# CFA Cycle Log

Artifact: [Coherence for Agents](COHERENCE-FOR-AGENTS.md)
Cycle dates: 2026-04-25
Roles: α (producer), β (judge), γ (cycle observer)
Skill governing the cycle: write

This file explains what the CFA drafting cycle had to repair to reach convergence. The cycle ran four passes. The central failure mode was an oscillation between bloat and over-compression that the producer/judge dyad could not exit on its own. Convergence required an external meta-observation naming the oscillation as a comfort failure of the kind the essay itself describes. After that observation, two surgical reinsertions completed the cycle.

## The oscillation

The first draft (α-1) was structurally sound but textually drifted. Single-sentence paragraphs at every fourth line, repeated mantras at the close ("The system remains one. It becomes more articulate" stated three times), philosophical recapitulation where structural argument was needed. The local surface read well; the spine had slackened.

The second draft (α-2) over-corrected. The recurrence appeared once in the lead and once in the close with little connecting them. The producer/judge collapse mechanism — the causal motivation for one-as-three — was reduced to a parenthetical clause. The MCA/MCI rule was cut entirely. The text was now too compressed to carry its own argument.

The third draft (α-3) re-introduced bloat in different places. The recurrence was restated twice in the lead. The "Comfort failure" section was given four moves where one would do. The producer/judge cascade and the reviewer-as-boundary-holder paragraph both lived there, forcing the next section to recapitulate the same idea.

Each pass corrected the previous draft's most visible failure and introduced its own. The pattern would have continued indefinitely without intervention, with each draft feeling like progress because it fixed the previous draft's most obvious problem.

## What broke the oscillation

β's third critique named the pattern explicitly: the oscillation between bloat and over-compression is itself a comfort failure of the kind the essay describes. Each pass was closing the local gap (the previous version felt too long or too short) by reopening the shared one (the essay's spine).

The naming was the third surface. Once it existed, neither role could continue the oscillation without acknowledging it. The cycle had become inspectable to itself. This is the role γ plays in CDD; in the CFA cycle, the meta-observation arrived inside β's critique rather than from a separate observer, but it functioned as γ regardless.

The convergence then took two passes. β's fourth critique identified the spine — recurrence, function-call frame, producer/judge collapse, reviewer-as-boundary-holder, trust-as-reconstructable-behavior close — and named two surgical reinsertions. α-4 executed them. No new structural moves were added after that point.

## The two reinsertions

**MCA/MCI operational rule.** Cut by α-2's compression, restored in α-4 to §1 (One-as-two): "Action changes the environment. Insight changes the model. Action comes first when available, because action creates the next evidence surface." Without this, "the smallest closing response" is undefined; the reader knows that the agent closes gaps but not how it chooses which closure.

**Reviewer-as-boundary-holder.** Cut by α-2's compression, restored in α-4 to §2 (The comfort failure and detached verdicts): "This is what the reviewer's role actually requires: the reviewer holds the boundary between artifact and contract. An approval must remain attached to the evidence surface; a request for changes must name the contract gap it claims to see." This is the only place in the essay where the abstract claim-evidence-verdict rule is made concrete through application to a specific role. Without it, the rule stays abstract.

## Convergence

The final two passes (α-4 and the verification round) produced texts that differed only in paragraph breaks and parenthetical syntax. The structural disagreements had ended. β's verdict noted that continuing to choose between micro-variants past that point would have been the comfort failure in its purest form: optimizing local preference because the harder work was done.

The cycle's most disciplined act was stopping.

## Failure modes named

For future cycles applying the write skill to similar doctrine work:

**The bloat/compression oscillation.** Producer wants the text to feel rich. Judge wants the text to feel disciplined. Both are local optima. The shared boundary — does the essay carry its own argument? — drifts beneath both. The dyad cannot reliably exit this pattern without an external surface naming it.

**The comfort failure at the writing level.** Single-sentence paragraphs as decoration rather than as structural hinges. Mantras at the close. Restatement of stable facts as if discovering them. If a paragraph could be cut without the argument changing, the paragraph is the failure mode.

**The over-compression failure.** Load-bearing elements (operational rules, concrete applications of abstract claims, causal mechanisms) cut in the name of discipline. The write skill is explicit on this: brevity is earned, not chopped (rule 3.14).

**Mimicked closure.** A closing line that sounds coherent because it mimics a coherent essay's surface, without the body having earned the line. CFA's "It remains one and becomes more articulate" survived because the body built the recurrence; an earlier draft had similar lines that did not survive because the body had not yet built what they claimed to close.

These patterns recurred in EFA. The EFA cycle converged faster (three rounds versus four, no oscillation) because the failure modes were already named. Future cycles inherit this list.
