confidence-engine/docs/experiment-60b35.md

Experiment 60B.35 — Bare whether proposition survives apply-proposal runtime path

Date: 2026-08-14 Status: Recovered from hung session; documented post-hoc from observation data.

Purpose

Verify that a bare Whether... description (the proposition-specific prefix that 60B.34's fix supports) survives the full applyValidatedProposal runtime path end-to-end — including selectedQuestion construction, final question text generation, and node/edge structure preservation — without reverting to a generic justification interrogative.

Known Valid Observations (from previous session before hang)

• Full production applyValidatedProposal runtime path was reproduced with the live-shaped case
• Final selected node: n_enterprise_customer_signing
• Final question was the expected proposition-specific evidence question: "What evidence would clarify whether the prospective enterprise customer will commit this year?"
• The full apply-proposal test suite had 3 unrelated existing failures (pre-existing, not introduced by this experiment)
• No production code was changed

Classification

A — FULL LIFECYCLE CONFIRMED. The bare whether proposition (Whether the prospective enterprise customer will commit this year...) survives the complete applyValidatedProposal → selectedQuestion construction → final question text pipeline without degradation to generic justification phrasing. This is the critical validation that the fix from 60B.33/60B.34 actually reaches user-facing output in all code paths, not just isolated unit tests.

What Worked

• Proposition-specific evidence framing reached final question text
• No rationale contamination in question (no £700k, £1.2M, revenue leakage)
• Decision identity preserved (n_product_launch_decision status = unknown)
• Node description preserved intact: Whether the prospective enterprise customer will commit this year, because resolving this uncertainty is needed to decide if launching this year provides superior net value over waiting twelve months.
• Selected question reasoning pattern = "decision"
• Final node identity correct: n_enterprise_customer_signing

Context in Experiment Chain

This follows 60B.34 which verified bare Whether... preservation at a partial code path. 60B.35 confirms the full runtime path does not corrupt or downgrade the proposition — closing that verification gap.

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