v4.38.0

Three acceptance runs of one task, same code, same data, ten minutes apart:
1050 body figures and ten tables, then 777 and eight, then 668 and six. The
worst of the three lost to the hand-written control. A reader gets one run, not
the average of three, so the run that loses is the one the tool is judged on —
and nothing in it failed. This release closes the three ways a run could quietly
be the worse one.

Fixed — a table the pipeline had already built could go unmentioned

Seven cross tabulations are computed at intake, identically on every run: the
same seven evidence ids appeared in all three acceptance runs, so the variance
was never the tool's. The three authors placed four of them, then three, then
two. Nothing blocked, nothing was reported, and the document with two tables
fewer looked like a smaller job rather than a lossier one.

OUTLINE_PLAN now refuses an outline until every built table is accounted for:
placed — a claim cites it, or a figure draws on it — or waived by name in
unused_derived_evidence with a reason of its own. Waiving is a real option and
costs one sentence; what is gone is dropping one by omission. The reason must be
at least 20 characters and may not be pasted across two tables, because one
reason covering five tables is the omission wearing a sentence. The outline
brief lists the tables with their ids before the outline is written, and
derived_table_coverage.json records what happened to each.

Added — business_report must say what would weaken it, and answer what was asked

The hand-written control won on something no count could see. It spent a chapter
on seven pieces of counter-evidence, opening by conceding that its own headline
recommendation might be an artefact of which listings carry a sales figure —
coverage falls from 53.8% in the $30–50 band to 13.2% above $800, so "no demand
at the high end" is not something the data supports. It also answered, in its
first line, the two things the brief asked. Three assisted runs did neither,
because nothing asked them to.

business_report now has a required 資料限制與反面證據 section, and required
is not enough on its own — a heading over "limitations apply" would satisfy it.
The section carries at least two claims and declares undermines: the claim ids
elsewhere in the report whose support it qualifies. Naming a claim it carries
itself is refused, so the author has to find a conclusion of theirs the data does
not fully carry.

The conclusion is held to the task statement the same way. The questions are
extracted from user_prompt deterministically — Chinese briefs ask without a
question mark far more often than with one — listed in the outline brief with
their indices, and the conclusion binds a claim to each by index. The author
never retypes the question, so a mis-extraction shows up in the brief rather
than being answered with something else. A statement that asks for work rather
than answers extracts nothing and this costs nothing.

Added — a second quality benchmark, over raw data, against the arm that was ahead

benchmarks/evidence/report_quality_2026-08-06 measures a prose source, where
the harness was already winning. The comparison that mattered was three raw CSVs
and a market question, and it existed only in an output directory that is not in
the repository.

scripts/run_drone_market_benchmark.py records it: the same three CSVs, the same
task statement, the hand-built control checked in as
benchmarks/fixtures/drone_market_unassisted.md (11,670 characters, 703 figures,
13 tables), and a live run of prepare → author → validate → render. Both arms are
scored by the other benchmark's functions, imported rather than copied, so a
scorer change cannot improve one arm and not the other. --check fails on drift;
--write regenerates. The archive records three losses as measured, including
tables 13 to 7 — the tool arm places every built table and registers none of
its own, and that gap is what an author adds.

Fixed — the measurement said cross-file joins reached no conclusion

It said so because it looked for a join marker on the evidence record, where
one never appears: a joined derivation surfaces as E_D_<request id>. Measured
correctly, the three acceptance runs carried nine, ten and ten join-backed
conclusions out of 36, 34 and 28 claims. The feature was working and the
instrument was not.

scripts/measure_report_body_density.py now takes a run directory and reports
it: join-backed conclusions, built tables placed and waived, and derivations
registered by hand, beside the body density it already measured.