28 September 2026. Opus 5.5 rewrote the paragraph, overview, five-page design and atlas at max. Fable 5.1 at max and Astra at ultra independently checked the same candidate against the pinned requirements. Their complete findings went back to Opus; completed max correction passes supplied the final wording. Codex assembled the changes, aligned supporting records and verified the documents. Receipts and source hashes.
Claude Code offers max rather than ultra; see the effort reference. Broad max attempts hit or approached response limits without finished text. Smaller tasks completed at max; interrupted attempts are excluded. The previous epic synthesis and its different settings remain in baseline commit 77dfa8c.
Decisions
- One meaning per term. Planning chooses work; Product means the offering. Outcome is intended benefit; Assessment compares independently checked observations with that intention. Authority grants permission; Policy governs operation within it. Evidence includes discovery observations; the Evidence store preserves them.
- Clear ownership. Planning decides retirement. Assurance owns technical Verdicts and checks outcome measurements; Operations integrates the covered Candidate and confirms identities. Customer identities and vendor operating access remain separate.
- Explicit failure behaviour. A worker Attempt differs from an external dispatch. Stable Action keys, current Authority, reconciliation and stale-worker rejection remain binding. Recovery survives its target, protects deletion before exposure and quarantines uncertain effects before dispatch.
- Useful compression. Remove duplicate glossary entries and repeated explanations. Keep detailed retirement checks in self-improvement. Show the build order without changing the 27 epic IDs or dependencies. All domains share the three foundations.
- Selective acceptance. Keep severity-based security deadlines; do not make every finding an incident. Policy may evolve within Authority. Broader Run wording retains accountable scope and pinned inputs. Model agreement never grants permission.
Applying the design to itself
This revision used a pinned baseline, explicit acceptance, a recoverable candidate, independent review and recorded corrections. The first candidate failed its actual page limits; wording was tightened without shrinking type. Codex corrected a generated link, normalised diagram labels and removed one redundant sentence that caused an overflow.
Astra's final regression check passed the safety and ownership corrections. Its remaining terminology finding was applied: the first-slice contract now calls technical proof “verification”, reserving Assessment for measured Outcomes.
All 22 rendered pages were visually inspected: overview 1, design 5, atlas 6, guideline 10. Original project constraints, epic dependencies and all six quality dimensions remain intact. This establishes document consistency, not implemented factory reliability. Pilot, operating authority/limits, targets, schedules and stack still need commissioning; personal-value calibration remains pending.