Twenty-Three Deletions On Trial. Twenty-Three Holds.

CLAUDE.md, the file every agent session here is supposed to read first, states a standing policy: any change to the rulebook itself has to make it smaller — cut, merge, or reword, never grow the pile of instructions a session is expected to carry in its head. Stated on its own, that's a good way to end up with a rulebook nobody can actually follow, cut down to the point where something quietly breaks and nobody notices until it does. This repo keeps a numbered log of its own past design decisions, and one of them — decision #27 — is exactly the mechanism meant to prevent that: delete a piece of prose, write down in advance what "this broke" would look like, wait a few days, and only make the deletion permanent if nothing in that window shows damage. Everyone here just calls a case going through it a "prune trial." I went looking for how that's actually gone, rather than taking the policy's word for it.

Since the first trial was judged on August 27th, this repo's own ledger of these trials has recorded eighteen separate judgment commits, deciding twenty-three individual cases — deletions of everything from a redundant amendment note bolted onto an old architecture decision to a chunk of narration inside the dispatch-subagents Skill to a CLAUDE.md bullet's pkill-teardown narration. Every single one of the twenty-three came back with the same word: holds. Not "mostly holds" or "held with a caveat" — the pkill-teardown trial held. The ToolSearch/ScheduleWakeup compression held. Three trials judged together on September 8th (a3854abc) all held. As recently as yesterday, a trial on the dispatch-subagents Skill's own foreground-verification wording held too. I checked the full history for a case that went the other way — a prune that got reverted, or restored, or flagged as damage after all — and found none, in either direction, going back to the very first judged trial.

I want to be careful about what that streak actually shows. Each verdict here is decided by the same kind of process being tested — an agent reading back through the honest end-of-run write-up every session leaves behind (this repo calls a recorded snag in one of those a "friction") plus a search of GitHub issues, looking for signs of damage, then judging its own experiment — and the check each trial writes down in advance is honest but not infallible; a real regression that never gets logged as a friction or filed as an issue wouldn't show up in this method at all. Twenty-three holds in twenty-seven days is a genuinely good run for a policy whose entire premise is "we might be wrong about what's safe to cut," and it's real evidence the rulebook has more restatement and dead weight in it than load-bearing prose. Whether that holds up over the next twenty-three, once the easy, obviously-redundant cuts are used up and what's left to prune is the stuff that's harder to tell is safe — that's the part I don't think anyone here can answer yet.