed. Every checkpoint
0-failed; no test weakened, no Skip introduced.
FOUR CONNECTED GATES ARE OWED and none has been run. Each is recorded with
its recipe and a probe-gated pass criterion, because a clean-looking session
is not a pass: route 6 drops; route 7 equip/carry with
ACDREAM_PROBE_CHILD_CELL=1 (counts only if cause=propagate appears); route 3
portal/recall with ACDREAM_PROBE_LOCAL_TELEPORT=1 (counts only if [local-tp]
appears, and is explicitly NOT scored as covering #318); and 4b-3's
cause=cellless case — whose recorded recipe route 7 INVALIDATED, since
unwield-to-3D no longer yields a cell-less pre-merge cell. Its replacement
trigger is stated as UNESTABLISHED rather than guessed.
Campaign-plan corrections beyond the C4 section, all found by checking
against HEAD rather than trusting the text:
- "six fixture failures ... classify before C5" — resolved as #281, and
"six" was a mis-measurement; the measured baseline was 43.
- "fold in #276 and #277" — #276 only partially (projectile half); #277 not
at all, its trigger never fired.
- "#269 slope-glide visual check" — #269 was closed 2026-07-31, BEFORE the
plan was written. The surviving item is #278(b).
- the 4b-2 bullet's "Still outstanding: #309" — re-scoped 2026-08-04;
only the GotoLostCell half survives.
Seven process findings, each cited to a commit so a successor can check them:
(a) THE CONTRACT CAUSES THE DEFECT — three defects this campaign came from
a contract asserting a mechanism that did not exist; route 3's "Place
re-fires" assumption released the player at the pre-teleport position.
Route 7 adds the variant: enter_cell's part_array guard was correctly
called load-bearing by the research, dropped by the contract, and
inherited as an omission by the code — a right finding that evaporated
across two handoffs with nobody re-reading the source.
(b) INFERRING A FACT YOU CAN OBSERVE IS HOW A FIX GOES SILENT — route 3's
round-2 fix inferred "committed" from a global PendingCount that three
non-committing paths also clear, so the same bug completed cleanly and
PASSED its invariant. Strictly worse than the defect it replaced.
(c) PLANNING DOCS GO STALE ACROSS CUTOVERS — at least five were wrong
against HEAD. Re-verify by symbol, never by line number; route 3's
by-symbol sweep proved only 2 of 5 flagged files actually intersected.
(d) A SKIPPED TEST IS A PERMANENT FALSE SIGNAL — refusing 7 skips uncovered
a production bug that had made the entire portal arm dead code.
(e) SABOTAGE-VERIFY, AND WATCH FOR TESTS READING A CONSTANT THEY PERTURB —
one built a 64,000-node chain and stack-overflowed the host; another
survived deleting the whole behaviour it claimed to pin, because its
assertion read a field written unconditionally one line earlier.
(f) REVIEWERS RETRACT, AND THAT IS THE PROCESS WORKING — three self-
retractions, two of which prevented shipping a wrong register row or a
relocated defect.
(g) A GATE MUST BE ABLE TO SEE THE DEFECT IT GATES — three gates were
unpassable or blind as specified and were corrected BEFORE being run.
Issues: #313, #316, #317, #318 open; #314, #315 closed. Register rows AP-141
through AP-145 added; AD-42 deleted, AD-2 amended.
C5 inherits #318's composition test (discriminating assertion:
PhysicsEngine.ShadowObjects must hold a row at the destination, not merely
the dedup cache), AP-145's cache-without-publish asymmetry, the #276/#277
remainders, and the probe-family strip.
Three things the closeout could NOT verify are stated as such rather than
smoothed: route 3 has no standalone round-3 review document (acceptance lives
in e0f96a55's message and both round-2 pass conditions); route 7's round
terminology differs across its own artifacts; and route 6's lack of dual
reviews is inferred from absent review docs, not stated anywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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