Boundary Protocol v1.0: IBC Sufficiency & Refinement

This skill defines what every Initial Boundary Condition (IBC) MUST possess before an expensive walk is launched from it, and the cheap-tier refinement loop that manufactures such boundaries.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", and "MAY" are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 (RFC 2119, RFC 8174).

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Philosophy: Optimize for Cheap Rejection

A good IBC is not one that maximizes the probability the walk succeeds. It is one that makes the failure modes cheap and early. A wrong frame can never be fully prevented at authoring time; what can be guaranteed is that the walk detects and rejects it in its first few hundred tokens instead of its last fifty thousand.

This follows from the cost asymmetry of cascade control: iterating in boundary-space (cheap models + human revising a prompt document) costs orders of magnitude less than iterating in trajectory-space (re-running an architect-class walk). Error-correction iterations therefore belong in the cheap outer loop. The expensive walk should launch from a fixed point $\text{IBC}^*$ of the cheap refinement mapping and run as close to one-shot as the task allows.

The most expensive failure mode of a high-capability walker is a confidently-wrong frame: long-horizon coherence builds a large, internally consistent structure on a false premise without the local error signals that would trip a weaker model into visible incoherence. Premise verification before the expensive call has the highest leverage-per-token of any activity in the system.

Trust as an Anti-Goodhart Mechanism

A micro-specified boundary induces a compliance posture: the walk optimizes for letter-satisfaction of the rubric and produces rubric-satisfying, goal-missing output. A boundary that grants explicit discretion over its delegated questions ("these calls are yours; log your reasoning") shifts the optimization target from satisfy the spec to achieve the goal under constraints. The partnership dyad is structural, not sentimental:

• Trust = a non-empty delegated set with genuine discretion.
• Focus = a strictly bounded one, with halt predicates at the edges.

An IBC whose delegated set is empty wastes an architect on typist work. An IBC whose delegated set is unbounded is a gamble, not a delegation.

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The Sufficiency Conditions

An IBC is sufficient when it satisfies all seven conditions below. Each condition is independently checkable; adversarial reviewers in the refinement loop MUST cite the violated condition by ID when raising an objection.

S1 — FALSIFIABILITY

Every premise the IBC asserts about the world MUST be stated so that the receiving walker can verify or refute it against primary sources at low token cost, and SHOULD name the exact check (command, file:line, document section).

❌ "The auth module is well-tested." ✅ "auth/session_test.go covers token expiry; verify with go test ./auth/ -run TestExpiry."

Rationale: what reliably triggers early fallback in a capable walker is a verifiable contradiction between frame and world — vague unease does not. A falsifiable premise is a manufactured tripwire.

The floor renders a premise as a CLOSED claim entry (ledger/contracts/entry.ncl's Entry, narrowed by worker_ibc.ncl's PremiseChecked): its backing names the evidence species (corroborated | vouched | unclosed | residual), its signer designates who is asserting it, and its axes records the author's own assessment of the claim's coordinates (determined, certifiable, monotone) — required on every premise, since an IBC author is obligated to assess the ground the dispatch will stand on.

S2 — REJECTION_GENRE

The IBC MUST state that rejecting the frame is a success condition, and MUST define the rejection report format: which premise failed, the refuting evidence, and what the boundary loop should reconsider. The receiving walker's first obligation is a premise audit against S1's tripwires; on failure it MUST emit the rejection report and freeze rather than proceed.

Rationale: if halting has no genre, the walk invents continuation. An explicit low-energy path to "no" is what makes early fallback reachable.

S3 — DECISION_RIGHTS

Every question in scope MUST belong to exactly one of three sets:

Set	Meaning	Obligation
RESOLVED	Answered during boundary refinement	Evidence attached (S1-grade)
DELEGATED	The walker's to answer — where the expensive tokens go	Discretion granted; reasoning logged
RESERVED	The human's to decide	Encountering one is a halt predicate, stated as a predicate

A question that fits none of the sets is an unresolved unknown: the IBC is not sufficient and MUST NOT be dispatched. Genuinely architectural questions MUST NOT be fake-resolved at the cheap tier; ambiguities MUST NOT be left for the expensive tier.

A question the refinement loop cannot yet resolve is carried forward in the floor as an unknowns entry (worker_ibc.ncl's UnknownChecked): a question entry that MUST carry both a discharge condition (what would close it) and a closer (who can) — a question missing either is not routable, which is the same insufficiency this table already names.

S4 — EVALUATOR_ATTACHMENT

Every constraint and every acceptance criterion MUST name the strongest affordable deterministic evaluator that checks it, selected from the evaluator hierarchy:

machine-checked proof > type system > property test > example test > linter > decorrelated adversarial review > [human: escalation only]

In domains with formal models, a theorem statement is the perfectly saturated acceptance criterion — the boundary contains its own evaluator (see formal-foundations). A constraint with no evaluator attached is an exhortation, not a constraint, and MUST be either grounded or moved to the rubric as a qualitative goal.

S5 — CURATION_INTEGRITY

Context MUST be supplied as pointers and verbatim excerpts — file paths, line ranges, exact commands, quoted spec clauses — never as paraphrase. The boundary author's job is selection; the walker reads primary sources directly. A summary written by a cheaper model injects its misreadings as ground truth, moving the hallucination upstream where the walker cannot detect it.

Every context pointer declares its edit status. A context_map entry naming a file the walker may plausibly need to EDIT must be covered by the node's declared file_surface; an entry that is context only carries an explicit (read-only) marker. The mismatch — a file granted to the walker's eyes but not its hands — is the most frequent IBC-authoring defect observed in the field, and it fails at the worst point: the walker's own commit gate, after the work is done. It is mechanically checkable at authoring time (authorized.py --ibc-surface-check), and the dispatching loop MUST run that lint before any dispatch (orchestration §JIT authoring).

S6 — AMENDMENT_PROTOCOL

The IBC MUST partition its clauses into:

• Load-bearing: amendment requires returning to the human (these overlap heavily with RESERVED decision rights and the goal itself).
• Plastic: the walker MAY revise under logged justification (tactics, sequencing, internal structure).

A boundary with no plastic region cannot survive contact with reality; a boundary with no load-bearing region is not a boundary. Amendments to plastic clauses MUST be logged where the dispatching loop can read them (see campaign RECONCILE).

S7 — DISCIPLINE_PROPORTION

Boundary mass MUST scale inversely with walker capability. Weaker walkers do not need fewer constraints — they need a smaller, prioritized boundary: rule overload causes silent prioritization failure (the walker drops invariants it cannot rank).

• Each worker-tier IBC MUST name exactly one disciplining predicate workflow as its control loop (e.g. refine for polish tasks, core TDD execution for feature steps) and MUST inline only the load-bearing rules for the task, omitting the rest of the global rule mass. A fast, cheap walker under the refine loop is a powerhouse; the same walker under forty ambient rules is a coin flip.
• Architect-tier IBCs MAY carry the full normative surface, but SHOULD still rely on gate-time boundary reconstruction (re-reading the live ledger) over initial rule mass: periodic reconstruction beats initial saturation for long horizons.

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Where approval attaches

Prime Invariant 6 requires a sufficient, human-approved boundary before an expensive or autonomous walk. It does not say at what granularity that approval attaches, and this skill and orchestration had drifted apart in the gap — this document gating every IBC while the machinery that actually dispatches approves layer-0 in batch, authors later-layer IBCs just-in-time, and names pausing between layers approval theatre.

The head ruled the granularity (.ledger/state/decisions-dispatch-granularity.yaml, DG1): approval attaches to the frame that was discussed and agreed, never to each IBC. Inside an agreed frame, purely mechanical execution proceeds autonomously and needs no further gate.

What escalates is divergence, not cost. "Expensive or autonomous" fires on every dispatch and therefore discriminates nothing. A seam is genuine when the work carries outstanding nuance, or when the path could depart from what was agreed — S3's RESERVED set is this same predicate stated per question. Encountering one is a halt, exactly as S3 says.

So the loop below runs where the frame itself is in question: the goal is open, the premises are unverified, or the walk could reasonably diverge from what was agreed. It does not run over a mechanical step inside a frame the human already approved — there the IBC is checked against the sufficiency conditions and dispatched.

The Boundary Refinement Loop

/boundary manufactures $\text{IBC}^*$ as the fixed point of a cheap contraction mapping. It is a meta-application of the refine loop where CTX.TARGET_ARTIFACTS is the IBC document itself; the machinery (ledger discipline, adversarial sweeps, grounded critique, convergence bounds) is inherited rather than restated.

DRAFT ──→ ATTACK     (adversarial sweep against S1–S7)
ATTACK ─→ REVISE     (grounded objections found)
       └─→ APPROVE   (zero grounded objections; human gate)
REVISE ─→ ATTACK     (loop)
APPROVE ─→ DISPATCH  (human approves IBC*; expensive walk launches)
        └─→ DRAFT    (human rejects; reframe)

1. DRAFT: Author the candidate IBC using templates/IBC.md. Drafting SHOULD run on a cheap tier; the human supplies the goal verbatim.
2. ATTACK: Spawn independent cheap-tier adversarial reviewers in mutually isolated contexts (MBSS semantics from refine). Each objection MUST cite the sufficiency condition it violates and the evidence; ungrounded objections are filtered exactly as in refine's verifier grounding. For contested framings — where reviewers disagree about the goal itself — apply the cross-model dialectic principle to the proposition "this IBC is sufficient to bound the walk."
3. REVISE: Resolve each objection by amending the IBC or rebutting with evidence. Premises raised to RESOLVED status MUST carry their verification evidence.
4. APPROVE: The loop converges when an attack sweep yields zero grounded objections. The human reviews $\text{IBC}^*$ and makes the dispatch decision. This gate is mandatory: no expensive walk launches from an unapproved boundary.

The Comprehension Probe — empirical sufficiency

The ATTACK sweep argues about an IBC; the probe simulates its consumer. Before an IBC dispatches an autonomous worker (campaign worker IBCs especially — campaign §ORCHESTRATE, orchestration §JIT authoring), run a zero-context dry run:

• A cheap-tier agent receives ONLY the IBC plus the repository's committed record — no conversation history, no scratch, nothing the real worker won't have — and produces an implementation plan (never code) plus an explicit list of every question it cannot answer from those inputs.
• Score three things:
  1. Unanswered questions — each one is a boundary or documentation gap found for pennies instead of a mid-campaign freeze. Target ~0; iterate the IBC (or the committed docs it leans on) until the count flatlines.
  2. Plan-vs-intent divergence — the probe's plan is compared to the author's intended approach; divergence means the boundary underdetermines the walk (or the intent is wrong — both are findings).
  3. Canary traps — seed the probe with the project's known temptations (the doctrine traps its records name) and count the bites; a bite means the IBC's inline rules don't neutralize a trap the worker will face.
• The probe is an empirical validator of S1–S7, not an eighth condition: a failing probe always localizes to a violated S-condition (usually S1 premises assumed-not-stated, or S7 rules that didn't make the inline cut).

Probe cost is a cheap-tier read; skipping it trades pennies now for a frozen worker later. For JIT-authored later-layer IBCs the probe runs at authoring time, against the tip the worker will actually see.

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Prime Directives

1. CHEAP_REJECTION_PRIMACY: Never optimize an IBC for persuasiveness or completeness theater. Optimize for the receiving walker's ability to refute it cheaply.
2. NO_EMPTY_DELEGATION: An IBC for an architect-class walker MUST delegate at least one genuine question. If nothing is delegated, route the task to a cheaper tier.
3. NO_PARAPHRASED_CONTEXT: Violating S5 invalidates the boundary regardless of other conditions; summaries are not context.
4. CONDITION_CITED_CRITIQUE: Refinement-loop objections that do not cite a sufficiency condition ID and concrete evidence are filtered, per the Grounded Critique Invariant in rules.md.
5. HUMAN_DISPATCH_GATE: $\text{IBC}^*$ MUST receive human approval before an expensive or autonomous walk launches from it. Per DG1 that approval attaches to the agreed frame, not to each IBC: a walk executing mechanically inside a frame the human approved carries it already, and a walk that could diverge from that frame does not — the latter is the seam, and dispatching it unapproved is the violation this directive names.

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AGENTS.md — the project-scope boundary

AGENTS.md is the persistent project-scope boundary: the durable anchor a zero-context agent orients from before any walk begins. It is the slow-changing record of goal, requirements, constraints, and known-unknowns that the per- dispatch IBC (S1–S7 above) is projected from.

Invariants (soundness — violation makes the file actively harmful)

• Self-contained entrypoint. A zero-context agent orients from this file plus its in-repo links. No assumed external knowledge; every pointer resolves in-repo or carries a URL.
• Authoritative ⇒ true. The goal is the desired end state (it steers the walk, not a status report). Factual/status claims are true, or marked WIP. Never conflate the two.
• Single source. Reference authorities (rules.md, ambient.md, specs); never copy their text.
• Agent-guiding only. If removing a line changes no agent action, cut it.

Required content

• Goal — the desired end state; why this exists.
• Requirements / Invariants / Constraints — the project's own (referenced if authoritative elsewhere).
• Unknowns — first-class, treated like requirements: the live known-unknowns, so the agent knows where the map is incomplete rather than assuming false certainty. Each unknown carries a signpost — what would resolve or invalidate it.
• Operational entrypoint — what to read first; build/test/validate; arsenal.
• Structure — what is core vs context-sensitive.
• Alignment-to-parent (non-root only) — how this component serves the parent goal (the defeater substrate).

Anti-rot constraints

• Minimal surface area — every line is a liability kept true; brevity is anti-drift.
• Freeform within the contract — required content present; everything else is project-specific. A contract, not a template.
• Stable / synced — absorbs only reconciled truth; volatile context lives in .scratch and is promoted deliberately at reconcile boundaries.
• Nesting-aware — a subdirectory earns its own AGENTS.md only when it has a goal distinct from and serving the root; do not proliferate.

Carrier roles

Unknowns and requirements both move forward via the same carrier stack:

Carrier	Role	Cadence
AGENTS.md	Persistent anchor — goal, R/I/C, unknowns	Slow-changing; synced at reconcile
Nickel context-map	Live carrier — active requirements + unknowns with grounding, last_validated, signpost markers; fail-loud on omission (last_validated staleness is enforced against the HEAD commit date by tracker_fresh.sh)	Per-walk
Flight log (.ledger/log/)	Narrative/history — decisions, findings, pivots and their why	Append-only
.scratch + sync	Volatile draft; promotes validated changes → AGENTS.md	Ephemeral

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Boundary Cadence

Boundary-setting is the recurring self-conditioning operation, not a pre-flight checklist run once per campaign. It operates at three cadences:

• Macro (per-dispatch IBC) — the S1–S7 sufficiency conditions above; the human dispatch gate; the expensive walk launches from $\text{IBC}^*$.
• Meso (per-step reconstruction) — at the start of every step in a long walk, re-read the governing invariants and the active ledger rather than trusting accumulated context. Procedure in ambient.md.
• Micro (per-decision query-shaping) — a standing disposition: before generating any substantive output, verify that the operative constraints are present in context. This is not a machinery step; it is the boundary skill applied as an attentional prior.