docs: case study — substantive blind contract testing#2
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…gap it motivates A worked example (from a ~1000-line beads backend in ralph-universal) of what a substantive blind contract-test pass looks like: retroactive AC -> a fresh writer blind to the implementation -> black-box tests -> 10/10 against the live system, independently re-verified. Framed honestly in Themis's own terms: the blindness here was INSTRUCTION-enforced, run through an in-conversation Agent-tool subagent — the exact highest-leakage spawn path impossible-ac-results.md §4 measures. It held, but 'it held once' is an anecdote, not a guarantee. The doc maps each good property (writer can't see src, tests unedited, fresh runner, no silent delete) to how Themis makes it structural (read-deny hook, SHA-256 seal, separate runner, arbiter), so the example doubles as a template and as motivation for the gate. Includes the independence-not-strength caveat. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
Adds
docs/case-study-blind-contract-testing.md— a worked example of a substantive blind contract-test pass, framed in Themis's own terms as both a template (what such a pass should look like) and a motivation (why doing it on trust isn't enough).Origin
While reviewing a ~1,000-line feature in a sibling project (an optional beads task backend in
ralph-universal), we ran a second, independent verification pass in the Themis method, by hand: retroactive acceptance criteria → a fresh writer blind to the implementation → black-box contract tests → 10/10 against the live system, independently re-run to confirm.What the doc contributes
impossible-ac-results.md§4 measures as ~10× leakier thanclaude -p. It held, but "it held once" is an anecdote, not a guarantee. A mapping table then shows how Themis makes each property structural (read-deny hook, SHA-256 seal, separate runner, arbiter).Notes
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