# JFA Cycle Log — γ

Artifact: [Judgment for Agents](JUDGMENT-FOR-AGENTS.md)

Cycle dates: 2026-04-27

Roles: α (producer), β (judge), γ (cycle observer)

Skill governing the cycle: write

Companion: [JFA-cycle-log-dyad.md](JFA-cycle-log-dyad.md) — α/β internal record of the cycle.

This file records γ's verdict on the JFA cycle. α produced the essay and the prior log of α/β work. β issued findings, held conditionally, and approved after repair. γ now observes the closed cycle against the doctrine inherited from CFA and EFA.

## Verdict: cycle locks

The artifact has converged. Role separation held through the single repair round. Each β finding maps to a specific structural change in the locked text. β's approval is attached to commitments that are load-bearing in the artifact rather than decorative. The cycle inherited CFA and EFA's named patterns and converged faster as a result. Further revision would be optimization without grievance.

## Role separation held

β-1 issued four findings. α-2's repairs each map to a single finding without revising surrounding material:

- Finding 1 (procedure substitute) → spine reframed at line 38: "The governing boundary in a conflict is the boundary whose loss most changes what coherent action remains possible. Severity, reversibility, and inspectability reveal that loss. They do not form a ranking."
- Finding 2 (case-debate trap on anonymous feedback) → alternate competent-agent path added at line 62, converting the case from precedent into pressure test.
- Finding 3 (soft repair in the unrecoverable case) → ordinary audit path removed; terminal debt named at lines 100 and 110; "if no channel remains" discipline added at line 100.
- Finding 4 (competent disagreement under-shown) → an explicit "another competent agent might choose differently" sentence added inside each case at lines 62, 74, 90, and 102.

β did not propose alternate cases or rewrite paragraphs. α did not revise sections outside the scope β named. The dyad held its contract.

## β's verdict followed evidence

β's final review names four structural commitments as locked: judgment is boundary selection under forced loss; procedure can make work visible but cannot choose; severity/reversibility/inspectability are lenses rather than ranks; unrecoverable judgment produces terminal debt rather than repair. Each appears at a load-bearing site in the artifact:

- Boundary selection under forced loss: line 28.
- Procedure cannot choose: section at line 40, mechanism at lines 42–46.
- Lenses not ranks: stated at line 38, made operational at line 76, denied four times across the essay (lines 38, 44, 76, 124).
- Terminal debt distinct from repair debt: section at line 104, mechanism at line 110, applied at line 100.

β issued no caveats outside its findings. The verdict is attached to inspectable surfaces.

## No findings hidden under approval

γ checked the artifact for structural concerns β did not name. None found. The inheritance commitments specifically:

EFA's no-fixed-order commitment held. The essay denies fixed ordering at four sites and never reintroduces it through softer phrases like "usually severity governs, except…" The procedure-creep risk the brief flagged was caught at finding 1 and structurally precluded by the four denials.

EFA's foreseeability bound on standing held implicitly. Each case names proximate, material standing — absent student and future students of the same channel; residents and maintenance vendor; absent author and future reviewer; the named target. No case wanders into speculative downstream impact. Inheritance is preserved without re-derivation, which is the correct way to inherit.

CFA's reviewer-as-boundary-holder rule held compatibly. Line 46's "the visible record shows why this choice was made under these facts" carries the same evidence-attachment discipline applied to a judging agent rather than a reviewing one.

CFA's closer-earns-its-line test held. Line 128's closing — "A judging agent does not make every boundary whole. It prevents the system from confusing an owned breach with a clean one" — performs the same closing-cadence move CFA's "It remains one and becomes more articulate" performs. Its key terms ("owned breach," refusal of false closure) are built earlier in the body at lines 102 and 112. The closer is earned.

## Coherence delta

One productive oscillation. α-1 → β conditional hold with four findings → α-2 surgical repair → β approval. Each finding closed a gap a careful reader could previously have raised, and each closure is visible in the locked text. This is not a comfort loop.

Round count by cycle: CFA = 4, with external observation needed to break the bloat/compression oscillation. EFA = 1 conditional hold + 1 reinsertion round after external observations. JFA = 1 conditional hold, no external observations needed. The acceleration is structural: each cycle inherited the prior cycle's named failure modes and so did not have to discover them.

## JFA-specific risks: caught and disarmed

The brief flagged three failure modes specific to JFA's material. All three were caught inside the dyad without external naming:

**Case-defense oscillation.** β finding 2 caught it directly. α-1's draft over-defended the professor/student resolution, making a specific policy question feel like the doctrine. α-2's "another competent agent might choose differently if [credible threat plus defined safety process]" converts the case from precedent-defense into pressure test. α extended the same fix across all four cases under finding 4, so the pattern was both named and structurally generalized.

**Procedure-creep.** β finding 1 caught it directly. α-1's "most future coherent action possible" was a scalar maximization rule wearing structural clothes. α-2's reframing makes severity, reversibility, and inspectability lenses on the field rather than weights in a function. The four explicit denials of fixed ordering across the essay make later procedure-creep structurally visible: any softer phrasing in a future revision would now contradict an existing commitment in the same text.

**Unrecoverable-case shrink.** The brief warned the unrecoverable section might shrink across drafts. The actual risk ran the other way, which β finding 3 caught. α-1 had given the unrecoverable case too much recovery — a normal record after deletion — softening the hardest case. α-2 removed the audit path, named terminal debt, and added the "if no channel remains" discipline. The unrecoverable section in the locked draft is structurally heavier and harder than α-1's, not lighter.

The brief's other warning — premature stopping because the cases are exhausting — does not apply here. The cases held their hardness through approval, and the unrecoverable section grew rather than shrank. β stopped after one repair round because the structural findings were closed, not because the material was tiring.

## Failure modes carried forward

Future doctrine cycles inherit the following, composed from CFA, EFA, and JFA. Patterns are named by reference to where they were first seen, not re-derived.

From CFA:

- Bloat/compression oscillation (the dyad-without-meta pattern requiring external naming to break).
- Comfort failure at the writing level: single-sentence paragraphs as decoration; mantras at the close; restating stable facts as if discovering them.
- Over-compression: cutting load-bearing elements in the name of discipline.
- Mimicked closure: closing lines that sound coherent because they mimic a coherent essay's surface, without the body having earned the line.

From EFA:

- External observations enter as findings to evaluate, not as verdicts to execute.
- Rejected observations require structural reasons attached to inherited commitments, not producer preference.
- Inherited commitments must hold without re-derivation; restating them in the new artifact is a sign the cycle has not actually inherited them.

From JFA:

- Procedure substitute. The strongest failure mode for any doctrine cycle that addresses choice under conflict. A phrase can become procedural even when it avoids numbered steps. "Most future coherent action" was such a phrase. The fix is to convert decision-rule language into structural-state language: not what to compute, but what is the case.
- Case capture. Concrete cases can absorb the reader's attention and become precedent-defense rather than pressure tests. Every case must include a visible alternate-competent-agent path so the resolution stays inside structure rather than becoming policy.
- Soft repair as audit drift. When a brief requires unrecoverable breach, ordinary audit language can quietly reintroduce repair under another name. Terminal debt must remain distinct from repair debt; "preserved evidence in a restricted channel" is repair, not absence.
- Competent disagreement omission. Asserting that judgment is not procedure is insufficient. The essay must show, inside each case, why another competent agent might choose differently. The omission is a comfort failure: it lets the producer keep the case feeling resolved.

## Closure

The artifact held discipline through one full repair round. Inheritance from CFA and EFA was visible in how fast the cycle converged and in which patterns the dyad caught without external naming. The two failure modes most threatening to JFA's material — procedure-creep and unrecoverable-case softening — were caught at the first β review and structurally disarmed in the repair. The closing sentence is earned. Stopping is right.

Cycle locked: 2026-04-27.
