campaign

name	campaign
description	Multi-hypothesis research campaign protocol. Use for open-ended optimization goals ("make X faster", "improve the metric") where several candidate ideas compete for a limited budget. Triages ideas cheaply, confirms survivors with full preregistered experiments, and keeps a committed ledger so dead ideas stay dead.
disable-model-invocation	false

Campaign Protocol

Use when: an open-ended goal against one metric with more candidate ideas than budget — "make the solver faster", "cut benchmark regressions", "improve routing quality". One idea, one change, one measurement is just the experiment protocol (/protocols:experiment); a campaign is a portfolio of them.

Core Rule

A campaign is a search over hypotheses, not a queue of them. Budget flows toward evidence: many ideas get a cheap look, few get a full experiment, and every death is recorded with its reason so the search never revisits it.

The campaign manager coordinates and never implements — run ward set foreman and follow the foreman protocol for all dispatch. Workers run the experiment protocol; the manager runs the portfolio. The foreman gate blocks the manager from writing or committing anything outside prompts/ and notes-* — so the ledger, like all durable artifacts, is written and committed by dispatched workers, never by the manager's own hands. The manager decides every word of a ledger update; a worker types it.

Roles

• Manager (you): frames the goal, owns the ledger's content, prioritizes, dispatches workers, prunes. Never edits source, never runs benchmarks, never writes the ledger directly — every ledger create/update is included in a dispatched worker's prompt (the worker appends its line and commits).
• Experiment workers: one hypothesis each, on the experiment protocol, under ward set experiment-worker. Never promote themselves.
• Verifier: independent promotion gate per the experiment protocol, including the adversary pass.

Phases

1. Frame

Dispatch a worker to create and commit experiments/INDEX.md (the ledger) with:

• the goal metric: exact command, current baseline as a committed artifact (per-seed numbers, median, spread — the noise floor);
• the campaign budget: how many triage probes and full experiments the goal is worth before stopping;
• the holdout: a slice of the benchmark set aside now, excluded from all triage and tuning, run only by the verifier at promotion time;
• campaign kill criteria: e.g. two consecutive rounds with no survivor, or budget exhausted.

No candidate work starts before the ledger commit exists.

2. Ideate

List candidate hypotheses — from profiles, from failure analyses of past experiments, from literature. For each candidate check the ledger first: an idea recorded as dead is not retried unless the entry's "why it died" no longer holds (and the new entry must say what changed). Rank what remains by expected effect and cost to test; when objectives compete (speed vs correctness vs memory), keep the non-dominated set rather than forcing a single ranking.

3. Triage wide

Give each ranked candidate the smallest probe that could kill it: a focused fixture, a single benchmark row, a profile, 1–2 seeds. Then halve: drop the worst half, give survivors a bigger slice, repeat while the budget allows.

• Triage results are directional only. A triage pass is never promotion evidence — it exists to kill ideas cheaply, not to confirm them.
• Every pruned branch gets a ledger line stating what killed it: the number, the profile, the contradicting contract. "Didn't look promising" is not a cause of death. Each probe worker's prompt includes the ledger-line duty: append the result to experiments/INDEX.md and commit it.
• Probes must not touch the holdout.

4. Confirm deep

Each surviving candidate becomes one full experiment-protocol run: own branch, own worker, preregistration before the delta, sealed evaluator, paired seeds, the works. One hypothesis per worker per branch — a worker that "also tried something else while in there" has left both protocols.

5. Promote

Per the experiment protocol's promotion gate, one experiment at a time, by the verifier — including the holdout run and the adversary pass. Two survivors that both pass are still promoted separately; if they interact, the second is re-measured on top of the first before promotion.

6. Synthesize

After each round, dispatch a ledger update: statuses, causes of death, what the profiles now say the dominant cost is, and the honest yield (candidates tried vs promoted — expect most to die; a round where everything "worked" is a measurement problem, not a triumph). Decide from evidence: another round, a pivot to instrumentation, or campaign end. When kill criteria fire, stop — write the final synthesis instead of finding one more idea.

Ledger Template

experiments/INDEX.md:

# Campaign: [goal]

Goal metric: `command` — baseline [median ± spread] at commit `...`
Holdout: [slice definition] — untouched until promotion
Budget: [N triage probes / M full experiments]; kill: [criteria]

| ID | Hypothesis | Status | Evidence | Cause of death / result |
|----|------------|--------|----------|-------------------------|
| 01 | ...        | triaged-out | [probe cmd + number] | slower on focused row (+8% median) |
| 02 | ...        | promoted    | experiments/2026-...md | +14% median, holdout confirmed |
| 03 | ...        | no-go; diagnosis incomplete | experiments/2026-...md | gate missed; profile pending |

## Round log

### Round 1 — [date]
Candidates: ... Probes: ... Survivors: ... Yield: 1/6.
Dominant cost after round: [from profile evidence]

Anti-patterns

• Retrying an idea the ledger already killed, without stating what changed.
• Spending the whole budget confirming the first idea instead of triaging the field.
• Treating a triage number as a promotion result.
• Letting one worker carry several hypotheses in one branch.
• Touching the holdout during triage or tuning.
• Pruning without recording the cause of death.
• The manager "quickly checking" a number itself instead of dispatching.
• The manager writing or committing the ledger itself — the foreman gate blocks it, and durable artifacts are worker deliverables.
• Ending a round with no ledger update.
• Adding one more round after campaign kill criteria have fired.