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Prior art before every nontrivial fork: an Eyes pass on papers and implementations precedes the question

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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Eureka 2026-10-02 18:42:28 +02:00
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13
SKILL.md
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@ -187,6 +187,19 @@ Templates are in `references/briefs.md` and `references/campaign-state.md`.
### 2. Operator rulings
**Prior art comes before every nontrivial fork.** Before a nontrivial question
goes to the operator, Self stops the line that raised it. Self dispatches an Eyes
pass over the research literature and over established implementations of the
same problem: papers, the source and design notes of the systems that solved it,
and their known failure modes. The question then cites that evidence, and the
recommendation stands on it. Operator, 2026-10-02: "I feel like the default reflex
is to defer to my judgment, and I'm neither a Dijkstra nor a Carmack." The
operator rules on what the project is for and what it values. Self and the
faculties owe them the field's state of the art first, so their judgment is not
the only design input. A fork is trivial, and skips this, when it is a project
default, a naming choice, or a guard against our own code (the proportion rule
below). When unsure, run the pass.
Put the open questions to the operator together, from the open-questions recipe,
each with its options, recommendation, and what depends on the answer. Self
admits every answer as a `ruling` that answers its question, keeping the

9
references/changelog.md
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@ -1327,3 +1327,12 @@ brief template prescribed foreground polling in tool-timeout chunks (one model c
also claimed "nothing wakes you", which is stale: the harness wakes an agent when its background shell exits.
Both brief sections now say: one background waiter per job that exits on the event, no timer under 60 s, no
duplicate watchers, no interim messages.
## 2026-10-02: prior art before every nontrivial fork
Operator, verbatim: "can we make it a rule to stop what we're doing and do an Eyes pass to look at research papers
and other implementations related to whatever we're working on before any nontrivial forks? I feel like the default
reflex is to defer to my judgment, and I'm neither a Dijkstra nor a Carmack". Evidence: in the Asura and variants
campaigns that day, Self put the single-file store's write model (carry foreign records, refuse, log-structured, page
tree) to the operator from first principles. SQLite, LMDB and log-structured stores had not been surveyed, and
neither had the literature. SKILL.md step 2 now requires an Eyes prior-art pass before a nontrivial question
reaches the operator.