confidence-engine/docs/experiment-60b23.md

Experiment 60B.23 — Narrow decision-audience routing to genuine audience-identity uncertainty

Branch: feature/question-family-specificity-v0.29
Date: 2026-08-13
Status: COMPLETE
Type: BOUNDED IMPLEMENTATION

Objective

Implement the smallest deterministic narrowing so proposition-specific decision unknowns containing audience nouns do not get hijacked by the generic decision_audience route.

The target regression from 60B.21 / 60B.22 was:

label:
Prospective enterprise customer signing status

description:
Uncertainty about whether the prospective enterprise customer will sign if we launch this year, so that its resolution is needed to decide which timing option provides superior net value.

This should not be treated as audience discovery merely because customer appears in the text.

60B.22 diagnosis carried forward

60B.22 established two linked causes:

1. selectQuestionFamily() routed any decision-pattern node containing customer|user|buyer|stakeholder|recipient|audience into decision_audience via first-match early return.
2. extractMeaning() also genericised any such noun occurrence into the relevant customer, user, or value recipient, bypassing the underlying unresolved proposition.

The implementation boundary for 60B.23 was therefore:

audience-family routing depends on the semantic role of the audience term, not mere lexical presence.

Exact semantic narrowing implemented

1. Audience-family routing now requires explicit audience-identity phrasing

Added a shared deterministic helper in lib/graph/question-formulator.js:

• hasAudienceIdentityQuestion(text)

This fires only for explicit audience-identity forms such as:

• Who is the target customer?
• Which buyers are we building this for?
• Who would receive the value?
• Which audience should this serve?
• Who experiences this problem?

It does not fire merely because a customer/user/buyer/stakeholder/recipient noun appears as the subject of another proposition.

2. Proposition-preserving extraction now prefers explicit whether... descriptions for status-like labels

When the label is a nominal status phrase (status, likelihood, probability, chance, risk, uncertainty) and the description begins with:

Uncertainty about whether ...

extractMeaning() now returns the explicit whether ... proposition directly instead of the nominal label phrase.

This preserves proposition-specific meaning for cases like:

• customer will sign
• customer will renew
• users will adopt the change
• stakeholder will approve the plan

without hardcoding any product-launch wording.

3. Decision threshold routing no longer preempts proposition-specific whether ... decision unknowns

Within decision-pattern family selection, if extracted meaning is already a whether ... proposition, the node stays on decision_evidence_clarification rather than being diverted into decision_threshold_outcome.

4. Legitimate audience questions remain valid through post-build validation

The formulated audience question still resolves to the decision_audience family and survives existing question validation. No prompt, schema, provider, or targeting logic changed.

Behaviour preserved

Legitimate audience-discovery cases preserved

True audience-identity questions still route to decision_audience.

60B.20 direct interrogative behaviour preserved

Existing direct proposition-style interrogatives such as:

Will our largest client leave if we relocate?

remain unchanged and still produce direct proposition-specific wording.

Focused test results

Dedicated question-formulator suite

npx vitest run tests/graph/question-formulator.test.js

Result: PASS (25/25)

Covered:

• 60B.21 signing-status regression
• legitimate audience identity preservation
• customer-as-subject non-audience case
• user-as-subject non-audience case
• buyer/stakeholder lexical mention non-audience case
• existing direct interrogative preservation

Smallest broader regression suite containing decision-family tests

npx vitest run tests/graph/question-formulator.test.js tests/graph/question-formulation-v0.24.test.js

Result: PASS (45/45)

What is now guaranteed

1. Raw audience/customer/user/etc. noun occurrence is no longer sufficient to trigger decision_audience.
2. decision_audience now requires that audience identity itself be unresolved.
3. Proposition-specific decision unknowns with audience nouns can preserve their unresolved proposition into the final question.
4. Existing audience-discovery questions still route to the audience family.
5. Existing interrogative direct-question behaviour remains unchanged.
6. No schema, prompt, apply-proposal, question-target selection, materiality, compatibility, provider, or harness logic changed.

What remains unproven until live rerun

Still unproven until the exact 60B.21 live product-launch regression is rerun:

• whether the live model-selected node + final deterministic wording path now yields the expected proposition-specific question in the full end-to-end launch-timing case.

Production code changed

YES — lib/graph/question-formulator.js

Tests changed

YES — tests/graph/question-formulator.test.js

Prompt changed

NO

Schema changed

NO

Apply-proposal changed

NO

Question-target selection changed

NO

Materiality changed

NO

Reasoning-context compatibility changed

NO

Provider changed

NO

Harness changed

NO

Ollama calls

0

Live API calls

0

Full suite run

NO