# OCTAVE Secretary — Definitive Conclusions

**Date**: 2026-04-09
**Based on**: 5 rounds of benchmarking, 50+ model calls, 12 GH issues filed and resolved

## 1. Naming: octave-specialist vs octave-secretary

**Keep both. They serve different purposes.**

| | octave-specialist | octave-secretary (NEW) |
|---|---|---|
| **Purpose** | Expert architect — designs agents, validates specifications, synthesizes patterns | Reliable scribe — writes/compresses/validates OCTAVE documents on behalf of other agents |
| **MODEL_TIER** | PREMIUM | STANDARD |
| **Skills loaded** | 6 (literacy, mastery, compression, mythology, ultra-mythic, pattern-mastery) | 3 (literacy v2.0, mastery, compression) |
| **When to call** | Agent architecture, spec interpretation, compression validation | Any agent needs an OCTAVE document written, updated, or compressed |
| **Platform** | OA-Router (needs codebase context) | Goose clink (needs speed and cost efficiency) |

The specialist is the architect. The secretary is the scribe. Most system operations need the scribe.

## 2. Model Tiers for the Secretary

| Tier | Model | Platform | Cost/call | Use When |
|------|-------|----------|-----------|----------|
| **Budget** | Claude Haiku 4.5 | goose clink (OS-A) | ~$0.02 | Bulk document writing, routine compression, config files |
| **Standard** | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | goose clink (OS-B) | ~$0.15 | Self-correcting pipeline, schema-validated writes, agent definitions |
| **Premium** | Claude Opus 4.6 | goose clink (OS-C) | ~$0.60 | Architecture work, novel agent design, deepest semantic matching |

**Default**: Sonnet. It self-corrects on errors (observed in every round) and produces clean output at moderate cost.

**Haiku is viable for bulk ops.** Round 4 proved that Haiku with 3 skills + LLM frame matches Sonnet-with-5-skills quality at ~10% of the cost.

## 3. Synthesised octave-literacy v2.0

**File**: `octave-write-test-outputs/literacy-v2-synthesised.oct.md`
**Status**: VALIDATED, 0 errors, 0 warnings, 154 lines

### What Changed from v1.5.0

| Change | Source Agent | Impact |
|--------|-------------|--------|
| `AUDIENCE::LLM[exclusively]` in META | Opus | Identity-level — format purpose declared upfront |
| `NORTH_STAR` in META | Opus | One-line paradigm anchor |
| §0::WHY_OCTAVE_EXISTS (new section) | All 5 unanimously | Causal foundation before syntax |
| MYTHOLOGY_RATIONALE inside §0 | OA-Sonnet | Mythology's compression function alongside the paradigm |
| DESIGN_CHAIN derivation | Opus | Syntax becomes a consequence of audience, not arbitrary rules |
| §2c::OPERATOR_ECONOMICS (new) | Opus | Why operators matter for LLMs specifically |
| `R1::`-`R9::` keys (was `1::`-`9::`) | Opus + OA-Sonnet | Fixes Rule 3 violation in original v1.5.0 |
| §4 enriched with loss accounting | Opus | Example demonstrates the paradigm, not just syntax |
| All syntax examples quoted as strings | Synthesis | Prevents octave_write self-referential parsing issues |

### What Was Preserved

All syntax rules, operator precedence, bracket forms, literal zones, assembly rules, and v6 envelope structure — unchanged. The rewrite is additive, not breaking.

## 4. Key Research Findings

### Skills are the force multiplier (Round 3-4)
The oa-router's "advantage" was skill loading, not the platform. When skills are equalized, goose-clink outperforms oa-router on speed, cost, and archetype quality.

### LLM-consumption framing changes output character (Round 4)
Adding "documents are for LLMs, not humans" shifted agents from writing "documents" to writing "structured semantic payloads" — operators as logic, archetypes as compression, loss accounting as self-audit.

### 3 skills is the sweet spot (Round 4)
Removing octave-mythology and octave-ultra-mythic (313 lines of context) produced 50% smaller, 52% faster, 0-warning output. The mythology vocabulary is already in model training data — skills just need to say when and how to use it.

### Self-referential OCTAVE is hard (Synthesis)
Writing a skill that teaches OCTAVE syntax IN OCTAVE causes parsing conflicts. Teaching examples like `KEY::value` get parsed as live OCTAVE. Solution: quote all syntax examples as strings.

### Agents don't proactively scan for peer work (Round 5 rerun)
Haiku doesn't read other agents' output files. Sonnet does. This matters for test isolation and for understanding collaborative potential.

## 5. Friction Issues Filed and Resolved

All 12 issues from the benchmark were resolved in PR #361 (v1.10.0):
- Silent data loss on numeric keys → W_NUMERIC_KEY_DROPPED warning
- Bare line dropping → W_BARE_LINE_DROPPED in top-level warnings
- YAML hyphen → error message now includes OCTAVE list syntax hint
- UNVALIDATED status → validation_hint field with available schemas
- Section-scoped `changes` → §N.KEY paths now resolvable
- Plus: dry_run alias, schema catalog, META.ID field, lenient default docs

## 6. Next Steps

1. **Create the octave-secretary agent definition** — an .oct.md file in `.hestai-sys/library/agents/`
2. **Deploy literacy v2.0** — replace the current v1.5.0 in `.hestai-sys/library/skills/octave-literacy/SKILL.md`
3. **Configure goose clink roles** — OS-A/B/C as Haiku/Sonnet/Opus with octave-secretary role
4. **Test the full pipeline** — secretary receives request → writes via octave_write → validates → delivers
