personal-agent-os/memory-systems/agent-os/dream/insights.md

Insights — Dream Mode Consolidated Learnings

Living, de-duplicated knowledge base. Themes, not an append log. Newest evidence strengthens or replaces existing entries. Opened 2026-10-10 (first Dream Mode run).

🏛️ Standing Principles (epistemics & discipline)

• Pre-registration is load-bearing. For any falsification loop ("what died and why"), kill criteria + cost assumptions must be timestamped before the run. Post-hoc autopsies re-import survivorship bias through the writer. Schema must force the field.
• The critic must be a different engine than the proposer of the claim. Hard-wiring one model (even a strong one) as permanent critic creates correlated blind spots → sycophancy collapse. Rotate roles (planner proposes, reviewer critiques — separate profiles count).
• Optimize for honest falsification, not PnL. Success metric = cleanly-falsified claims per week at bounded cost. PnL is a rare lagging output; chasing it un-disciplines the only durable asset.
• Measurement integrity gates the experiment. If the instrument is broken (clock skew, unmeasured latency), the run is void — fix the instrument before running. Refuse to start a clock that would void every result.
• The durable asset is failures-with-autopsies, not strategies. Wins are published (survivorship bias + marketing); a fee-adjusted record of what died and why is scarce and never has to be re-learned.
• Honest-gap ledger. Every build report names what's wired, what's offline-only, what remains. Never claim live behavior that hasn't run.
• Name which cost/branch you're invoking before concluding. E.g. a taker fee says nothing about a maker edge's viability.
• A known root cause with a cheap fix should not survive the day it was found — diagnose → propose → ask in the same turn; apply on approval.
• A defect in the instrument is not a death of the claim (strengthened 2026-10-11). When a claim fails because the spec/test was wrong, the honest record is withdrawal (never-tested) — never an autopsy with a cause of death. Filing a death for an unrun claim is the corpus's own survivorship-bias back door. The schema must carry a never-tested/withdrawn status so a documentation defect can't be written up as evidence of death.
• Durable-run integrity triad (2026-10-11). Any multi-day/unattended run must: (a) keep its progress counter in the durable store and replay it on startup (in-memory counted reset → the run can never reach its N, silently); (b) key liveness/stall detection on a quantity that changes when healthy (log file-size growth, never "last log line unchanged" — constant verdict lines make that a false stall); (c) make the recovery action idempotent and non-leaking ("confirm zero live before starting one" — a restart-on-stall cron that never reaps the prior process compounds the fault it exists to repair).
• A cron's own recovery action is a code path that needs testing. Treat every self-healing action as a first-class artifact: unit-check the idempotency guard and the resource-lifecycle on the restart path, not just the happy path.
• Read a gate at its registered N. When a statistical gate (e.g. a one-sided LB>0) prints a verdict before its sample is met, label it interim, not decisive until N=X — lead with that. A mean and its lower bound move at different speeds (2026-10-11: mean +0.019 while LB −0.099); an early negative LB is noise, not evidence.

🛠️ Technical Notes

• Kalshi fees (verified 2026-10-10): taker = round_up(0.07·C·P·(1−P)), charged only when you take. Maker fee = 0 on ~12,500 of 12,699 series (only ~129 series tax resting orders, quarter rate; cancelling free; 14 niche series fee-free). Polymarket US is a separate, thinner, full-KYC venue with contested CA status; Kalshi CA is clean (CFTC DCM).
• Headless (-q/--oneshot) approval gate: profiles with approvals.mode unset default to manual → no user → dangerous-pattern commands (python -c, execute_code, rm -r, kill -9, heredocs) time out to BLOCKED. The execute_code fallback is gated too → retry loop that burns context. Fix: approvals.mode: smart (+ command_allowlist for scoped safe patterns) + tool-loop guardrails (hard_stop_after: 5). Cron-safe only after allowlist/config applied.
• Cron/unattended tool limits: python -c, execute_code, and heredoc script execution are blocked in unattended (-q) runs unless allowlisted; write_file refuses overwrite without a prior read (pagination paradox); terminal foreground cap 600s (else promoted to tracked background).
• killcorpus (C:\Users\fight\Projects\killcorpus): paper-only. Spec KXBTCD-lag-vs-spot v1.1.1 (taker primary; maker secondary pending fill model). Harness harness/paper_trader_instrumented.py — instrumented (book_read_ts, ntp_offset_ms, spot_age_ms, realized_slippage), variance gate σ²=0.25, latency gates 1000/500/250 ms, fixed N=967 post-registration. Offline selftest green; live feed→fill→settlement path wired and proven (settle-through proof 2026-10-11: 40 signals / 5 trades / 5 settled, clock off). Gitea Tony_tech/killcorpus push superseded by Contents-API content-mirror. Reference (read-only, do not edit): polyterm/paper_trader.py. Live eval launched 2026-10-11T16:24:28Z (REG_TS). Supervision: cron 1da28c73cd5f (15 m, supervisor) + c7ea39ffb05a (1 h, health check). Policy: hold until N=967; interim K1 non-actionable; only pre-registered early stops (sustained measurement_artifact, variance breach → UNDERPOWERED) may halt. Fixes shipped: b833e3c (smoke-arg parser), 45f94a5 (DB replay of counted on startup). Gitea Tony_tech/killcorpus content-mirrored via Contents API, no origin (git-level link deliberately held). Schema drift seen once: DB signals table lacked book_read_ts_ms the writer needs — deployed DB and writer must be reconciled at launch.
• Agent-loop roles: planner=Proposer, reviewer=Critic, builder=Executor, jimmy=Recorder.

🧵 Open Threads

• Trace-fix (builder/reviewer approvals.mode: smart + guardrails + timeout 300) written, unapplied — awaiting Tony's approval. See ../04_projects/trace-review-bot/2026-10-10-trace-analysis-and-fix.
• killcorpus prereqs cleared 2026-10-11: clock fixed (±2 ms, was −284 ms); settlement observed (5 settled); durable runner proven; spec v1.1.1 approved. Eval live since 16:24:28Z, accruing toward N=967. Next gate = a valid run at N=967 → first autopsy (kept/killed/parked/inconclusive). Nothing else halts it except the pre-registered early stops.
• killcorpus open items: git-level link (origin) held — decide at first autopsy; handoff docs (docs/handoff-2026-10-11*.md, killcorpus-full-2026-10-11.md) untracked — commit/push/delete undecided.
• Dream Mode live as of 2026-10-10 (skill + skill_review.py + 2 AM cron + dream/). Note for 10-11 = second run.