Deprecate crowdmon: freeze, do not delete, and state the conditions for reopening

[mspinola]

Development stops. DEPRECATED.md carries the decision, what freezing means in practice, and three checkable conditions for reopening. README gets a banner; the handoffs register is closed to new entries.

Follows the harvest (crowdmon #81, cotdata #102, cotmetrics #9, all merged), which is why the measurements are already rehoused before this lands.

Why

Four pre-registered tests, no positive result: the core §10 claim uninformative with its clean episodes spent, two genuine nulls, and a fourth that passed on the letter but was mostly artifact.

The asymmetry between those failures is what decided it. The mechanism test failed for a repairable reason. The §10 validation did not: it tested the actual claim competently and came back uninformative with the evidence exhausted, because hand-identified clean episodes are a finite stock. Only new crises restore them, and those cannot be scheduled. Even a clean pass on a repaired mechanism test establishes the mapping, which that pre-registration says explicitly is not evidence D predicts anything.

Waiting was checked rather than assumed: the sample spans 57 blocks of 13 weeks and a year adds about four.

The counter-argument is recorded rather than omitted, because it is the strongest case against this decision: the test was flawed, so the idea might still work is true here, and is also the argument that keeps dead projects funded for another six months.

§2.1 corrects a claim this file first made

An earlier draft said the suite was left green. It is not: 6 of 654 fail. All six are live pins drifting against a moving store, which now holds report week 2026-08-04 while the published panel is pinned at 2026-07-28, so a recomputation carries one extra market-week and the pins are off by exactly that (6,669 against 6,668). Same failure mode as amendments-2026-08-05 §E1, and it was six pins then too.

Three things follow: red does not mean broken, it gets worse every week the store advances, and it is downstream of the operational decision rather than independent of it. Whichever way that goes, the fix is to neutralise the pins rather than chase them, since a frozen repo should not have tests depending on data collected after it was frozen. Deliberately not done here: it belongs with whoever makes that call, and doing it first would presume the answer.

The open work order is BLOCKED, not open

2026-08-06-trigger-contradicted-copy.md is marked blocked in both the file and the register row. The register's own rule is that a handoff without a completion status gets re-executed by a future session, and this is a copy fix to a page whose future is undecided: worth doing if the /damage page keeps being read, moot if not, in which case close it unstarted.

Two deliberate choices

The README banner says everything below it is left unedited on purpose. A deprecated project rewritten to sound modest is a worse record than one that states what it set out to do and what happened.

§5 records what was worth building anyway, including what the harvest turned up that this repo never looked for: cotmetrics computes six price-against-positioning level correlations per lookback whose null has never been measured.

Plain-language bottom line

The idea did not work, it was tested fairly four times, and the test that mattered most is not just negative but finished, because the historical events it needed are used up. So the project stops. Nothing is deleted, the useful measurements already moved to the packages that own them, and the notice says plainly what would have to happen for reopening to be worth it, so the decision can be checked later rather than argued from memory.

One correction worth flagging: the notice originally claimed the test suite was passing. It is not, and six tests fail for a reason that will get worse rather than better now that the project is frozen. That is written down instead of quietly fixed, because someone running these tests in six months needs to know the red is expected.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code