Penrose v0.2.0

[0.2.0] — 2026-06-25

A correctness-and-coverage release. Every change was implemented and adversarially swarm-audited;
the evaluation-invariant suite, the calibration battery (null + placebo + injection), and the unit
tests are green. The headline is two verdict-lane correctness fixes plus a real data unblock.

Verdict integrity

• Order-independent deflation denominator (5c). The Deflated Sharpe multiple-testing count is now
  pre-registered as a per-family cohort before evaluation, instead of a running tally read at backtest
  time. Previously the same strategy could get a different verdict depending on whether it ran 1st or
  8th in its family (early members were under-deflated). Now every member deflates by the full family
  size, uniformly and race-free. This can only tighten verdicts (it closes a selection-bias hole); no
  existing eval outcome moved.
• Module generation learns to be faithful (6c). Claims are routed by type
  (descriptive-statistical / trading-strategy / structural-proposition) so a descriptive claim (e.g. an
  unconditional mean) is implemented as a statistic test, not a trading backtest. A pre-backtest
  fidelity gate flags unfaithful specs before the expensive run, and a fidelity-rejection memory feeds
  past divergences back into generation. Fidelity only ever demotes or blocks, never promotes.
• Regime-scope declaration. A claim can pre-register a declared regime and be tested fairly within
  it (adherence-gated), instead of being falsely killed as regime-fragile for concentrating where it
  intends to trade.
• CPCV / overfitting kill-lens. Combinatorial purged cross-validation (Lopez de Prado) added as an
  independent robustness axis next to the bootstrap, permutation, and walk-forward gates.
• Actionable underpowered verdicts. A verdict that can't resolve a realistic edge now reports how
  much more would resolve it, the marginal OOS trades still needed (or the cross-sectional breadth
  alternative), turning a dead-end label into a sequential next step.
• Independent fidelity verifier (optional). The fidelity refuter can route to a genuinely
  independent second LLM provider (configurable via PENROSE_LLM_VERIFIER_*), reducing the correlated
  blind spots of a model checking its own work; it falls back to the same provider by default, and each
  result records whether the check was independent.

Data ("works out of the box" for more than crypto)

• Catalog-derived domain awareness. The relevance gate and spec generator read the data catalog at
  runtime, so adding a new-domain series (equities, rates, inflation, commodities) makes those theses
  testable and lets the generator request real series names instead of inventing them. Fail-open to the
  built-in behavior when no catalog is present.
• Keyless long-history adapter (Stooq). A 6th out-of-the-box data adapter: decades of daily
  equity/index data with no API key, filling the gap where the free Alpha Vantage tier (~100 bars)
  flipped equity theses to insufficient_data.
• Conservative name-resolution. Near-miss series names resolve only on a unique high-confidence
  match; ambiguous names miss (never a wrong-series resolution).
• Auto-fetch the needs_data loop. When a claim needs a series an enabled vendor can supply
  unambiguously, Penrose fetches it once and re-tests, instead of only logging the request. Bounded and
  conservative (never supplies a wrong/ambiguous series).
• Panel adapter. A panel catalog adapter type for resolution-outcome / microstructure data
  (daily event-date aggregation), the framework for the largest class of data-blocked theses.

Learning surface (P9 firewall intact)

• Cross-run principle distillation. Structural-kill principles are now distilled across the whole
  decision corpus, not just within a single run, so recurring failure modes actually surface.
• Propose-only read store. An agent-readable record of "what Penrose has learned" (status: proposed), strictly separate from the approved brain, promotion still requires human P9 approval.

Robustness & honesty

• Output directories are created on startup (fresh/CI/sandboxed clones no longer fail on a missing
  reports/).
• A fidelity-refuter network timeout degrades to "fidelity unknown" and continues, instead of killing
  the run; LLM timeouts are configurable per role; optional --max-claims.
• Re-running an unchanged source is idempotent (atomic supersede by source identity), instead of
  appending duplicate decisions.
• Strategy-class alias collisions no longer log spurious warnings.

Agentic surface & tooling

• Read-only MCP server (pip install penrose[mcp], penrose-mcp). Five read-only tools let an
  agent query verdicts, proposed principles, open data-requests, and pipeline status over the Model
  Context Protocol. It exposes operations, not escape hatches: nothing over MCP can approve a verdict
  (P9 stays human), write the corpus, or run anything. mcp is optional; the core never requires it.
• penrose run --json emits a single machine-readable result object (verdicts + principle), so callers
  no longer have to tail a log; penrose run --claims <claims.json> injects pre-built structured claims
  and bypasses the lossy P2 re-extraction round-trip.
• Make targets honor a PY override (e.g. make eval PY=./.venv/bin/python); .PHONY completed;
  stress-testing docs linked.
• The public-build pipeline is hardened: tracked-files-only staging (gitignored operator artifacts can
  never ship), fund-specific leak markers, a symlink guard, and a dry-run-by-default sync.