Grounded build-time labnote summarization

META-RESEARCH-001: Grounded build-time labnote summarization🔗

Question🔗

Can a versioned AI apparatus produce concise labnote orientations that preserve findings, limitations, and negative results without introducing unsupported claims?

Motivation🔗

The public research library should help humans and agents decide whether a labnote is relevant without replacing its canonical Markdown source. A summary generator may help, but it may also erase caveats, overstate mixed evidence, or invent claims. Those risks require an experiment before site integration.

Frozen protocol🔗

The versioned protocol is stored with the experiment in experiments/meta-research/experiments/meta-research-001/frozen-protocol.json. Candidate summaries are generated from public canonical labnotes in shadow mode. Generation does not modify labnotes, the public manifest, or dist/.

Each candidate must include a short orientation, the central finding, limitations, negative or mixed evidence, and explicit source quotations used as evidence. Deterministic validation checks the schema, source hash, length, quotation support, and no-new-claims acknowledgement before human review.

The frozen corpus deliberately includes positive, negative, mixed, inconclusive, and apparatus-oriented records. Reviewers judge claim support, finding preservation, caveat retention, negative-result retention, and whether the candidate is useful for a relevance decision. Accepted, edited, and rejected candidates all remain experimental observations.

Promotion gate🔗

The apparatus is not production research infrastructure yet. Promotion into research-tools requires completed META-RESEARCH-001 evidence, a documented failure policy, and a separate reviewed change. Public rendering requires an additional activation decision; generation success alone never authorizes publication.

Current status🔗

The experiment and shadow-mode apparatus are active. Results remain pending until the frozen campaign and review are complete.

Initial supervised shadow observation🔗

The first supervised candidate targeted the negative composition-009 record rather than an easy positive result. The initial validation failed closed because two exact evidence quotations crossed Markdown line wraps. No source or public-site file was modified. Apparatus revision 0.1.0 was corrected to normalize textual whitespace before exact quotation comparison while retaining rejection of invented wording. The candidate then passed schema, quotation-support, length, claim-acknowledgement, and source-hash validation and became ready for human review. That result does not itself establish factual grounding.

This is evidence that the shadow boundary and one deterministic check work; it is not evidence that summaries are generally faithful or useful. The campaign and human review remain required.