# 0004 — First instrument inspection (§116, after EXP0 + EXP1)

2026-08-21, end of the first experimental day. Answers to §116's questions,
honest ones.

## What our architecture forced us to throw away

- **Run membership.** Objects carry producers but not which run made them:
  EXP0's aborted runner left extra parses that mingle with the completed
  run's 16 (report counted 24). Append-only was right; the gap is that
  "run" is not a grouping derived objects can reference.
- **The eventseq→relgraph conversion is invisible in the store.** evaluate()
  converted in memory instead of storing the conversion as a transformation
  with its own loss vector. The single most lossy operation of EXP1 (see
  P2) is exactly the one the store cannot show. Fix before EXP3.

## Where the LLM made interpretive decisions invisibly

**Entity granularity is the dominant invisible decision.** Whether "folder"
or "reading" is an entity changes the graph's node count and therefore
everything downstream — it is why feedback3 recovered 0/6 (parses grew
extra nodes and became diamond-shaped) and why P1's family prediction
failed. Nothing records this choice; the `assumptions` field exists and
the prompts never asked for it. Candidate fix: parses declare their
entity-selection policy as an assumption.

## Abstractions that felt natural only because of our tooling

- "Recovery = WL top-1 against a ground-truth library" is a retrieval frame
  smuggled into evaluation. Useful, but it quietly re-centred proximity
  ranking — the exact gravity ADR-0000 built the kernel to resist. Keep it
  as one evaluator among several, never "the" score.
- GED with free node-substitution (discovered in a smoke test, not chosen):
  our edit scripts are purely structural; renames cost nothing. Correct for
  day-zero, but it should be a declared parameter, not an accident.

## Kernel gaps found by using it

- A claim cannot be *about* an experiment (`_locate` knows art/rep/tra/clm
  only). Found while trying to record the re-entrant-edge claim properly.
- `representations_of` scans every file per call — fine at 150 objects;
  the promised SQLite index becomes worthwhile around EXP4-scale.

## Can a failed mapping be represented as richly as a successful one?

Yes — unparseable parses persist with status, the wedged runner's
transport failures persist, and P1's failed prediction is scored in
RESULTS.md beside the supported ones. The §53 discipline held.