PROCITY/docs/RETRO_V7.md

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.