feat(rules): the rule arms stop filtering the corpus to one tier (#3702) #142

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bvandeusen merged 1 commits from dev into main 2026-09-08 00:31:12 -04:00

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Author	SHA1	Message	Date
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5	dd1e6e2645	feat(rules): the rule arms stop filtering the corpus to one tier (#3702) ... Both arms passed tier="conditional", on the reasoning that an always-on rule is already in the session so re-surfacing it is pure noise. That conflates two different things: PRESENT IN CONTEXT the rule was delivered at session start SALIENT AT THE MOMENT the rule is in front of the reader when the action it governs is about to be taken A rule handed over in a list at turn zero is present while a session writes a config value three hundred turns later. It is not surfaced. So the filter did not skip a redundant hint — it made a whole class of rules permanently ineligible for the only mechanism that puts a rule in front of an agent AT the moment, and the more important a rule is, the likelier it sat in that class. Underneath, the filter was doing the THRESHOLD's job. Whether a rule belongs in a hint is a relevance question and a similarity bar is the control for relevance. A categorical exclusion standing in for a relevance judgment cannot be tuned, cannot be measured, and cannot be wrong in a way anybody notices. MEASURED, NOT SETTLED. The old comment's fear is real: a hint that fires on every write and says obvious things teaches the reader to skip the block. It had simply never been checked, and retrieval_logs already records the scores to check it with. Rules clearing often and high means the fear was justified and the BAR is the work; rules clearing rarely in a thin band means relevance was always sufficient. Only eligibility moved. The bar stays at 0.72 and k stays at 1, so the resulting distribution has one cause — and k=1 bounds the blast radius: a wider pool can change which rule surfaces and how often, never how long a single hint gets. The threshold rationale's first premise ("the eligible corpus is TINY — tier=conditional only") is updated rather than deleted: a larger pool makes clearing the bar mean MORE, so that argument weakened, and the bar was left alone anyway rather than move two variables at once. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ	2026-09-08 00:24:02 -04:00