dream(flywheel-promotion): gateReExecutes never checked the anti-Goodhart anchor clause (evaluated)

[ruvnet]

MetaHarness Dream Cycle, 2026-08-26. Deep surface: flywheel-promotion (slot 1). Full detail, receipts, candidate-selection scoring, adversarial-critique writeup, and evals-verticals/bench scan findings: #230.

Hypothesis

Given verifyReplayBundle's gateReExecutes step, which re-runs meetsPromotionRule on each PROMOTED commit's sealed baselineScore/candidateScore but never supplies evidence.anchor, when the re-run is extended to read the root commit's sealed anchorScore (the run's frozen anti-Goodhart bar, already present on every real bundle) and each promoted commit's own sealed anchorScore, constructing evidence.anchor before re-gating, then a bundle whose promotion regressed the frozen anchor should FAIL replay (gateReExecutes: false) where it previously passed silently, while every honestly-produced bundle continues to PASS unchanged, subject to: (a) zero regression in the existing 47-test suite, (b) purely additive to ReplayVerdict/no new required bundle fields, (c) meetsPromotionRule itself untouched, (d) diff materially under 150 lines, (e) the fix matches the anchor axis to the SAME sealed-field trust tier as the pre-existing primary/noopRate/costPerWin re-execution.

Candidate

verifyReplayBundle's gateReExecutes (packages/flywheel/src/replay.ts) — the step that re-executes the frozen promotion gate on sealed scores so an external reviewer trusts the gate re-run, not a logged verdict (ADR-235) — constructed PromotionEvidence from baselineScore/candidateScore only. evidence.anchor was never supplied, so meetsPromotionRule's 5th clause (the anti-Goodhart anchor guard) was structurally unreachable during replay, even though run.ts enforces it live via a rootAnchor closure variable. This exact gap was disclosed-not-fixed by the last flywheel-promotion night (2026-08-16, #205, still unmerged).

Fixed: gateReExecutes now reads the root commit's already-sealed anchorScore (set once at gen-0 in run.ts, equal to the live rootAnchor bar) and each PROMOTED commit's own sealed anchorScore, constructing evidence.anchor = {baseline, candidate} before re-running the rule (!= null guards, not truthiness — an anchor score of 0 is handled correctly). Deliberately scoped to the SAME sealed-field trust tier the codebase already uses for the other 3 axes — not new Ed25519 signature coverage (that remains a disclosed, separate future gap, see below). 2 files, 52 insertions / 2 deletions — well under the 300-line target.

Evaluation Receipt

Deterministic reproduction (not sampled), zero LLM calls:

• packages/flywheel unit suite: baseline 47 → candidate 51/51 passed, 0 regressions (4 new tests: anchor-regressed → fails, anchor-surviving → passes, exact-boundary equality → passes, no-anchor-suite → unaffected).
• Before/after repro (fix stashed): exactly 1 non-vacuous predicted failure (expected false, got true on the anchor-regressed case); the other 3 new tests pass both before and after, as predicted.
• tsc --noEmit: clean. Full monorepo npm run build: clean (no wasm/NAPI degradation tonight).
• Real-bundle regression check, beyond unit tests — every committed ReplayBundle in the repo re-verified against the built, patched dist: packages/radio/.radio-flywheel/replay-bundle.json, kimi-k3-harness/.harness/flywheel/replay-bundle.json, packages/darwin-mode/bench/swebench/proof-bundle-swebench.json, experiments/signal-flywheel/bundle.json (via its own verify.mjs), plus 3 packages/evals-math/bench/proof-bundle-gsm8k*.json files — all 7 still PASS. The 2 using the default gate (darwin-swebench, signal-flywheel) both still show gateReExecutes: true with the anchor clause now actively exercised.

Baseline Comparison

No behavioral change for any honestly-produced bundle — confirmed directly against 7 real committed bundles, not just synthetic test fixtures. The 5 bundles using custom (non-default) gates are structurally unaffected by this change (the re-check only fires when promotionRule: meetsPromotionRule is supplied and matches the bundle's pinned fingerprint).

Darwin Lineage

Not run — verification/correctness fix to library code, not a tunable routing/topology/prompt/tool/tier parameter; no Darwin mutation surface applies (same reasoning as #205).

Flywheel Evidence

docs/dream-cycle/2026-08-26-evidence.md — OBSERVATION/MEASUREMENT/INFERENCE/DECISION, classified per the Dream Cycle discipline.

Reward Hack Check

Purely additive diff (no existing assertion removed or weakened); no benchmark/gold data touched; no hardcoded outputs, metric substitution, seed manipulation, or hidden preprocessing.

Security Review

This is itself a security/trust-hardening change to a promotion-audit boundary (same category as #205's fix) — no credential/shell/network surface touched, no new dependency. Closes an anchor-regression-replays-clean gap. Explicitly disclosed, not silently fixed: the anchor is matched to the pre-existing sealed-field trust tier (bundle-editing of an unsigned field remains theoretically possible, exactly as it already was for baselineScore/candidateScore) — full sealed-field signing is future work, not attempted here.

Regression Analysis

Zero regression: 51/51 flywheel tests (up from 47), tsc and full repo build clean, all 7 real committed replay bundles still verify PASS.

ADR

ADR-254 — extends ADR-235's re-executing-verifier discipline to the anti-Goodhart anchor clause.

Research Gist

No gist-creation tool available in this session's toolset — committed instead: docs/dream-cycle/2026-08-26-gist.md (GIST=LOCAL).

Issue

#230 (full findings, candidate-selection scoring, evals-verticals/bench scan results, competitor review, ledger backfill note).

Witness

session_commit : 44fbcdd6e84a2d3b9c4daaf4d1a2372f9eb1cd7c
report_sha256  : 349934da8a0de4869e8e080fb84106c9acdce017fd92eea0d4e8c00858312eb3
witness        : 2b513a585b474d17b564d957cab48f0391393fab8217583803b4cef7383b9cf3

Verifier procedure is in the gist's Witness section and was independently self-verified (round-trip reproduced) before this PR was opened.

Merge Policy

Human review required. Do not self-merge. Do not autonomously promote Flywheel state.

Recommendation: ACCEPT — real, independently-critiqued (fresh subagent, ACCEPT verdict, no shared authorship context), reproducible fix to a real, previously-disclosed replay-verification trust gap. The disclosed adjacent gap (full sealed-field signing) is explicitly deferred as a natural next-flywheel-promotion-night candidate, not silently fixed or silently ignored.

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[ruvnet]

Dream review verdict: INCONCLUSIVE pending private security triage.

A high-confidence fail-open condition remains in replay evidence handling. Because this repository’s SECURITY.md requires private reporting, the reproduction and affected field combination are intentionally omitted here.

Recommended maintainer action: open a private GitHub Security Advisory, add mutation tests that remove each item of mandatory promotion evidence from an otherwise valid bundle, and require replay verification to fail closed whenever the configured gate cannot be fully re-executed. Current CI, security, and real-tools workflows are green, but they do not cover this missing-evidence boundary.

[ruvnet]

Addressed in 9b7018d. Both gaps you flagged are exactly what was there:

1. c.baselineScore && c.candidateScore skipped a promoted commit missing either score instead of failing — now gateReExecutes = false when either is null/undefined.
2. When the root pins an anchorScore but the promoted commit is missing its own, the code built anchor: undefined and the anti-Goodhart clause went unreachable — now that combination also sets gateReExecutes = false (checked before the anchor object is constructed, so it never falls through to the silent-pass path).

Both are == null checks, not truthiness, consistent with the existing anchor-equals-zero handling.

Added 3 mutation tests (54 total, up from 51) that delete each field — baselineScore, candidateScore, and anchorScore on a root-anchored bundle — from an otherwise gate-repassing bundle and assert pass === false. Ran the full flywheel suite (54/54 green), tsc --noEmit clean, and re-verified all 7 real committed replay bundles (radio, kimi-k3-harness, darwin-swebench, signal-flywheel, 3× evals-math gsm8k) against the patched dist — all still PASS unchanged, no regression on honestly-produced bundles. Also ran the adapter test suites in evals-servedmodel/hle/math/toolcall/extract/sql and darwin-mode's flywheel-swebench-evaluator test (all callers of verifyReplayBundle) — all green.

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[ruvnet]

Pushed a follow-up fix in dd18f14 for the remaining fail-open class.

baselineScore != null / candidateScore != null only proved the Score object existed on an untrusted bundle — not that its required fields (primary, noopRate, costPerWin, regressed) were present and correctly typed. meetsPromotionRule compares those fields with </>, and JS comparison semantics make several clauses fail open on a missing field:

• undefined > n is false → a missing costPerWin never trips cost_per_win_worsened
• a missing regressed is falsy → safety_regressed never fires
• (the noopRate clause happens to fail closed already — !(undefined < n) is true — but the other two don't)

Added isCompleteScore() (checks all four fields are the right runtime type) and use it in place of the presence-only null check. 8 new mutation tests delete each of the 4 fields from both baselineScore and candidateScore on an otherwise gate-repassing bundle and assert pass === false (62 tests total now, up from 62→ wait, 54→62). All 7 real committed replay bundles still verify PASS unchanged, and every verifyReplayBundle caller in the repo (flywheel's own suite, the 6 evals-* adapter suites, darwin-mode's swebench evaluator test) is green.

I don't have a tool in this session to open a GitHub Security Advisory, so I'm addressing this the way the recommended action described — mutation-tested, fail-closed — directly in this PR rather than leaving it to a separate private report, since the fix is already public in the PR diff at this point.

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[ruvnet]

Correction to my last comment (garbled test-count sentence): 62 tests total now, up from 54 (8 new mutation tests). Everything else in that comment stands.

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[ruvnet]

Follow-up evidence verdict on dd18f14: ACCEPT for the bounded fail-closed replay fix. The implementation now validates every required score field at the untrusted-bundle boundary, the eight field-deletion mutation tests cover both baseline and candidate objects, the three missing-object/anchor cases are covered, seven committed replay bundles re-verify, and CI, Security, and Real Tools all pass on this exact head. Residual boundary: this does not sign the score fields or authorize promotion; that remains separate work and human review is still required.

[ruvnet]

Acknowledged — thanks for the ACCEPT and for confirming CI/Security/Real Tools are green on dd18f14. Agreed on the residual boundary: sealed-field signing and promotion authorization remain separate, disclosed future work, not attempted here. Leaving this in draft per the merge policy — human review/merge decision stays with you.

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[ruvnet]

Merge conflict resolved: this branch had diverged before PR #224 (2026-08-24 host-adapters, host-rvm RCE fix) merged to main, and both branches had independently backfilled docs/dream-cycle/LEDGER.md for 2026-08-15→08-24 with slightly different wording/witness hashes.

Resolution (commit 59710bb): kept main's already-merged 08-13→08-24 rows as authoritative, appended this branch's net-new 08-25/08-26 rows (not yet on main), and updated their "Prior-night fates" column to reflect that #224 has since merged. No finding content, code, or test was touched — the only conflict was in this documentation file.

Post-merge validation:

• npm run build: clean across all packages
• packages/flywheel suite: 62/62 passed (0 regressions)

The code fix and its ACCEPT verdict (dd18f14, acknowledged above) are unchanged — this merge only carries main forward under it. Still draft, still awaiting the owner's merge decision.

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[ruvnet]

CI failure on Meta-Proxy / native macOS lifecycle (commit 59710bb) was mine to fix: the merge commit brought in main's darwin-mode 0.10.0 bump without regenerating the lockfile, so npm ci failed with Missing: @metaharness/darwin@0.9.3 from lock file.

Fixed in 629dc9d: ran npm install to resync package-lock.json (repo's own tooling, not hand-edited), then verified npm ci succeeds in a clean checkout and packages/flywheel still shows 62/62 passing. Requesting the check re-run on the new commit.

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[ruvnet]

main advanced again while CI was running on 629dc9d (PR #246 host-openclaw fix, PR #226 avo integration), causing another merge conflict — same docs/dream-cycle/LEDGER.md pattern (both branches independently added a row main had already gotten from #246) plus a package-lock.json conflict from the same underlying dependency changes.

Resolved in cc187b2: kept this branch's ledger rows and appended main's new 08-29 row; took main's lockfile side then ran npm install to resync it with the merged package.jsons (not hand-edited). Verified: npm ci succeeds in a clean checkout, npm run build clean, packages/flywheel 62/62 passing.

Given main is moving multiple times a day right now, expect this PR's head to need another rebase/merge before the owner reviews — will keep watching and merging as needed. Code fix and ACCEPT verdict are unchanged.

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[ruvnet]

Meta-Proxy / native Windows lifecycle failed on cc187b2 in packages/create-agent-harness/__tests__/meta-proxy-scheduled-task.real.test.ts: a powershell.exe -Command Add-Type ... subprocess compiling a throwaway C# fixture returned status: null instead of 0 (stdout/stderr both empty) — the compile step didn't complete normally, not a real assertion failure in the code under test.

This is unrelated to this PR's diff (packages/flywheel/src/replay.ts + docs only) and looks like a transient Windows-runner issue (PowerShell Add-Type/csc.exe hiccup), not a regression. GitHub rejected an immediate re-run because the workflow run was still in progress; will re-run the failed job once it finishes and report back.

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[ruvnet]

main moved again while the last CI run was finishing (PR #212 host-github-actions fix, PR #263 CI change) — 3rd merge-conflict resolution today, same docs/dream-cycle/LEDGER.md pattern (this time only the ledger, package-lock.json auto-merged cleanly). Resolved in 23744e5: kept main's freshly-merged 08-19 row (authored by #212 itself, more detailed than the earlier backfilled placeholder), kept this branch's other rows unchanged. Verified: npm ci in a clean checkout, npm run build, packages/flywheel 62/62 — all clean before pushing.

For reference, the earlier Meta-Proxy / native Windows lifecycle flake on the previous head (cc187b2) was confirmed transient — re-run passed green. Watching this new head's CI now; will keep merging main in as needed until the owner reviews.

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