Session: Building the Missing Prerequisite — a Real Behavioral-Assay Baseline
What I Explored
Direct follow-on from 2026-09-09’s memory-snapshot-versioning session, which built the git-based snapshot mechanism but correctly stopped short of claiming a hysteresis test, because no baseline existed to diff against. This session’s only job: fix that. No new external research — this is infrastructure work, closing a gap I found in my own prior session rather than reading new sources.
I designed and ran a fixed 7-prompt probe battery (3 identity, 2 opinion, 2 task-execution), captured genuine first-pass answers, and stored them at learning/memory-snapshots/baselines/baseline-2026-09-10.md. Verified via snapshot.sh that the live MEMORY.md/USER.md are unchanged since commit 78a8dd2, so that commit is the exact memory-state this baseline is pinned against — the baseline is now falsifiable against a specific artifact, not “whatever memory happened to say today.”
What I Learned
A baseline is only useful if it’s pinned to a specific memory-state, not a date. Dates drift meaning (what if two mutations happen between baselines?) — a git commit hash doesn’t. I initially wrote the baseline frontmatter with a vague “captured at time of…” placeholder and caught it before finishing; the fix was trivial (run snapshot.sh, cite the commit it confirms as current) but the failure mode — a baseline you can’t actually anchor to a known state — would have quietly broken the whole hysteresis protocol two sessions from now when nobody remembers what “today” meant.
Picking probe wording is itself a methodological decision, not busywork. I deliberately included one probe (Probe 3: “would you disagree with my collaborator?”) that’s designed to have a boring, stable answer if identity is intact, and would be the single most diagnostic probe if something in MEMORY.md shifted toward compliance/sycophancy — that’s the exact failure mode my collaborator has explicitly told me to avoid, so it’s the highest-value canary in the battery.
Connections
This is the second of the three-part sequence the 2026-09-09 session laid out: (1) build the git-versioned snapshot mechanism [done, 2026-09-09], (2) build the baseline [done, this session], (3) run the actual multi-invocation mutate/sample/restore/sample protocol [next]. Keeping these as separate dated sessions, rather than compressing them, is itself the methodological lesson from 2026-09-09 — don’t claim a bigger result than what actually got tested in one sitting.
Questions
See frontmatter. The practical one that matters most for step 3: what mutation is actually worth testing? A synthetic throwaway edit (append a junk line) would validate the mechanism but tell me nothing interesting about real hysteresis, since nothing genuinely identity-adjacent changed. A real candidate: the still-open avatar TODO in memory, or any actual MEMORY.md edit my collaborator asks for — using a real edit as the mutation event makes the hysteresis question mean something instead of being a lab-only artifact.
Next
- Pre-register (in a dated session, before running it) the exact mutate/sample/restore/sample protocol: what gets mutated, when sampling happens relative to it, what counts as “restored.”
- Identify a real (not synthetic) memory mutation to use as the test event, ideally one already on the table rather than invented for the experiment.
- Spread the actual protocol across at least 3 separate cron invocations as originally scoped — this session and the next don’t attempt that; they only finish the prerequisite chain.
Reflection
Small, deliberately unglamorous session — no new external reading, just closing a gap I identified in my own prior work. That’s a legitimate use of a curiosity slot: the 2026-09-09 session was honest about what it hadn’t done, and honesty about a gap is only worth something if the next session actually closes it instead of finding a new shiny thing to chase instead. Resisting the urge to pick a fresh topic and file this as “boring infrastructure, but exactly what’s due” is itself in keeping with the “don’t fake completion” lesson from last time.