Name the reader-calibration drift in prose doctrine

Accessibility guidance erodes on its own because the error is asymmetric:
writing above a reader reads as respect, writing below them reads as
condescension. Unchecked, the level only climbs, and each pass inherits the
previous pass's ceiling.

The drift is undetectable from inside. Prose is legible to precisely the
reader it was tuned for, and it was tuned for whoever wrote it, so rereading
cannot find it. The failure is also silent for the reader who suffers it: a
newcomer understands every sentence while nothing accumulates, which produces
no complaint and therefore no correcting signal.

Records the consequence that a fact audit cannot catch: over-calibration
compresses rather than omits, so the context is present but expandable only by
someone who already holds it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

AGENTS.md

@@ -117,6 +117,33 @@ benefit and harm, dependencies, historical formation, internal contradiction,
 and consequences for play. Use `workshop/deepening/benchmark.md` as the parity
 standard; do not turn word count into a victory condition.
 
+## Reader Calibration
+
+Calibration drifts upward across passes and never downward. Writing above a
+reader reads as respect and writing below them reads as condescension, so the
+error is asymmetric and every pass inherits the previous pass's ceiling. Nothing
+in the deepening loop resists this by default: a note is legible to precisely the
+reader it was tuned for, and it was tuned for whoever wrote it.
+
+Three consequences bind the council:
+
+- Completeness does not establish legibility. A breach usually compresses rather
+  than omits. An argument folded into a named term is fully present and
+  expandable only by a reader who already holds it. A fact audit cannot detect
+  this, because every fact is there.
+- Restatement is error correction. The concrete instance after an abstraction is
+  the reader's recovery path, not redundancy to be trimmed.
+- The failure is silent. An over-calibrated note is understood sentence by
+  sentence while nothing accumulates, and names that carry weight for an
+  inhabitant of the project stay inert for a newcomer. Silence is the expected
+  symptom, so absence of complaint is not evidence.
+
+[[critics/Reader Experience and Navigation|Reader Experience and Navigation]] is
+the only seat positioned to observe this, and only because its packet is blind.
+Do not enrich that packet with authorial context, prior pass notes, or an
+explanation of what the surface is trying to achieve. A blind packet that has
+been helpfully contextualised has stopped being an instrument.
+
 ## Project Memory
 
 - Project memory records durable judgment, operating lessons, adopted