mfowler
c6c7ce8640
So that "stateless vs builder-adversary" and "lean vs stateless" isolate context hygiene / review granularity WITHOUT the confound of the minimal prompts' reduced testing pressure (which we found cuts ~25% of test methods). stateless = orig + context hygiene; lean = orig + context hygiene + per-gate review. min stays the pure minimal-prompt variant (isolates verbosity vs orig). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Builder/Adversary example — context-lean + full per-gate review
The builder-adversary-stateless variant added context
hygiene (compact at each checkpoint, read diffs not trees, lean loads) and, in benchmarking,
happened to also do fewer review rounds — so its token saving was partly leaner context and partly
less scrutiny. This variant isolates the two: it keeps all the context hygiene but requires
full per-gate review granularity — one claim(<gate>) per gate and one independent Adversary
verdict per gate, no batching.
The point: if this variant keeps most of the token saving despite doing as many (or more) review passes than the original, then the saving is real efficiency (lower carried/reloaded context), not a reduction in adversarial scrutiny.
So vs the others:
| variant | context hygiene | review granularity |
|---|---|---|
| builder-adversary | no | as the agents choose |
| builder-adversary-min | no | as the agents choose |
| builder-adversary-stateless | yes | as the agents choose (tended to batch → fewer rounds) |
| builder-adversary-lean | yes | per-gate, enforced (no batching) |
Everything else — pattern, AI-as-adversary cold verification, the claim(/review( handoff,
machine-docs/ coordination — is identical. The agent-orchestrator-benchmark repo runs it
head-to-head with the others on the same multi-phase task.
python3 ../../agents.py status --config agents.toml
python3 ../../agents.py up --config agents.toml # needs `claude` on PATH
Prompt base: these prompts are the full original
builder-adversaryprompts plus the additions above — NOT the minimal ones — so that comparing this variant tobuilder-adversaryisolates its specific change (context hygiene / review granularity) without the minimal-prompt testing-pressure drop.