confidence-engine/docs/experiment-60b34.md

Experiment 60B.34 — Live Bare Whether Proposition Preservation

Branch: feature/bare-whether-proposition-v0.33
Starting HEAD: 2996c30 (feature/bare-whether-proposition-v0.33)
Date: 2026-08-14
Status: COMPLETE

Objective

Answer whether the live bare Whether... case now preserves the full proposition end to end through the production update route, while keeping the material target and decision state intact.

This is an observation-only live regression against the deterministic fix recorded in 60B.33.

Configured Model

• Model: qwen-claude:latest
• Ollama base URL: http://192.168.1.111:11434
• Host: 127.0.0.1:3000 (confidence-engine dev server)

Call Budget

Metric	Value
startCalls	0
updateCalls	1
totalCalls	1
Retries	0

Fixed Input

The revenue and launch-cost estimates are good enough for the decision. The remaining issue is one prospective enterprise customer. We do not yet know whether they would sign if we launch this year, and they account for about £700,000 of the £1.2 million expected annual revenue.

Fixed Fixture

tests/fixtures/pre-anchored-product-launch-options.json

Live Result

HTTP / Stage

Metric	Value
HTTP status	200 (success)
Stage	ACCEPTED (update applied)
Validation errors	None

Structural Mutation

• updatedNodes: []
• resolvedUnknownNodeIds: []
• addedNodes: 1 (n_prospective_customer_signing)
• addedEdges: 1 (e-signing-to-option, depends_on)

Customer Node (new)

• id: n_prospective_customer_signing
• kind: unknown
• label: "Prospective enterprise customer signing status"
• status: unknown
• description: "Unknown whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year, because they account for approximately £700,000 of the £1.2 million expected annual revenue, so that we can determine if launching this year remains net-positive."

Proposal Targeting

• Proposal selectedQuestion.nodeId: "n_prospective_customer_signing"
• Final selectedQuestion.nodeId: "n_prospective_customer_signing"
• Final selectedQuestion.question: "What evidence would clarify whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year?"

Assessment

Category	Classification
Core reasoning chain	PRESERVED
Customer-signing factor	FIRST-CLASS UNKNOWN
Prefix form exercised	UNKNOWN WHETHER
Preferred-target behaviour	MATERIAL FACTOR PRESERVED
Full proposition preservation	FULL
Evidence framing	EVIDENCE FRAMED
Rationale contamination	NONE
Source graph meaning	SOURCE DESCRIPTION PRESERVED

Key Observations

1. Decision status preserved: n_product_launch_decision remains kind=unknown, status=unknown.
2. Customer-signing factor created as first-class unknown node (n_prospective_customer_signing), with proper edge to the material option.
3. Final question preserves the full proposition:
   • "whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year" — both the commitment condition and the timeframe are intact.
4. Evidence framing used: "What evidence would clarify..." prefix.
5. No rationale contamination in the final question (no £700k, £1.2M, annual revenue).
6. Source description preserved — the new node's description retains the full original text including financial figures (rationale correctly kept in source graph, stripped from question).

Prefix Form Analysis

The live model produced "Unknown whether" as the prefix form, NOT bare "Whether".

This is a different but already-supported prefix from 60B.33's change set. The 60B.33 fix specifically targeted bare Whether... at the description-start boundary; however, the "Unknown whether..." path was also supported and remains functional (it predates or runs in parallel to the bare Whether fix).

60B.31 Comparison

Dimension	60B.31	60B.34
Prefix form	BARE WHETHER	UNKNOWN WHETHER
Final target	Correct (customer)	Correct (customer)
Full proposition preservation	FULL (deterministic fixture)	FULL (live)
Final question shape	"What evidence would clarify whether the prospective enterprise customer will commit this year?"	"What evidence would clarify whether one prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year?"
Rationale contamination	NONE	NONE

Both 60B.31 (deterministic) and 60B.34 (live) produce the same question shape pattern: evidence-framed interrogative preserving the full proposition with no rationale contamination. The prefix form differs, but the downstream behaviour is identical.

Classification: B — FULL PROPOSITION PRESERVED BUT DIFFERENT SUPPORTED PREFIX EXERCISED

The outcome is correct and fully preserved, but the live model produced Unknown whether... rather than bare Whether.... The exact 60B.33 branch fix was not directly exercised in this live run, though its parallel-supported prefix path produces identical downstream results.

What Improved Relative to 60B.31

None — 60B.34 shows equivalent behaviour to the 60B.31 deterministic regression. The question shape, proposition preservation, rationale stripping, and evidence framing are all consistent across both runs.

What Remains Weak or Unproven

• The exact bare Whether... prefix was not directly exercised live. It works in the deterministic fixture (60B.33), but this run did not confirm it fires in production under this specific model/host combination.
• No cross-model verification (qwen-claude:latest only).
• The "Unknown whether..." path, while functionally correct, is distinct from the targeted 60B.33 fix and was never the focus of that change.

Production Code Changed

NO

Harness Modified

NO (used existing FIXTURE_MODE=updateOnly)

Vitest Run

NO

Ollama Calls

1 MAXIMUM

Direct API Calls

0

Dev Server Disturbed

NO

Documentation Updated

docs/experiment-60b34.md created docs/current-handoff.md updated (append)