D080 - The loop has an objective function

decided · 2026-08-19 · prompted by the user

The question was whether a fresh agent on a fresh machine could just be told ./orbistoun.sh run <title> and have the work be self-evident. Nearly - and finding the gaps was the useful part.

The loop had no measure of success. It said what a guest wanted; it said nothing about whether a change helped. Without a before-and-after, an iterative process is repetition: you can change something, run again, and have no way to tell which direction you moved. That is not a documentation problem, it is a missing number.

The number is where the guest died. A call trace now records the faulting instruction, and a run compares it to the previous one:

progress
  FURTHER  image+0x13514 -> image+0x1a4c20
  imports  31 distinct (+2), 402 calls (+65)

An instruction pointer that moved forward means the guest executed code it could not reach before, and nothing else in a run reports that as directly. Surviving where it used to fault counts as the strongest forward signal there is. BACK is reported just as plainly, because a change that makes things worse is worth knowing about immediately rather than three changes later.

Deterministic in the way that matters: an unchanged tree gives the same fault address and the same counts, so any movement is attributable to something that actually changed.

Two supporting gaps closed at the same time.

./orbistoun.sh doctor says whether a machine can do the work and what is missing. Discovering that one failure at a time - a toolchain error, then a missing tool, then an empty directory - is how a two-minute setup takes an hour.
CLAUDE.md now opens with three commands rather than a pointer at eighty decisions. The decision log is a reference, not an introduction, and telling someone to read it first was telling them to read the appendix before the book.

What is still not automatic, and should be said plainly: implementing a function is work, not a command. The loop identifies the wall, measures whether you moved it, and keeps the record - it does not write the implementation, and nothing here pretends it will.