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

DEPRECATED.md

@@ -0,0 +1,191 @@
+# crowdmon is deprecated
+
+**Decided 2026-08-07.** Development stops. The package is **frozen, not deleted**, and §4
+states the conditions under which the decision would be worth revisiting.
+
+---
+
+## 1. Why
+
+The thesis was `damage = crowding x illiquidity x holder fragility`. It was tested four times,
+each time against a pre-registration frozen before the statistic was computed, each time
+executed in `npf` because `tests/test_boundaries.py` refuses a `crucible` import precisely so
+this package cannot render a verdict on its own output.
+
+| test | result |
+|---|---|
+| §10 validation, the core claim: is `D` elevated *before* a forced-exit episode? | **`uninformative`**, and the clean episodes are **spent** |
+| Index share: is index positioning stickier than swap? | **genuine null**, premise retired |
+| Fragility orthogonality: do `Phi` and `I` separate the trend book's trades? | Stage 1 independent, **Stage 2 genuine null** |
+| Forced-flow mechanism: when the trigger fires, does the pool move? | `supported` on the letter, **mostly artifact**, marginal residual |
+
+Four honest tests, no positive result.
+
+**The asymmetry between those failures is what decided it.** They did not all fail the same
+way, and only one kind of failure is fixable.
+
+The mechanism test failed for a repairable reason: it measured `Delta pool_net`, which this
+package's own `futures/flow.py` documents in its first paragraph as unable to tell a forced
+exit from a fresh entry in the same direction. That is a bad test, not a dead idea, and
+`docs/handoffs/2026-08-06-forced-flow-respecification.md` records the corrected design.
+
+**The §10 validation did not fail that way.** It tested the actual claim, competently, and
+came back uninformative with **the evidence exhausted**. Hand-identified clean episodes are a
+finite stock and they are spent. No better design recovers them; only new crises do, and those
+cannot be scheduled.
+
+So the optimistic path is narrower than it looks. Even a clean pass on a repaired mechanism
+test establishes **the mapping**, which that pre-registration's §5.6 says explicitly is not
+evidence that `D` predicts anything. The claim that would justify the footprint is the §10
+claim, and it is out of ammunition.
+
+**Waiting does not help**, which was checked rather than assumed. The mechanism sample already
+spans 2012-05-15 to 2026-07-21, **57 blocks** of 13 weeks. A further year adds about four:
+roughly 7% more data and 3% tighter standard errors. §1 of that pre-registration chose the
+question partly because its evidence regenerates weekly, which is true in the sense that it is
+never *spent* and false in the sense of getting usefully stronger on any horizon worth waiting
+for.
+
+### The argument that was considered and rejected
+
+"The mechanism test was flawed, so the idea might still work" is true here. It is also the
+argument that keeps dead projects funded for another six months. It raises the ceiling on what
+a better test could find; it is not evidence of anything. Recorded because it is the strongest
+case against this decision and it should not have to be re-derived by whoever reads this next.
+
+---
+
+## 2. What deprecated means here, concretely
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **Frozen** | No new modules, no new engines, no new handoffs against the composite |
+| **Not deleted** | Every file stays. Other repos cite these documents, and a citation has to land on real text |
+| **Not retracted** | The measurements stand. A parked hypothesis is not a withdrawn one |
+| **Tests are NOT all green**, and §2.1 says why | 6 of 654 fail, all of them live pins drifting against a moving store. Red here does not mean broken |
+
+### 2.1 The suite is red, and it is drift rather than rot
+
+Measured on `main` at deprecation, **6 failed, 648 passed, 5 skipped**. An earlier draft of
+this file claimed the suite was left green. It is not, and the claim was corrected rather than
+the tests, because what is failing is worth understanding.
+
+```
+tests/test_brief_live.py::test_the_two_null_causes_split_where_C20_measured_them
+tests/test_brief_live.py::test_the_separating_rule_still_has_zero_exceptions
+tests/test_publish_live.py::test_the_trigger_counts_reproduce_d9
+tests/test_publish_live.py::test_the_pool_column_is_supplied_so_the_agreement_flag_is_not_null
+tests/test_publish_live.py::test_the_pool_check_removes_half_of_d9s_close_and_severe_cell
+tests/test_publish_live.py::test_the_manifest_counts_match_the_panel_it_ships_with
+```
+
+**Every one is a `*_live` test comparing a recomputation against a pinned count.** The
+`COTDATA_STORE` has advanced to report week **2026-08-04** while the published panel is pinned
+at **2026-07-28**, so the recomputation carries one extra market-week and the pins are off by
+exactly that: 6,669 against a pinned 6,668, and a date assertion reading `2026-08-04` where it
+expects `2026-07-28`.
+
+This is the same failure mode `docs/design/amendments-2026-08-05.md` §E1 already recorded, and
+it was six pins then too.
+
+**Three things follow, and the third is the one that matters.**
+
+1. **Red does not mean broken here.** Nothing regressed. A frozen package pinned against a
+   moving store fails by construction.
+2. **It gets worse, not better.** Every week the store advances widens the gap. A reader
+   running the suite in six months will see the same six failures with larger deltas.
+3. **It is downstream of the §3 decision, not independent of it.** If the publish job keeps
+   running, the panel keeps pace and these pass again; if it is switched off, they fail
+   permanently. **Whichever way that goes, the fix is to neutralise the pins rather than to
+   chase them**, because a frozen repo should not have tests that depend on data collected
+   after it was frozen. That work is deliberately not done here: it belongs with whoever makes
+   the §3 call, and doing it first would presume the answer.
+
+**The harvest is complete.** [`docs/HARVEST.md`](docs/HARVEST.md) classifies all 108 numbered
+findings in `docs/design/amendments-*.md` as PORTED, RESOLVED or DIES, and nothing remains
+unhoused:
+
+- **To `cotdata`**: `cross-report-comparability.md` (Legacy and TFF agree on exactly two
+  quantities; the `spread_contracts` null trap) and `reading-the-store.md` (universe
+  composition, coverage denominators, the volume parameter, code continuity, price tiers).
+- **To `cotmetrics`**: `positioning-series-properties.md` (exceedances arrive in episodes, so
+  a count of them is not a sample size; correlating positioning levels is spurious).
+
+Facts were **restated, never moved**. `docs/analysis/` and the amendment series are
+point-in-time records under this repo's doc lifecycle; rewriting them would destroy the record
+of when each thing was learned, which is what makes "the data contradicted the brief" a
+checkable claim.
+
+### The verdicts live in npf
+
+They were rendered there, and they stay there: `npf/docs/crowdmon/`, dated 2026-08-01,
+2026-08-06 twice, each with a committed reproducer, a pinned store manifest, and for the
+mechanism test a byte copy of the store at
+`~/code/cotdata_store_snapshots/2026-08-06-forced-flow-mechanism`.
+
+---
+
+## 3. What is still running, and what is open
+
+**Two launchd jobs and one consumer page**, listed rather than switched off, because turning
+them off is a decision about whether the panel is still worth reading and that is not a
+research question:
+
+- `com.mspinola.crowdmon-publish` and `com.mspinola.crowdmon-live-tests`.
+- `cot-analyzer`'s `/damage` page, this package's only consumer. Nothing in `npf` or
+  `livebook` imports it.
+
+**One open work order**,
+[`docs/handoffs/2026-08-06-trigger-contradicted-copy.md`](docs/handoffs/2026-08-06-trigger-contradicted-copy.md).
+It is a copy and vocabulary fix, not a research task: when `pool_agrees` is `False`, both
+renderers say the level "would force a book that is not there", and the measurement says flow
+follows either way with the difference between groups small. **Its status depends entirely on
+the page**: worth doing if the panel keeps being read, moot if it does not, and it should be
+closed unstarted rather than left open in that case.
+
+---
+
+## 4. Conditions for revisiting, stated so they are checkable
+
+Vague promise is how a parked project becomes an undead one. **Any one of these, on its own,
+makes it worth reopening. Nothing else does.**
+
+1. **New clean forced-exit episodes.** §10 needs hand-identified episodes uncontaminated by
+   the events already used. Two or more genuinely new ones would restore the test the whole
+   thesis rests on. This is the only condition that addresses the core claim.
+2. **A point-in-time replay becomes possible.** Vintages accumulate forward from 2026-07-31,
+   and §7.8 of the §10 pre-registration gates its replay at **no earlier than 2026-11-01**.
+   That answers a different question from §10, the decision-rule one, and it is the only
+   scheduled thing in this list.
+3. **The respecified mechanism test is run and comes back strong on the corrected outcome
+   variable.** `docs/handoffs/2026-08-06-forced-flow-respecification.md` §4. This would raise
+   the ceiling; on its own it still would not establish that `D` predicts anything, per §5.6.
+
+**Not a condition**: a new module, a better weight table, another engine, or a reading of the
+existing data from a fresh angle. The data has been read. What is missing is evidence that has
+not happened yet.
+
+---
+
+## 5. What was worth building anyway
+
+Recorded because a project that produced nothing and a project whose hypothesis did not survive
+are different things, and the second one is normal.
+
+The measurements outlived the thesis. Several are now load-bearing in `cotdata` and
+`cotmetrics`: the `propadj` / `backadj` trap that corrected cotdata's own spec, the
+Legacy/TFF comparability limit, the Supplemental basis mismatch, the open-interest identity
+across 48,950 market-weeks, the fact that 76% of the Disaggregated universe is power and gas
+basis, and the near-unit-root property that makes level correlations on positioning
+meaningless.
+
+The working agreement that produced them is the part most worth carrying forward: **measure,
+do not assume**, and where a measurement contradicts a document, fix the document in the same
+change and say so. Probing the actual files overturned a written assumption in nearly every
+session here, including several of this package's own.
+
+The harvest also turned up something this repo never looked for: `cotmetrics` computes six
+price-against-positioning **level** correlations per lookback whose null has never been
+measured, which the corrected rule above says cannot be interpreted without one. It is
+written up there as a check to run rather than a defect report. A project's last useful act
+being to hand a neighbour a question worth asking is a reasonable way to finish.

README.md

@@ -1,5 +1,23 @@
 # crowdmon
 
+> ## DEPRECATED, 2026-08-07
+>
+> **Development has stopped.** The thesis below was tested four times against frozen
+> pre-registrations and produced no positive result: the core claim came back
+> `uninformative` with its evidence **spent**, two further tests were genuine nulls, and the
+> fourth was mostly artifact. See [`DEPRECATED.md`](DEPRECATED.md) for the evidence, what
+> "frozen, not deleted" means in practice, and the three conditions under which reopening
+> would be worth it.
+>
+> **The measurements outlived the thesis and have been rehoused.**
+> [`docs/HARVEST.md`](docs/HARVEST.md) maps all 108 findings; the durable ones now live in
+> `cotdata` and `cotmetrics`. Nothing here was deleted, and the facts were restated rather
+> than moved, so citations still land on real text.
+>
+> **Everything below this box describes the package as designed.** 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.
+
 A crowding and forced-exit monitor.
 
 **Damage = crowding x illiquidity x holder fragility.** Crowding is a property of the

docs/handoffs/2026-08-06-trigger-contradicted-copy.md

@@ -1,6 +1,13 @@
 # Handoff: a contradicted trigger row is described as an absence, and it is not one
 
-**Status:** open
+**Status:** **open, BLOCKED on one decision. Do not start it until that decision is made.**
+`crowdmon` was deprecated 2026-08-07 ([`../../DEPRECATED.md`](../../DEPRECATED.md) §3). This is
+a copy fix to a page whose future is undecided: **worth doing if `cot-analyzer`'s `/damage`
+page keeps being read, moot if it does not**, in which case close it unstarted rather than
+leaving it open. Nothing in the work below changed; only whether it is worth doing.
+
+The register's rule is that a handoff without a completion status gets executed by a future
+session, so this marker exists to stop that happening to a page that may be on its way out.
 
 Written 2026-08-06. Released by §6 of
 [`2026-08-06-forced-flow-respecification.md`](2026-08-06-forced-flow-respecification.md),