10 — Rollout and validation

Phases are ordered by the research's risk/reach ladder (measure → protect → write-time compress → retrieve → output → route → memory), each gated by the harness before the next activates. Nothing ships to a role's default until its arm clears the acceptance bar on that role's own workload.

Phases

P0 — Measure (no mutation). jackin-context crate with L0 only: ledger, JSONL ingestion (message.id dedup), observation attribution, cache-bust detector, thinking estimator, ctx doctor, CI token-budget linter, TUI panel. Default-on for all roles (JACKIN_CTX_MEASURE_ONLY). Deliverable: every capsule knows its own Bash-vs-native-read split, cache health, and thinking share — the three numbers that decide everything downstream. Also: baseline windows recorded per role for later A/Bs.

P1 — Protect (negative-cost set). Guard lines + subagent model/effort pins + report-register contracts in generated agent config; excludeDynamicSections + spawn stagger/pre-warm in the orchestrator; conflict probe (INV-8); cache-bust alerts live. All items are the dossier's S-tier negative-cost set — no quality risk, no A/B needed beyond screening. The model pins are now load-bearing, not belt-and-braces: since Claude Code 2.1.198 the Explore subagent inherits the session model instead of defaulting to Haiku, so cheap exploration exists only because the engine generates explicit pins.

P2 — Observation pipeline. Shims + classifier + TOML filter corpus + crushers + never-worse guard + CCR archive + recovery footers. A/B arms: measure-only vs +shims (vs RTK-binary arm for the subsumption claim). Acceptance: ≥20% tool-result-token cut on shell-visible traffic at success/bounce parity.

P3 — Retrieval. fff + sem + mq embedded; ctx_* verbs registered; read-stub cache + delta-fills; doctrine section in role instructions. A/B: +read-verbs vs P2 (vs headroom-MCP and lean-ctx faithful-arm external arms). Acceptance: tokens-per-solved-task ≥20% down on read-heavy tasks, native-read share and bounce rate improving, net-of-injection.

P4 — Output pack. Register levels (default terse), codebook (opt-in), canary gate + online judge + holdout. First harness run doubles as the missing register-vs-agentic-quality benchmark.

P5 — Routing and lanes. Effort tiering per task class (harness produces the per-level curve first), advisor wiring, batch lane, quota prober + tasks-per-cap display, budget governors. Highest-multiplier, highest-risk items last, each behind confirmation-grade (n=30) validation per role.

P6 — Memory. Knowledge notes + handoff files + net accounting; only after P2–P3 ledgers exist to measure against.

Role manifest surface (sketch)

New versioned [context] table in jackin.role.toml (one schema bump, 5 artifacts per PRERELEASE):

[context]
mode = "standard"        # off | measure | standard | aggressive (register+routing active)
languages = ["rust", "toml", "markdown"]   # grammar/features linked into indexes

[context.output]
register = "terse"       # off | terse | compact | register
codebook = false

[context.routing]
effort_default = "high"
subagent_model = "haiku"  # exploration-class agents
advisor = true
batch_lane = true

[context.filters]
extra = ["filters/role.toml"]   # role-repo TOML filters, content-hash trusted

Env kill switches override per launch; jackin load --ctx=off for instant bisection. Pilot vehicle: the-architect role (already the fff/codedb pilot), whose third-party stack (RTK binary + headroom MCP + fff/codedb MCP servers + caveman guidance) becomes the engine's external comparison arms and, on success, is retired in favor of the native pack. The pxpipe proxy arm runs separately on the pilot's gist-tolerant task slices only — never in the same lane as the headroom arm (both mutate message history; stacking hazard per tools hub 17).

Validation program

1. Per-phase A/Bs as above (techniques 16 — Validation Harness: the No-Quality-Loss Proof Protocol protocol; batch-lane execution; canaries in every round).
2. The cross-tool harness (tools hub 09 — Gaps, open questions, and the next-research brief's highest-value open deliverable): Native / engine-P2 / engine-P3 / engine-full / RTK / headroom-MCP / lean-ctx(faithful) / caveman+RTK stack / pxpipe proxy arm (gist-tolerant workloads only, allowlisted models, never stacked with headroom on the history region — tools hub 17) — first controlled multi-arm numbers, published back into the research hub.
3. Continuous: online canaries, bust alerts, bounce-rate regression tripwires, ctx doctor --gate in CI, monthly platform-drift re-audit (prefix mass, schema mass — the ±70k/5-days lesson).
4. Docs gates per PR: roadmap item freshness, this spec updated as design decisions land, behavioral spec (INV table) added under developer-reference/specs when implementation starts.

Risks