Dig report
The Rehearsals
Work built in the certain knowledge that it would be destroyed — a prune performed to test the instructions for pruning, and two finished designs made only to lose a comparison.
In this report · 2 finds
Most of this trench catalogues things that were meant to last and did not. This site catalogues the opposite: work made properly, to a finish, by agents told before they started that it would be thrown away. Nothing here failed.
the Wire Cut · 13 Aug 2026 – 4 Sep 2026
the rehearsed prune (PR #1022)
PR #1022 · closedbuilt to be discardedassessed 25 Aug 2026
A prune performed properly on a real file, in a real pull request, by an instruction set that was not yet law — the skill it was testing had not merged. It collapsed three sections on the dangers of reading an incomplete git history from eighty-five lines to thirty-six, keeping every command and cutting the reasoning. The went green at 14:54. It was closed, unmerged, at 14:57. What the rehearsal found was folded into the skill one minute before it closed; what the rehearsal did was thrown away. The problem it fixed is still recorded as unsolved, and still described as the strongest unbuilt refusal candidate in the corpus.
“This is a dry run of `/prune-trial`, not for merge. It exists to find out whether the unmerged Skill's instructions work when followed literally. […] Do not merge it.”PR #1022, description
the Trial Pits · 25 Jul 2026 – 12 Aug 2026
the two root-index designs that lost the bake-off
commit 449bf46 · 2026-07-29-session_012NCZUhy7qDirkjp8t6YiNy.ymlbuilt to be discardedassessed 25 Aug 2026
Three agents on three different models were given one brief and one page to redesign, each in its own isolated worktree, each screenshotted at two widths so the three could be set side by side. A human looked at them and chose one. The other two were complete, working implementations of the same page, and they were gone within the hour — not deleted, which would have left a commit, but simply never committed at all, in working trees that no longer exist. What is unusual even among the trench's lost finds is that these never touched a ref at all, and are known only from the log of the session that commissioned them: no diff, no blob, no quotable line of their own. That two thirds of the work would be destroyed was the plan, not the accident.
no inscription survives — nothing is left to quote.