The Funnel — How Truth Reaches ML
Truthful reporting and bounded escalation. Every verdict in the system climbs a condenser chain to one size-capped brief; every failure keeps its valence the whole way up; two auditors outside the chain make sure of it. ↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md
The condenser chain
Condenser rules
- Raw verdicts → one class digest per worker class → tier digests → the Executive Brief.
- A condenser never re-derives, never re-judges, never argues with its inputs. When two inputs conflict, it emits the conflict as a flagged line pointing at both sources. Divergences surface as flagged revisions, never silent smoothing.
- Compression is deliberately asymmetric: a thousand passes become one green line with a count; each distinct failure mode keeps its own flagged line linking down to raw verdicts.
- Span rule: a condenser may hold at most W inputs, where W is measured (largest fan-in with zero sampled fidelity loss), never assumed. Split a tier when fan-in exceeds W or sampled fidelity drops; merge a tier of pass-throughs. Both triggers are numbers. Funnel depth grows logarithmically with organization size — the bigger the org, the more tiers; forced arithmetic, not a preference.
Bad-news conservation — the one hard invariant
Resolution may be lost going up — valence NEVER. A thousand passes become one green line with a count; each distinct failure mode keeps its own flagged line linking down to raw verdicts. Divergences surface as flagged revisions — never silent smoothing. The invariant has a dumb check — flag reconciliation: count the failure flags entering a condenser, confirm every one is reachable from a flagged line in its output. Arithmetic plus link-following. ↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:31
The Executive Brief
One standing delivery on ML's mandated cadence. Four fixed sections, size-capped to one human reading, every line linking down an unbroken chain of custody to raw verdicts: ↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:56
1. WORKING
WORKING — what functions; maximally compressed; one green line per branch, with volume.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:572. NOT WORKING
NOT WORKING — every unresolved failure mode, conservatively compressed, including the funnel's own DROPPED/MISMATCH verdicts.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:573. CHANGED
CHANGED — every commit-boundary crossing since the last brief (worker births and deaths, directive/standard commits, model reassignments, off-cycle grants).
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:574. NEEDS A DECISION
NEEDS A DECISION — the marshaled queue: each entry one question, its live options, and the cost of not deciding. No entry ages past staleness without a re-escalation flag.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:57The two auditors — outside the chain
Conservation-Auditor SURFACED | DROPPED
Conservation-Auditor samples a failure verdict at random depth, traces it upward tier by tier, rules SURFACED or DROPPED. Its sampling extends to escalations: every escalation forward must be reachable as a NEEDS-A-DECISION entry, or it rules DROPPED.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:42Ground-Probe trust never chains
Ground-Probe samples any digest line at any tier and re-checks it against raw evidence, bypassing every intermediate tier. Trust never chains: no tier's honesty rests on the tier above it.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:46The escalation ladder — climb, never jump
A node that cannot decide does not signal ML; it signals the next tier up. Each higher tier holds, by construction, the compressed verdicts of everything below it — so a deadlock un-resolvable at a leaf is often resolvable one tier up, where a sibling's verdict settles it. At every tier a Tier-Arbiter retries the same dumb elimination against the wider evidence pool: it either kills a branch (citing the specific sibling verdict that killed it) or certifies the deadlock un-resolvable at that tier and passes it up. Intelligence stays flat on the climb; only context widens.
- subsidiarity
- A node that cannot decide signals the next tier up — never ML directly. Most deadlocks die on the climb, killed by a sibling's verdict the leaf could not see.
- Tier-Arbiter
- At every tier, retries the same dumb elimination against the wider evidence pool: kills a branch (citing the specific sibling verdict) or certifies the deadlock un-resolvable at that tier and passes it up.
- the invariant
- Intelligence stays flat on the climb; only context widens. No tier is smarter than the one below it — it just sees more.
The four contact categories — everything that may reach ML
1. Intent and values changes
Intent and values changes. No loop may make them; proposals touching them forward automatically.
No loop may make them.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:922. Tiebreaks
Tiebreaks at high-consequence nodes that resisted elimination at every tier — with the saturation and climb records attached. Includes trial DEADLOCKs and unclosable-loop findings. Packaged as one binary question with the surviving rivals and the evidence for each; nothing un-eliminated reaches ML.
Saturation + climb records attached; one binary question; nothing un-eliminated reaches ML.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:923. Keyholder grants
Keyholder grants — a parked task, the least grant that unblocks it, one action to approve. Proven grants forward immediately, off the brief cadence, logged retroactively in the next brief's CHANGED.
Least-access, one action to approve; logged in the next brief's CHANGED.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:924. Final override and decommission
Final override and decommission — never requested by the system; only the numbers are exposed.
Never system-initiated — only the numbers are exposed.
↳ system/corpus/FUNNEL.md:92The command center at the apex
- Deliver the brief each cycle (hash-verified).
- Decide within delegated evidence bounds; escalate beyond them.
- Translate each ML input into exactly one committed downstream verdict — reconciled every cycle by set arithmetic (translation-reconciler).
- Orient structural proposals (org growth, funnel topology) as the dumb side of the org-level atom.
- Guard the funnel: treat DROPPED/MISMATCH as the highest-consequence fault.
- Spend ML's attention conservatively (the authority budget).