Addresses critique from second self-review:
1. SCOPE GAP fixed: spec now covers all 4 V7 categories the user asked
for. Added Track 3 (controllers) and Track 4 (exploration) with their
own smoke tests (controller_activity, exploration_coverage) and
HEALTH_DIAG fields. Previous version only had action-space + reward.
2. H1-H5 expanded to H1-H10 with 5 new codebase-specific hypotheses:
- H6: Regime-adaptive trailing stop closing Full-positions early
- H7: VSN / NoisyNets masking magnitude features
- H8: Target tau too slow for magnitude propagation
- H9: Data genuinely favors Quarter (no bug, delete magnitude branch)
- H10: Entropy regularization + argmax tie ordering bias
3. H3 REFRAMED from "Kelly bug" to design critique — Kelly as hard
multiplier vs soft gate. Fix sketch updated to offer replacement.
4. Feature branch + tag strategy replaces "single branch" containment.
feat/policy-quality isolates work from main until Phase 4 merge via
PR. git tag policy-quality-baseline gives named rollback anchor.
5. SURROGATE-NOISE CHECK added as MANDATORY validation gate — catches
look-ahead/leakage bugs that would otherwise produce false-positive
edges. Permanent smoke artifact.
6. Validation gate restructured: B + surrogate-noise MANDATORY;
A criteria soft; controller-activity soft. Partial success path
explicit per-gate.
7. Risk register expanded — added scenarios for B-mandatory failure
(feat branch stays unmerged), all-10-hypotheses-REJECTED (fall back
to H9 delete-branch), surrogate-noise failure (halt spec, open
diagnostic spec), multi-load-bearing-controllers (tech debt doc).
8. Budget corrected to 5.5-6.5 hrs L40S (was underestimated 3.5-4),
with per-track breakdown.
Spec now: 464 lines, 10 sections, covers 4 V7 tracks × ~10 hypotheses
+ 8 reward terms + 7 controllers + 5 exploration mechanisms = ~30
audit items total.
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