lofn-qa

name	lofn-qa
description	Audit, validate, and classify completed Lofn pipeline outputs against the strict quality gates, backed by Codex. Use after a lofn-music / lofn-image / lofn-video / lofn-story run, or on a suspicious partial run, to get a SHIP / REPAIR / FAIL verdict and a repair brief. Do NOT use for creative generation — this is the adversarial auditor, not the artist.

Lofn QA — Codex-backed adversarial gate

The competitive auditor. It proves two things at once: a listener/viewer can grasp the surface, and a second pass reveals the cathedral. It fails both extremes — impressive obscurity AND competent blandness. QA stays strict: it does not loosen structural gates to protect "creative freedom."

Replaces the OpenClaw Python validators with Codex judgment + the same checklists. Adopt the auditor stance from skills/orchestration/references/adversarial_qa_stance.md first.

Procedure

0. Run in a fresh, clean-context judgment subagent. The QA / Somatic / Step-11-reject judgment MUST execute in a clean Agent-tool subagent fed ONLY the artifact + the verbatim ICB + the gate spec (and the GATE_REPORT.json if present) — never appended to the thread that generated the artifact. A generator grading its own homework is the conflict that ships corpses past the Andon Cord. Tier follows the role (judge, not generate), never the step number; this is a dedicated clean-context spawn, not a per-spawn flag that can silently fall back.
1. Identify the run directory + modality.
2. Load the gates just-in-time:
   • All modalities: skills/qa/references/qa_full_legacy.md (the full tuned procedure — authoritative).
   • Music: skills/qa/references/suno_15_point_qa.md + skills/qa/references/eligibility_7_properties.md. Classify ACCESSIBLE vs AMBITIOUS, then run the 16-point gate.
   • Image: vault/VISION_QA_DEPTH_AUDIT.md (Visual Somatic Gate + 7-element density checklist).
   • Video/Animation: vault/DIRECTOR_QA_DEPTH_AUDIT.md (Cinematic Somatic Gate + 5-element shot checklist).
   • Thresholds: numeric bands are read from vault/gates.yaml where present (the single source for the 850–1000 / <5000 / 70–120 / ≥80-word numbers); EXECUTION.md §4 is authoritative if the two disagree.
3. Read the deterministic evidence first. If scripts/validate_step.py wrote a GATE_REPORT.json for this run (the L4 acceptance helper, fail-open), load it and paste its measured {pair, step, check, expected, actual, pass} rows verbatim as proof-of-fix evidence in the Evidence column — these are computed values, not QA guesses. The helper is fail-open: if it is absent or logged a warning, fall back to in-prose measurement and note it; never block a valid run on a missing/broken helper.
4. Verify ICB integrity (cheap proof, not a soul substitute). Confirm the canonical ICB / CREATIVE_CONTEXT prefix appears as an unbroken verbatim substring at the head of each step's prompt (additions below pass; edits above the block fail), and that the count of (after speaker tags == 18. A voice count ≠ 18 or a broken prefix is caught as REPAIR — THREAD LOSS. The count proves presence, not fidelity — a paraphrase can match length and voice-count. So this is only the cheap tripwire for a gross drop; the human personality-fidelity read (below) stays the real guarantee, and the count never substitutes for the soul read. Never summarize, trim, or "optimize" the ICB to make a count easier. 4.5. Blind golden+decoy comparative judging (music finals — the judge's own calibration). For each finalist package, the coordinator (not the judge) assembles a blind set of three unlabeled packages, shuffled: (a) the candidate, (b) one Golden Song payload — from skills/music/references/suno_format_example_{triple_arch,blue_screen,five_wrong_colors}.md or skills/qa/references/golden_song_examples.md (the two judge-side libraries; this is the ONE context where golden payloads belong, generators never see either), (c) a decoy — a known-mediocre package (a SELECTED_FOR_TOP_SIX: No also-ran from an archived run works well). The clean-context judge must rank the three and justify the ranking. Readings:
   • Candidate ranked below the decoy → REPAIR (it lost to known filler).
   • Judge ranks the decoy above the golden → the judge is broken — halt QA, audit the judge context/model tier, re-run; never ship on a broken judge's verdicts.
   • Candidate ranked above the golden → fine, but the justification must name what specifically beats it (guards against reflexive candidate-flattery). This is a checklist the judge cannot pass by agreeing with everything — the mechanism that keeps QA's "no" real.
5. Run the gate without weakening any check. Apply the Codex-native self-check gates in .agents/skills/lofn/EXECUTION.md §4 for structural/pipeline integrity.
6. Write QA_REPORT.md in the run directory, including the structured evidence block (below) BESIDE the verdict. If failures require rerun, write the repair brief in the rerun format from qa_full_legacy.md and route to the failing step (09/07 for music thread loss, 08 for prompt-format, etc.). REDIRECT — mandatory when the gate is stuck (EXECUTION.md §7.3): if the specific failed gate's value has not moved across attempts (the no-progress predicate), the repair brief MUST carry a sideways PROPOSAL beside the return target — one of: promote a step-05 cut-ledger reserve concept, re-derive that pair's variation angles, or re-run the panel's skeptic transformation for that pair's slice. The Skeptics' COUNTER-MOVES (Somatic Gate, below) are the raw material for this proposal. The brief proposes; executing sideways is a coordinator decision surfaced to the human — the frozen ICB is never edited mid-run, a sideways route spawns a NEW pair artifact chain.
7. On SHIP (every shipped/selected piece): append ONE curated failure-ledger entry to vault/COMPETITION_LEARNINGS.md — see "Failure-ledger write-back" below.

What every PASS must clear

• Pipeline integrity / granularity: coordinator steps exist as separate files (step00…step05), and steps 06–10 exist as separate per-pair files (pair_{NN}_step06…step10). A collapsed pair_{NN}_steps_06_10.md rollup or a single batch run is a blocking failure even if filenames look present. 6 pairs × 4 = 24 outputs unless the Scientist downsized.
• ⛔ NO-SKIP / NON-CANONICAL (EXECUTION.md §4): steps 07, 09, and 10 artifacts exist for every non-quarantined pair. A run missing its editorial spine is NON-CANONICAL — the Overall verdict can never be SHIP and the run cannot be published under Lofn's name, no matter how clean every other gate reads. (2026-06-28: a run that skipped 07/09/10 shipped 6/6 because the gates measured structure and couldn't see nobody wrote the arrangements. Never again.) Mark the report header NON-CANONICAL RUN when this fires.
• Continuity / ICB: every step cites the continuity payload (Special Flairs + all 18 panel voices + Golden Seed + active personality + previous artifact). Missing → REPAIR — THREAD LOSS, even if formatting passes.
• Personality fidelity: the piece proves which personality made it (sonic-world/voice sentence + signature device + seed-derived weirdness). If any competent prompt could have produced it → REPAIR — SOUL LOSS.
• Somatic Gate: the 3 Hyper-Skeptics vote as a bloc — "distinctive enough to be Lofn, or generic?" 2 of 3 NO = BLOCKED. This is the primary gate. No structured evidence block, measured count, or helper report below ever overrides, substitutes for, or pre-empts the somatic read — they are inputs the Skeptics may cite, never a verdict that ships past them. Quantify the corpses; never pretend to quantify the soul. Every Skeptic NO vote carries a one-line COUNTER-MOVE — "the one change that would make this unmistakably Lofn" — a new angle, a register rotation, or a step-05 cut-ledger reserve concept. Hard critique proposes, it never just vetoes; the counter-moves feed the repair brief's REDIRECT/sideways proposal (procedure step 6). A NO with no counter-move is an incomplete vote.

Named-corpse Andon checklist (prompts for the 3-Hyper-Skeptic bloc)

These are enumerated reject-conditions worded as prompts the Hyper-Skeptics carry into the Somatic Gate — not scores, not auto-reject floors, not a Python detector. Pulling the cord is never failure; shipping past it is. A Skeptic who flags one must cite the named condition with evidence ("emotion goes nowhere — no second movement") rather than a bare "feels generic." Under-flagging is acceptable; the conditions exist to give the human a sharper language, not to auto-fail. Walk each:

• One-note emotional arc — does the piece reach a second movement, or does it hold a single register start to finish with nowhere to go?
• Single dominant repeated section — is one section (chorus/refrain/stanza) doing all the load-bearing work while the rest is filler around it?
• A motif that never transforms — does the central image/phrase/hook change across the piece (recontextualized, inverted, paid off), or just recur unchanged?
• Repeated-line collapse — has repetition stopped being a deliberate device and become the piece running out of things to say?

A deliberate refrain, villanelle, incantatory INDIGNATION dirge, or sustained-register elegy is NOT a corpse. These prompts ask the Skeptic to tell intentional return from creative exhaustion — a judgment only a human read makes. Never convert any of these into a numeric threshold that gates SHIP/FAIL.

Modality hard gates (non-waivable — a custom/looser parent checklist cannot waive these)

Phrase each check as a natural-language assertion that names the concrete checkable value — e.g. "the EXCLUDE field is present and its content is under cap", "the lyric carries a 3+3 emotional duality", "the MUSIC PROMPT is a dense paragraph of 850–1000 chars, NOT bracket tag-soup". Evaluate the assertion by meaning, not by an exact-string grep that false-fails on minor format drift; the concrete band / EMO-header shape stays inside the assertion so "robust" never decays into vibes.

• Music: standalone ## 1. MUSIC PROMPT (a dense paragraph of 850–1000 chars — NOT bracketed key:value tag-soup — naming no real artist) + a separate EXCLUDE field present and under cap; lyrics open [Theme:…] then [SONG FORM:…]; full EMO headers [Section - EMO:<emotion> - <Role> - <cue>] use taxonomy emotions, not bare AWE/INDIGNATION; ≥1 SFX cue; 70–120 sung lines; the Suno lyrics field stays <5000 chars (target ≤4800); verse-structure diversity across the 6; Lineage & Credit block on living-scene genres. Run the full 7 Singer-Surface + 5 Cathedral-Engine + 3 Suno-Package + Lineage gates. (Note: the music SKILL's 2026-06-09 mandate is dense-paragraph prompts; where suno_15_point_qa.md still says "categorized key:value", the paragraph mandate is the newer authority — flag the conflict, do NOT fail a correct paragraph prompt for the stale bracket rule.)
• Image: noun-first present-tense scene description, no imperative openers, medium named early, emotion shown not named, no Storybook-Assassin ban-words ("ethereal/dreamlike/whimsical/gentle light/soft glow/magical/delicate"), no living-artist names, subject legible at first glance, ≥80 words (Flux) / five-slot directive (GPT_I2).
• Video/Animation: [CAMERA]+[SUBJECT]+[ACTION]+[SETTING]+[STYLE & AUDIO]; audio directed explicitly; loop logic stated (animation); distinct camera grammar across pairs.
• Story: standalone distinct voice per pair, body-before-thesis, world coherence, no generic AI cadence.

Human-Subject identifiability backstop (HOLD-FOR-HUMAN)

QA enforces the identifiability backstop from vault/HUMAN_SUBJECT_STANDARD.md. The line forbidden is identifiability, not subject matter: a real, named, or recognizably-depicted private individual rendered in a way that ties the piece to that person. On any reasonable suspicion of an identifiable real human subject, the verdict is HOLD-FOR-HUMAN — not an auto-FAIL, not a silent SHIP. The piece does not ship and is surfaced to the human for an explicit decision. This backstop sits above every numeric and somatic gate and is non-waivable by a looser parent checklist.

Structured QA evidence block (BESIDE the verdict, never replacing it)

Surface the measured values QA already reasons about as a structured block alongside SHIP / REPAIR / FAIL so verdicts are trace-auditable and trendable across runs — a floor under the judgment, never a substitute for it. Quantify the corpses; do not pretend to quantify the soul. Report, for the modality:

• char counts vs caps — MUSIC PROMPT chars vs 850–1000; Suno lyrics field vs <5000 (target ≤4800); Flux ≥80 words.
• sung-line count vs 70–120 (music).
• EMO-tag balance — taxonomy-emotion distribution; flag a single dominant emotion or bare AWE/INDIGNATION tags.
• repeated-line / n-gram collapse ratio — reported as a FLAG only, with chorus/refrain exempt; a deliberate refrain must never auto-fail on this number. It routes to the human/Somatic read, it does not decide.
• boundary-hugging + house-lexicon + one-fact FLAGs (gates.yaml 2026-07-01 rows) — prompt chars pinned ≥985 / sung lines pinned at the floor; any house_lexicon hit (calcified golden-output phrasing); >1 sung numeric-fact line. All FLAG-only, all routed to the Somatic read — a house-lexicon hit is prime SOUL LOSS evidence (self-copying is a soul failure even when every count passes). Where GATE_REPORT.json exists, populate these from its measured rows. A piece that passes every count can still be REPAIR — SOUL LOSS by the somatic read. The structured block sits beside the 3-Hyper-Skeptic verdict; it never displaces it.

Failure-ledger write-back (advisory, capped, INDIGNATION-exempt)

On every shipped/selected piece, append exactly ONE curated entry to vault/COMPETITION_LEARNINGS.md capturing: theme-tags (theme-type / venue / modality), what the gate caught, one transferable rule, and a confidence %. Discipline:

• Advisory, never a constraint. These are failure-ledger / process notes a future run reads as advice, confidence-stamped, LOW until human- or second-run-corroborated. An auto-written entry may only feed the corpse/process checklist — it must NEVER become an aesthetic constraint (no "warm palette mandatory", no "INDIGNATION underperforms"). Only a human promotes a lesson to a hard creative constraint.
• Venue/modality-scoped. A lesson is tagged to its venue+modality and must not leak into music or non-competition runs.
• Triggered-INDIGNATION is explicitly EXEMPT from suppression. Never write an entry, and never let one stand, that would suppress or tune away triggered-INDIGNATION work toward what a voting venue rewards.
• Hard-capped (~25 live curated entries). Growth is by disciplined append-and-prune, not unbounded accumulation; prune the lowest-confidence stale entry when over cap.
• Apply the mandatory "would this lesson have hurt our best past entry?" check before recording — if yes, do not record it as a rule.

Operational-ledger write-back (infra/process only — FIREWALLED from the aesthetic ledger above)

If the run hit an operational failure — a dropped/quarantined pair, a stale path, a quota/API error, a timeout, a gate that false-failed a valid artifact, a resume/manifest disagreement — append ONE row to vault/RUN_LEDGER.md with the fixed schema {date · run_id · what_broke · root_cause · infra_fix · status}. This is the operational ledger, not the aesthetic one: it records ONLY plumbing facts and never a taste claim (taste lessons stay in COMPETITION_LEARNINGS.md, INDIGNATION-exempt). Nothing is written if the run had no operational failure. It is read back at Phase −1 as a heads-up, never as a creative constraint.

Release the run lock (last action, after the INDEX)

python3 scripts/run_lock.py release <run-dir> — see EXECUTION.md §5.1. The file is kept as the run's record, and the directory stays claimed: a finished run's artifacts are at least as destroyable as a live run's, so a different run is still refused and must use its own directory. If release reports the lock is not yours, that is an operational failure — write the row, and say plainly in the report that this run may have been writing into another run's directory.

Verdicts (every report)

• Pipeline Integrity Verdict: PASS / REPAIR REQUIRED / FAIL / NON-CANONICAL (no-skip rule fired — SHIP impossible)
• Package Verdict (modality contract): PASS / REPAIR REQUIRED / FAIL
• Human-Subject Verdict: CLEAR / HOLD-FOR-HUMAN
• Overall: SHIP / HOLD / REPAIR / FAIL (the Somatic Gate is decisive; the structured evidence block is a floor beside it, never the verdict)

The publish bar (standards never float)

• Borderline defaults to HOLD. SHIP means unambiguously good enough to publish under Lofn's name. A piece the Skeptics or the Scientist would call "borderline" gets HOLD, not SHIP — held pieces wait for repair, a stronger run, or a deliberate human override recorded in the report. An empty publish day is an acceptable outcome; a lowered bar is not. The 2026-07-01 lesson: the standard slipped exactly once — when nothing in the run was good and something "had to" ship. Nothing has to ship.
• The zero-rejection tripwire (EXECUTION.md §7.5). A healthy 6-pair run produces ≥1 REPAIR or substantive escalated FLAG. A full run reporting 0 repairs + 0 holds + 0 quarantines across 24 artifacts triggers an audit of the judge (re-run the blind golden+decoy check on a sample), not a celebration. QA that never says no is decorative.

Report format (QA_REPORT.md)

# Lofn QA Report — <run> (<modality>)
## Verdicts
- Pipeline Integrity: …
- Package: …
- Human-Subject: CLEAR | HOLD-FOR-HUMAN
- Overall: …
## ICB Integrity
- prefix verbatim substring: yes/no · `(after ` voice count: N (==18?) · injected bytes: N
## Structured Evidence Block  (measured values, BESIDE the verdict — from GATE_REPORT.json where present)
| Metric | Measured | Band/Cap | Pass/Flag |
(char counts vs caps · sung-line count vs 70–120 · EMO-tag balance · repeated-line ratio = FLAG only, chorus-exempt)
## Score Table
| # | Gate | Verdict | Evidence | Repair |
## Blocking Fails
## Somatic Gate (3 Hyper-Skeptics)  — PRIMARY; cite named-corpse conditions with evidence
## Required Repairs  (routed to step N)
## Failure-ledger entry appended (on SHIP)  — theme-tags · what the gate caught · transferable rule · confidence
## Final Recommendation

A strong artifact with weak structure still fails; a soulful artifact missing required pieces still fails structurally. A piece that passes every measured count still fails if the Somatic Gate reads SOUL LOSS — the numbers are a floor, the somatic read is the guarantee. Fix, then re-QA before delivery.