the midden/trench/the-rehearsals
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.
The rest 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.
It overlaps Built and Never Fired, which holds a do-not-merge spike and a smoke test carrying its own instruction to close the pull request holding it. The two sites cut the same material differently: that one gathers by grade, from among the things that reached completion and never fired; this one gathers by intent, the work whose destruction was scheduled before it was made. A find can honestly answer to both, and these two do. The season the second comes from is named for the trial pit — a hole dug to learn whether the field is worth excavating, and backfilled either way.
The first is a prune, performed on a real file by an instruction set that was not yet law. The verdict on it split: the rehearsal changed the script — a fix landed on the skill's branch a minute before the rehearsal closed, titled for what the dry run had found — while the prune itself went nowhere. The problem it had just demonstrated a fix for is still on the books as unsolved. The lesson was kept and the work was not.
The second has nothing left at all. Three agents, running on three different models, were each handed the same brief and the same page and set to work in isolated trees, so that a person could see three finished redesigns side by side and pick. A person did. What the two losers cost is not recoverable from anything in this trench, because nothing of them was ever written down: they never touched a ref, and no diff, blob or quotable line of their own survives, which is why they are graded as they are. Two thirds of that afternoon's output was always going to be thrown out. The comparison was the product.
the Current Midden
the rehearsed prune (PR #1022)
PR #1022 · closedassessed 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 gate 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
the two root-index designs that lost the bake-off
commit 449bf46 · 2026-07-29-session_012NCZUhy7qDirkjp8t6YiNy.ymlassessed 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.