2026-07-20Write-up published

Carried state, not briefing

This is the registration that started the series. The claim under test: an AI system that carries internal state between sessions behaves measurably differently from the same system merely briefed on what happened. Three arms in the original design. One carried its state through a real six hour gap with the state decaying on a published schedule. One was handed the full transcript. One was handed a summary.

Pass criteria were locked before the first API call: effect size threshold, significance threshold, sample size, scoring rules, and the conditions under which the run would void itself. Two runs came back honest nulls, a third voided on a content leak, and the redesign that finally produced an interpretable result replaced the briefed arms with something stricter: the individual’s own zeroed baseline, no transcript anywhere in the design. That result lives in its own entry.

Primary documents

  • T1 protocol (TESTS.md excerpt) (available on request)
  • Freeze tables and fork sheets (M2, M3) (available on request)

Reading