route.sh now emits `--advisor opus` into the startup command it prints.
The flag existed and worked, but nothing generated it, so it went unused:
the only mechanism that ever set an advisor here was `/advisor`, which
writes the global advisorModel setting -- every session, every repo -- and
was abandoned for burning quota. Nothing replaced it.
Two independent triggers, almost disjoint by construction:
rows 1-2 always. Sonnet main model, so opus is a capability LIFT rather
than a peer. Load-bearing: every fallback is one row cheaper and
the cheap rows are Sonnet, so this makes the quota fallback safe.
rows 3-4 only at reversibility=costly|one-way. Opus main model, so the
advisor buys peer review where a mistake is not cheap to undo.
rows 5-6 never. The CLI rejects every advisor for a Fable main model.
costly forces row 3 and one-way forces row 4, so a Sonnet row always has
reversibility=cheap and neither rule reaches the other's rows.
verification=none is deliberately not a third trigger: beyond the stakes
rule it adds only cheap-to-reverse mistakes, docs sessions among them.
Applied per ROW, so fallback-command carries its own correct answer.
route-selftest.sh 56 -> 73. Section 14 gates the three CLI facts the rule
rests on against the installed claude without spending a token: advisor
validation runs before the empty-prompt check, so `-p ""` reaches the
validator and stops. --help cannot gate this -- it short-circuits before
option validation, so an unknown flag would pass the gate untested.
Three pre-existing checks updated rather than worked around: two asserted
whole command strings that now carry the advisor, and section 11's effort
extraction swallowed the tail of the command line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01X8N8hQEJSWWtieWUx37txT
The last-session record exists to make the routing policy falsifiable, and
it only is if --last-effort is measured. route.sh documented the opposite as
settled fact: that the effort a session ran with is not observable from
inside that session. That was true when written and is not now. Claude Code
exports CLAUDE_EFFORT into every tool-use context as the session's current
effort level, so a Bash call reads it directly.
The premise had a cost. With effort unobservable, the record could only be
completed by asking the operator at session end, which made it block on their
presence -- all four fields or none. That is also the weaker measurement, and
in the same way the previous board line is: the operator reads the effort off
the startup command they typed, so both sources report what was PRESCRIBED
rather than what was RUN. They come apart exactly when the record would be
most interesting, which is what a session that silently ran xhigh under a
board line saying high already showed.
Reading it makes all four fields knowable from inside the ending session, so
the record no longer waits on anyone. The skill does the reading; route.sh
deliberately does NOT default from the variable, because a calculator that
consults its environment is no longer deterministic from its arguments and
the route->board round trip in selftest section 6 rests on that.
Section 13 also pins the trap this opens: skill frontmatter overrides the
session effort while that skill is active, so an effort: field in route's own
SKILL.md would make the reading report the skill instead of the session --
a measurement quietly measuring itself, with nothing in the output to show
it happened.
Also corrects the neighbouring claim that the model is readable from the
environment. There is no CLAUDE_MODEL; the session takes it from what it
knows itself to be running as.
route-selftest 50 -> 56.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Gfa1nvwGXdST2MHvbs6htD
Six follow-ups on 0d11838, three of which mattered.
The model-alias gate passed for the wrong reason: after the quoted-alias grep
it fell back to an unanchored grep for the bare word, which matches "opus"
anywhere in `claude --help` and would have reported success even if --model
stopped accepting the alias. A gate that cannot fail is worse than no gate.
Only the quoted form is matched now, and the failing aliases are named.
--last-model and --last-effort were unvalidated free text while the other two
record fields were gated. The next session READS the record back to decide
--opus-xhigh-failed, so a drifted spelling there rebuilds the exact
reader-versus-writer drift this script exists to remove, one field over. Both
are closed sets now: the row table's three model names and the verified effort
levels. That also makes the record's sanitizing dead code, so it is gone.
The skill told future sessions to write the record "every session" while
STATE documented that the effort level is not observable from inside a running
session. A session following both would have fabricated the value, and a
fabricated effort reads back later as a measurement. The skill now says: ask
the operator, and omit the record rather than guess -- explicitly including
that reading it off the previous board line measures what was PRESCRIBED, not
what was RUN.
Also: README said "seven bash scripts" (nine files, six user-facing) and its
skills badge still said 2; selftest counts updated to 50.
Verified, not assumed: the installed plugin cache at 0.9.0 contains only
board and coord-send, so route is not discoverable until a release bumps it --
the smoke test STATE had queued before release would have failed with 127 for
a reason unrelated to the skill. STATE reordered to release-then-test. The
manifest is auto_discover, so no skills array needs an entry.
check-versions.mjs is green (11 OK, 0 ERROR) with the new skill at 0.9.0.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 50, node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
The board line's next-cost field had a reader (board.sh) and no writer, so
its value was retyped by hand every session and drifted into several
competing spellings. Cleaning the data could not fix that: the cause was the
missing write path.
route.sh is that writer. Four scored traits of the next task -- path,
verification, reversibility, scope -- plus a required rationale, run through
the operator's model rubric moved here as the single copy. The row table is a
closed set of six values, so a seventh spelling cannot enter circulation, and
route-selftest.sh section 6 runs the round trip (route emits -> board parses)
inside one repo rather than across two.
Two spellings of one decision come out of one table: the rubric name for the
board line, the CLI alias for the command the operator pastes. Effort levels
are the set pinned in this marketplace; model aliases are gated against the
installed claude rather than hardcoded.
Three things worth naming:
- Escalation is asymmetric. Any single trait escalates; the cheapest row needs
all four at the cheap end. Underkill costs one session, overkill costs quota
every session -- but a wrong architecture call costs more than either.
- The Fable rows fire only from an explicit judgement flag, never inferred
from the last-session record. "The session did not finish" also covers
context exhaustion and operator interrupts, which say nothing about the
model, and Fable runs without an advisor.
- The trait block is a single-line HTML comment because board.sh's NESTE
extractor skips only lines that START with '<!--'. Measured first: a YAML
block or a multi-line comment silently replaces the repo's next step on the
board with "next_task:". Pinned by section 7.
board.sh is untouched as a program; its header now points at route.sh for the
value set so this does not reopen the two-specs defect 305f168 closed.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 47 (new), node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
