# IFA Cycle Log Artifact: [Inheritance for Agents](INHERITANCE-FOR-AGENTS.md)

Cycle date: 2026-04-27

Roles: α (producer), β (judge)

Skill governing the cycle: write

This file explains what the IFA drafting cycle had to repair after β identified a false evidence boundary in the first archived draft.

## Governing question

This document explains how a doctrine grows across cycles without becoming dogma.

The candidate question held. A sharper formulation emerged during drafting: doctrine grows when later cycles inherit prior named failure modes as contestable constraints, not when they inherit prior conclusions as fixed authority. That sharper formulation answers the candidate question rather than replacing it.

## Source load

α loaded the write skill. α then read the CFA, EFA, and JFA cycle artifacts as primary evidence, and the existing CFA and EFA essays as context. The JFA essay path remained unavailable during this repair, but the JFA cycle artifacts were available and sufficient for the inheritance finding β required.

## α-1 evidence-boundary draft

α-1 proposed the spine:

- Inheritance is named memory.
- Inheritance is not imitation.
- Inheritance has a failure mode: soft inheritance.
- Inheritance is partial.
- Inheritance prevents dogma by preserving contestability.

The spine was viable, but the draft narrowed the thesis because it claimed the JFA cycle artifacts were unavailable. That claim was false. The draft therefore underused the strongest evidence for the composition thesis.

## β verdict 01 — request changes

β requested changes on four findings:

1. **Evidence-boundary frame wrong.** The JFA dyad log, JFA gamma log, and JFA critiques were present at the referenced paths. The essay had to re-derive with JFA in scope and remove the narrowed-thesis hedge.

2. **Composition claim too thin.** The draft showed only CFA → EFA transmission. A composition claim requires the second step supplied by JFA inheriting from both CFA and EFA.

3. **JFA disclaimer wrong.** The draft used JFA's case-defense oscillation as a disclaimed example. The JFA gamma log made it available as evidence: prior inheritance helped contain the pattern but could not pre-solve it.

4. **Temporal claim underived.** The draft said inheritance must operate "while the decision is still reversible." The cycle artifacts supported repair while the draft remains open, but not that temporal phrasing as a general claim.

β also identified load-bearing material to preserve: the imitation/inheritance distinction, the soft-inheritance failure mode, the contestability claim, and the structural register.

## α-2 repair

α-2 removed the false evidence-boundary frame and restored the full CFA → EFA → JFA evidence base. The revised essay now shows two composition steps:

- CFA → EFA: CFA's named writing-level failures and stopping rule became boundary discipline inside EFA's conditional hold, γ verification, and external-observation handling.
- EFA → JFA, with CFA still carried forward: EFA's no-fixed-order commitment held in JFA without softening; CFA's evidence-attachment discipline carried into JFA's role separation and visible repair record.

α-2 used the JFA gamma log's round-count comparison as evidence, not triumph: CFA required four passes and external naming; EFA required one conditional hold plus external reinsertions; JFA required one conditional hold and no external observations. The revised essay states that this does not prove every future cycle will converge faster. It shows that inherited failure modes changed what later cycles had to discover for themselves.

α-2 rewrote the partial-inheritance section to use JFA's case-capture and terminal-debt repairs as evidence. The section now distinguishes what prior inheritance helped catch from what JFA had to discover in its own material.

α-2 removed the underived reversibility phrase and replaced it with the bounded claim that inherited failures must be visible before the artifact locks.

## Closure

The archive is repaired against β Verdict 01. No second β approval has arrived in this session, so this log records α's resolution rather than a new β lock.

No external observations arrived, so no `IFA-external-observations.md` was created.
