The central judgment call of the whole rehabilitation: what to do with the agent’s machinery. Deleting it would have been clean and irreversible — and wrong twice over. The harness is part of the project’s story (the tour says plainly that the implementation is agent-written), and it may be useful again if an autonomous loop resumes. Keeping it in place was also wrong: a public repo where the first thing a visitor meets is the scaffolding, not the building.
-The answer was a third category. Everything the agent needed and a human doesn’t was moved — intact, in one commit — to an archive/agent-harness branch. Nothing was deleted; the main branch simply stopped carrying it. The same commit unified the agent’s CLAUDE.md into a single human-and-agent AGENTS.md, later split again into lean workflow rules plus a DEV.md inventory. The test of the triage: months later, nobody has needed anything back from the archive — but it costs nothing to keep, and it makes the history honest.
The answer was a third category. Everything the agent needed and a human doesn’t was moved — intact, in one commit — to an archive/agent-harness branch. Nothing was deleted; the main branch simply stopped carrying it. The same commit unified the agent’s CLAUDE.md into a single human-and-agent AGENTS.md, later split again into lean workflow rules plus a DEV.md inventory. The test of the triage: in the days since, nobody has needed the process machinery back from the archive — though agent-era feature work off the same lineage (the ITER-0005 persistence arc — durable TupleSpace, content-addressed recovery, bytecode persistence — on branches this fork predated) was since grafted onto main and now underpins active design. The scaffolding was disposable; the code beneath it was not. Keeping the archive costs nothing, and it makes the history honest.
Revitalizing an agent-written codebase turned out to differ from ordinary legacy work in one repeated way: the artifact is strong where humans are weak, and weak where humans are strong. The agent never got tired, so the language core is deep and the test suite vast. The agent never changed machines, so the build was broken for everyone else on earth. It never had a reviewer, so nothing distinguished roadmap from rot. Every tier addressed some version of that asymmetry — and the fixes were mostly social artifacts, not code: a README, a ledger, a review convention, an archive, CI as an outside observer.
+Revitalizing an agent-written codebase turned out to differ from ordinary legacy work in one repeated way: the artifact is strong where humans are weak, and weak where humans are strong. The agent never got tired, so the language core is deep and the test suite vast. The agent never changed machines, so the build was broken for everyone else on earth. Its review and roadmap lived inside its own process layer — PAR adversarial audits, an iteration log, a behavior-scenario corpus — so to an outside reader who never opened that layer, nothing on the surface distinguished roadmap from rot. Every tier addressed some version of that asymmetry — and the fixes were mostly social artifacts, not code: a README, a ledger, a review convention, an archive, CI as an outside observer.
What the later arcs inherited from this one: a build a stranger can run, a ledger that made “burn down the bucket” a measurable goal, an advisory-PR convention still in use at #5 and #6, the epoch discipline for generated-parser changes, and the habit — docs verified against a live REPL — that grew into the doctest harness in the very next phase.