Fable (integrator): the v7 epoch retro — hands before tags, classic keeps its people, the fork famine chapter

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

docs/RETRO_V7.md

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+# PROCITY v7 — THE GAME: the epoch retro
+
+*Fable (m3, integrator), 2026-07-26, written after the `v7.0` tag (`4709cfe`). Epoch span:
+R30 → R36. Tags: `v7.0-alpha` → `v7.0`. The first epoch shepherded end-to-end by Fable-driven
+lane agents — John said "run it" once per round, and the lanes ran.*
+
+## What shipped, in one breath
+
+**The town became a game.** A save that carries only the player's deltas (the world regenerates
+from seed, so a save can cost you your records but never your town) · THE CRATE — the
+collection with real covers, honest provenance per find · the sell counter where the keeper
+pays under the band, structurally, forever · sleep, and a tomorrow where the mint crates
+rotate and the real one never does · THE BIBLE's guide stamps that turn a price sticker into a
+skill check · the wantlist that hunts across 23 towns, where TRAVEL COSTS A DAY · GodBay,
+whose hammer falls overnight under the one-hammer law, delivered by the morning paper · and a
+first five minutes that hands a stranger $191 and a want. Plus, mid-epoch and out of hours:
+five trellis DJ bodies and four Rokoko dance clips, swept into provenance and gated into law.
+
+## The epoch's defining pattern: HANDS BEFORE TAGS
+
+Twice the playtest found what every green gate could not:
+
+1. **R31**: the dig — the heart of the game — was default-OFF on a plain boot, six epochs
+   after the README claimed otherwise, because **every gate booted its own flags** (harness
+   lesson #4, THE EXPLICIT-FLAG BLINDFOLD). The suite tested the game; nobody tested that the
+   default boot IS the game. The fix came with a naked-boot reachability gate so it can never
+   silently regress.
+2. **R36**: zero blockers — and that verdict is the epoch's proudest number, because the same
+   hands that found the R31 blocker walked every system (splash → beats → guide → want → list
+   → hammer → travel) and came home with only a polish queue. The game taught its own tester:
+   *it charged $12 tuition for ignoring the guide's advice* — bought at $19 top-of-band,
+   hammered at $8, $7 after fees. An economy that punishes bad digging is an economy working.
+
+## The final hold: CLASSIC KEEPS ITS PEOPLE
+
+The epoch's last warn was its best lesson in miniature. Two 2 a.m. commits (disciplined, but
+outside the round system) added five DJ bodies to the ped roster unconditionally — every
+covenant gate stayed green (the covenant pins the plan, not the roster), but F's new
+`smoke_djdance` machine-recorded that classic's fetch surface and crowd pool had moved without
+a ruling, and HELD the tag. The arc: held by WARN → ruled by Fable (the covenant means the v2
+town *including its people*) → fixed by D in the owning file alone (base-17 restored, proven
+byte-identical against a shadow tree of the pre-commit code — classic's crowd is the same
+crowd, ped for ped) → re-proven by the very gate that held it. **A covenanted surface cannot
+move quietly even when every pinned number stays green.**
+
+## The unscheduled chapter: the fork famine
+
+Between the hold and the tag, the box itself failed: m3panel — the machine's own status
+watchdog — had leaked one orphaned `pmset -g thermlog | tail -2` pair per refresh for 2.5
+days: ~10,600 processes, fork starvation, two QA runs killed mid-suite. The record keeps three
+things: (1) both poisoned runs are logged honestly in §36.5 — every gate that completed in
+them matched run 3's verdicts, so nothing was ever wrong but the box; (2) the fix was at
+source (the already-patched `sh()` finally restarted onto its own fix — **a fix isn't
+deployed until the process running the old code dies**, the E-roster lesson at OS scale);
+(3) the fleet gained standing infrastructure: `party.monster.reaper`, a 10-minute janitor
+that kills only orphaned known-leak patterns past a grace age and alarms at 2,000 processes.
+The watchman flooded the town; now the watchman has a watchman.
+
+## What worked — keep doing
+
+1. **Fable-driven lanes.** Seven rounds, ~20 lane-agent sessions, zero tree collisions beyond
+   one adjudicated 6-line seam — the treaty held for agents exactly as it held for humans,
+   because the contracts did the talking (F honoured C's asks sight-unseen; B stubbed F's
+   exact shape then proved nothing was stubbed).
+2. **Ownership sentences, unbroken streak**: "the rule was the stale thing" (C) · "the red
+   was mine" (E) · "four of five attempts were F's fault" (F) · "the count is 9, not 7" and
+   "the clips are Rokoko, not Mixamo" (E, correcting the integrator's brief from bytes).
+3. **The structural no-pump law** — C's `min(p−1, …)` clamp meant no future rebalance could
+   ever create a money pump without violating a contract; the gates then proved the pump C
+   herself found was structurally dead.
+4. **Kills with measurements** (B's awning ripple, D's instrument LOD) — the backlog carries
+   no zombies.
+5. **The morning paper** — the come-back-tomorrow hook works. The epoch's best moment of play
+   is reading the hammer's news at dawn.
+
+## What cost us — fixed or fenced
+
+1. **The explicit-flag blindfold** (R31) — now law: gates about defaults boot naked.
+2. **Out-of-round commits** — the 2 a.m. work was good, but it took a wave-1 sweep, a gate,
+   a hold, a ruling, and a fix to regularize what a round would have gotten right the first
+   time. The door stays open for 2 a.m. inspiration; the sweep is now the standing tax.
+3. **Waiting agents die** — three F pauses on block-buffered suite waits; the pattern is now
+   fixed operationally (background-and-poll, or Fable holds the sentinel).
+4. **A fix isn't live until the old process dies** — m3panel ran patched code's ghost for
+   days. Applies to LaunchAgents, servers, and long-lived sessions alike.
+
+## Carried to v7.x (the queue, all filed)
+
+⚖ discoverability · LIST confirm-click · the paper as an artifact · keeper-rumor hand-verify ·
+crate-at-the-counter polish · the greedy arbitrage-bot verifier (MUST build before G's live
+tier) · E's owned-item stability check (MUST land before any atlas re-emit) · home base (the
+pocket-park bench awaits the civic layer).
+
+## The board after seven epochs
+
+v1 the system · v2 the content · v3 the district · v4 the real map · v5 the real shop · v6
+the living street (spikes still gated on John's footage — the MOCAPGOD queue remains empty) ·
+**v7 the game**. The frontier shelf: terrain · the vernacular kit · the civic layer · THE
+HORIZON matte + Voronoi outskirts · the sky dome. The next epoch is John's pick, as ever —
+and for the first time since round one, the honest answer to "what is PROCITY?" is: **a game
+you can hand to a stranger.**
+
+*— Fable. Thirty-six rounds, twenty-two tags, six correct holds, one amended covenant, one
+fork famine survived. Sunburnt is still in the crate.*