The support-maturity honesty fence

“Supported” is one fuzzy word collapsing a whole ladder — none / loads / runs / correct / optimized / SOTA-parity / beyond-SOTA. The support-maturity epic (#1243) turns that fuzz into a graded, ordered ladder (M0 none → M1 fenced → M2 loads → M3 runs → M4 correct → M5 optimized → M6 SOTA-parity → M7 beyond-SOTA) so a 10,000-step optimization loop is never pointed at something actually at “loads.” A ladder is only as honest as the rule that moves a cell up it. This page is that rule.

The commitment is one sentence: a support rung is an envelope with a witness, not a promise — a cell sits at the highest rung a non-author witness confirms, and not one rung higher. This is the net-true-value rubric (which grades a gain) and the observer-effect contract (which grades a cost number), turned on a third kind of claim: how mature is this support? Same provenance vocabulary, same “no number a participant can move by narrating it,” pointed at the ladder.

This is not a new gate. It is the name for a discipline the repo already runs in pieces — the internal/shipgate non-forgeable keep-bit, the internal/covmatrix OracleInCI / StaleUnwitnessed witness state, the internal/supportmaturityscore live re-derivation, and the provenance labels the conflation scorecard already enforces. The table at the end binds each fence rule to the stick that mechanizes it.

The three rules

Rule 1 — no self-reported promotion

A cell’s rung rises only on a witness its own author did not write. This is the one rule no prior auto-improver enforced, and internal/shipgate already implements it for the RSI loop: a candidate is KEEP-bound only when a witness the candidate’s author did not write confirms a strict metric gain — otherwise REVERT. The keep/revert decision is a typed verdict derived from the measurement, never from the candidate’s own claim (the “non-forgeable keep-bit”).

Applied to the ladder: a cell advances to M4 (correct) only on a CI-runnable oracle (covmatrix.OracleInCI), to M5 (optimized) only on a committed bench a third party can re-run, to M6 (SOTA-parity) only on the baseline-letter discipline of BENCHMARK-AUTHORITY.md. An author’s own “this is M6” is not a promotion event; it is a hypothesis awaiting a non-author witness. The author proposes the rung; the witness disposes of it.

Rule 2 — a rung can drop

Promotion is hard; demotion is free. supportmaturityscore.Build() recomputes every rung from covmatrix.Grid() on each run — it never latches a prior SUPPORTED. So when a witness regresses (a test goes red) or goes stale (covmatrix.StaleUnwitnessed: “SUPPORTED but no CI oracle — accelerated path runs, numeric claim unwitnessed in CI”), the next scorecard run reads the lower rung with no human in the loop and no override.

This asymmetry is the load-bearing design: a ladder where rungs only ever rise is a wish-list with timestamps. A ladder where any witness loss drops the cell — while a rise demands a fresh non-author witness — is a measurement. A correct-but-slow cell that loses its bench is honestly back at M4, not still flying an M5 flag.

Rule 3 — every rung carries a provenance label

Every rung carries one of the same closed labels net-true-value Q4 and observer-effect require, now read as what kind of evidence stands under this rung:

Label The rung rests on Can it raise a rung?
WITNESSED a fact fak authored and a third party can re-derive — a CI oracle, a committed bench, a passing test Yes — the only label that attains a rung
OBSERVED a value relayed from an external party fak does not control — an upstream “it’s supported”, a third-party benchmark No — it can describe a cell, but it is their witness, not fak’s
MODELED a deterministic projection — a roofline estimate, an author’s expectation, “should be M5 once the fast-path lands” No — it names a target rung, never an attained one

The rule that follows: a cell sits at its highest WITNESSED rung. An OBSERVED or MODELED claim above that is recorded as a target, never as the cell’s position. A MODELED “M6” sitting over a WITNESSED M4 is a cell at M4 with an M6 target — not a cell at M6.

The witness — the M6-author-only fixture

The fence is provable, not just stated. The binding invariant the code half (internal/supportmaturity, the C1 ladder + C2 witness binding) must satisfy:

A fixture cell that claims M6 with author-only evidence (no non-author witness — its support label is therefore MODELED, an author projection) is held at its witnessed rung — the highest rung an actual non-author witness confirms (e.g. M4 from a CI oracle). The provenance label is asserted on every cell, never absent.

Two assertions, one per failure mode: the held-rung assertion proves Rule 1 (the author-only claim did not promote the cell); the label-on-every-cell assertion proves Rule 3 (no rung is unlabeled, so no claim can smuggle itself in as “just supported”). Rule 2 is witnessed by internal/supportmaturityscore’s existing test that the debt count re-derives from the live grid each run.

How this is encountered by default

The fence is reachable today from INDEX.md, listed directly beside its two sibling standards (net-true-value and observer-effect), and is pinned as epic #1243’s honesty contract — Definition-of-Done item 8, “the honesty fence holds (no self-reported promotion; labels).” Two further placements are the named follow-on; this page does not yet claim them as present, because the fence forbids reporting an un-landed placement as attained:

Rule → stick

Fence rule Stick that mechanizes it State
1 · No self-reported promotion internal/shipgate non-forgeable keep-bit (non-author witness ⇒ KEEP); covmatrix.OracleInCI; BENCHMARK-AUTHORITY baseline letters enforced for the RSI loop; binding into the ladder is the C2 follow-on (#1245)
2 · A rung can drop supportmaturityscore.Build() re-derives from covmatrix.Grid() each run (no latch); covmatrix.StaleUnwitnessed demotes a stale oracle enforced
3 · Provenance label on every rung the WITNESSED / OBSERVED / MODELED vocabulary; the conflation scorecard enforces WITNESSED-vs-OBSERVED separation vocabulary enforced; per-rung label is the C1 follow-on (#1244)

Honest fences