Spike #4389 read the spec, Claude's docs and a dozen servers: the field is
for how the tools fit together, and the field runs ~600-1,600 characters.
Ours sat at the 2,048 cap as a keyword index that also carried stance.
- JUDGE, REPORT and MISSED leave the index. They fire mid-work, not at
session start; using-scribe and reporting-back state them in full, and
`placement`/`report_back` cue reporting in-band. No skill text changes.
- The rest is rewritten as plain practices (1,503 chars) and keeps every
session-start marker the ownership registry pins.
- INSTRUCTIONS_BUDGET 2000 -> 1600; the three index markers are dropped
from the registry; the miss-route index test now checks that the index
keeps what_might_apply and stays off the route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The tuning loop shipped in steps 4 and 6 and logged zero events in its
lifetime. `tune_retrieval`, `retrieval_telemetry` and `retrieval_surfaces`
appeared on no instruction surface at all — not the skills, not the hooks,
not the MCP instructions — so the decision that "the model should be the
thing handling it 9 times out of 10" could not begin to happen.
What was missing was not an auditor but a route. `using-scribe` now carries
it, ordered: read the refused records, fix the trigger, and only then
consider the dial. The order is the content. A rule's `when_to_apply` IS
the text its score is computed against, so a miss is evidence about that
text first; rewording one trigger changes one rule's reach, while moving a
floor changes what every record on the surface does and cannot tell a
badly-worded trigger from a genuinely distant one.
Measured, and the reason the order is asserted rather than suggested: rule
1 scored 0.6515 and ranked 5th for the moment it governed, behind three
rules that restrained the same act. Every percentile said "lower the
floor"; at 0.60 the arm delivered those three restraints and still not rule
1. Rewriting the trigger to lead with the symptom put it 1st at 0.7130.
Also: the create path gets a precondition. A new record is itself a
retrieval-affecting act, so before writing one, what_might_apply asks what
already covers that moment — fifty candidates and no bar, because a bar is
what lets the existing record hide.
`_INSTRUCTIONS` gets one index line, not the route: 1,986 of 2,000
characters, since Claude Code cuts the rest mid-word (#2562).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5.5