Lore v0.8.1

The first release driven by measurement rather than reasoning. A workflow audit
proposed twenty optimizations. Experiments rejected seventeen of them — two of which
would have opened holes — and a benchmark showed the headline saving of an eighteenth
never materialised. What shipped is the residue that survived: three small changes, each
traceable to a number.

The validator re-read rules it already had

doc-validator opened .claude/CLAUDE.md and .claude/lore-methodology.md on every run.
Both are already in its context: CLAUDE.md @-imports the methodology, imports are
expanded at launch, and a non-fork subagent inherits the whole CLAUDE.md hierarchy. The
prompt even conceded the point — "both are in context — but read both files explicitly".

Verified before changing: a session scaffolded from the docs layer quoted §0.2's first
bullet with no tool use, and a subagent spawned inside it did the same, reporting it had
the text "without reading any file". Instrumented runs confirm the behaviour changed —
baseline read both files, current reads neither.

⚠️ This did not reduce total tokens. Measured: 43,187 → 43,990 (+2%). The ~9k of reads
were genuinely avoided, and the freed budget went to other files instead. Recorded here
because the opposite is the intuitive assumption and it is wrong.

One malformed command cost an entire batch

Tracing a full run found 12 of 40 tool calls failing. The mechanism: test -s X && echo Y
is rejected as "multiple operations" and wc -w < file as "input redirection" — and
when one call in a parallel batch is rejected, every sibling issued alongside it is
discarded. Two malformed commands destroyed eleven healthy ones and produced three
round-trips that gathered nothing.

doc-validator now requires one operation per Bash call, no chaining, no <. It also
records a rejected command as unrun instead of reissuing it — the same curl had been
retried three times.

Measured, same fixture: 154.1 s vs 216.8 s wall-clock, 32 vs 40 tool calls, 6 vs 12
failed calls, 41,467 vs 43,990 tokens. Zero malformed commands in the post-change run.
Single runs, and duration varied 190–248 s across identical configurations, so treat the
timing as indicative and the counts as firm. Reasoning turns did not change: 10 → 10.

Two maps of the same territory

lore-methodology.md carried two canonical-locations tables — one under Rule 4, one under
the DoD declaring "Nothing else may restate it" — and two copies of the input-type→skill
table. They are now one each, merged as supersets so no row was lost. This is a
consistency fix, not a saving: it recovers 274 bytes, against the ~400–600 tokens the
audit predicted.

What was deliberately not done

Stop-gate scoping was the audit's #3 item; .docs-touched has exactly one writer
(Write|Edit), and its own comment records that it exists so a git pull does not
gate — inverting it would have let changes arrive unchecked. Evidence-log rotation
contradicts the documented append-only invariant. Dropping the validator's hook-covered
checks assumed hooks had run on those artifacts; check-census.sh fires only on write, so
a carried-over census is unvalidated. All three were rejected on evidence, not taste.

Known, unfixed

doc-validator.md calls lore:doc-reviewer "the single source of truth for how to
review" and gives no path, no env var, and no Skill tool to invoke it. Stale plugin
versions persist in the cache — 0.6.3's copy still says the canonical rules live in
CLAUDE.md, which stopped being true in 0.6.0. Latent while the copies match; live on any
machine mid-upgrade. It is a defect, not an optimization, and needs its own change.