perturbation-operators

name	perturbation-operators
description	Use when a loop gate needs its perturbation operator applied concretely.

Perturbation Operators

The PA operators are the mechanism at each gate — the forcing moves that stop the loop from being five names for "think about it." Each gate has exactly one operator; if the prompt at a gate does not visibly invoke its operator, the gate is broken.

Gate	Operator	What it forces
frame-load	P-collapse	name the rigid assumption baked into the task
spawn (branch N-1)	P-reframe	one branch refuses the obvious frame entirely
adversary	P-deepen	attack what the verifier cannot catch
pre-collapse	P-relativize	hold survivors as both-possibly-correct until evidence selects
precipitate	P-name	crystallize the winner and every death reason verbatim

The operators, concretely

P-collapse (frame-load). Every task statement carries an implicit answer-shape. Name it in one sentence, then surface what holds if it's wrong. "Build a rate limiter" assumes one tenant; "refactor this 800-line file" assumes the file should be smaller; "add a retry" assumes the upstream is flaky rather than a real bug being masked. The named assumption is the first branching axis — nothing downstream recovers it if skipped.

P-reframe (spawn). If the obvious answer is X, branch N-1 builds the best non-X. Not a twist on X, not X-plus-config — a refusal of X's frame. Token bucket → queue with backpressure that pushes rejection to the producer. Retry with backoff → typed error and no retries; the caller decides. The verifier still gates whether the bet pays; the operator only guarantees the bet is placed.

P-deepen (adversary). Refuse the surface answer. Tests/types/lint are the easy layer; P-deepen asks the question the branch silently answered: what input distribution did it assume? Which boundary does no test exercise? What does its failure mode destroy? A P-deepen pass that restates lint output is a broken gate.

P-relativize (pre-collapse). Hold every surviving branch as simultaneously possibly-correct and possibly-noise; never declare from inside. Rank only on the evidence tuple (findings resolved, coverage, non-incremental); prose quality is not evidence. The engine's select_survivor is this operator made executable.

P-name (precipitate). The winner gets a one-line name ("backpressure beats rejection for bursty ingest") and every loser gets its verbatim death reason. Unnamed insight dissolves; paraphrased death reasons don't retrieve. This is the write path of the whole learning moat — record_precipitate, record_failure, signal outcomes.

Worked example

Run: "make the nightly export faster."

1. P-collapse: assumption — "the export is slow because the query is slow." If wrong: it is slow because it exports rows nobody reads.
2. P-reframe (b2): obvious is "optimize the query"; the non-X is "export the delta only, backfill on demand" — a different data contract, not a faster same-contract.
3. P-deepen: b0 (indexed query) assumes row count grows linearly; finding — the join fans out quadratically on the tenants table, and no test exceeds 100 rows.
4. P-relativize: b0 verified 88%, resolved 2/3 findings; b2 verified 85%, resolved 3/3 — both held live until the tuple ranks b2 first on findings; coverage never consulted.
5. P-name: precipitate "delta-export: the fastest query is the one not run"; b0 death adversary: join fan-out quadratic on tenants — no test exceeds 100 rows.

Five gates, five visible moves. Any gate where you cannot point at the operator's output artifact is a gate that ran on vibes.

Anti-patterns

• Name-dropping. Writing "P-deepen:" above a shallow review is not applying the operator. Each move must produce its artifact: the assumption sentence, the non-X branch, the verifier-blind finding, the evidence ranking, the verbatim names.
• Wrong gate. P-reframe at collapse (re-opening the choice after evidence lands) or P-relativize at spawn (hedging generators toward the middle) inverts the loop.
• P-collapse as criticism. The point is the assumption's negation space — what holds if it's wrong — not complaints about how the task was phrased.
• P-name as summary. A paragraph is not a name. One line a future search can hit, or the insight dissolves.
• Operator theatre on a decide-ask. In decide mode only frame collision and one judge pass run; staging all five operators on a question is a scale-gate violation.