Cartridge documentation pruning, 2026-07-29
What was removed
Section titled “What was removed”| Path | Lines | Reason |
|---|---|---|
docs/reviews/ (16 files) | 5,430 | The scoring rubric whose criterion 1 grades structural conformance to a drifted template and whose ten criteria never ask whether a game is fun. Contains the self-grading cycle the audit documents: an evaluator scoring an agent’s invention 8.5/10 as a “real game now.” |
docs/software/cartridges/modules/drafts/ (3 files) | 948 | Playtest reports written by agents in invented player personas (Corwin, Mae, Vex), each auditing its own round-1 complaints as RESOLVED. No person played anything. |
authoring/ui-patterns.md | 2,251 | Teaches the retired 80-column, 25-row grid with rows 1 through 23 for carts, and describes a 14-cartridge library. Superseded by ascii-design-system.md, screen-design-rules.md, and the shipped ui/ component kit. |
authoring/commerce-navigation-modules.md | 1,894 | Full gameplay specifications for SynthFence, Drift, and Pathfinder, duplicating the standalone module specs. |
authoring/strategy-passive-modules.md | 2,074 | Full gameplay specifications for Nodespace, The Vault, Cipher Garden, Null, and Relay, duplicating the standalone module specs. |
authoring/campaign-economy.md | 1,937 | Declares two of its own assumptions superseded by Mission Control. Economy authority moved to economy-model.md; contract lifecycle moved to mission-control.md. The remainder is a narrative archetype catalog over cartridges being re-anchored. |
design-bibles/launch-titles-capability.md | 1,922 | A third copy of full specifications for ICE Breaker, NeonGrid, Black Ledger, Depthcharge, and Nodespace. |
campaigns/corporate-espionage.md | 621 | Built on the campaign-economy framework above and on the drifted ICE Breaker and Black Ledger specs. |
operator-manuals/ (3 files) | 3,147 + EPUB | In-fiction ICE Breaker manual derived from the most-drifted spec in the corpus. The craft is real and the subject is being replaced. |
Total: roughly 20,200 lines across 27 files.
The duplication finding
Section titled “The duplication finding”The drifted cartridge content existed in four places: the per-module specs under modules/, plus commerce-navigation-modules.md, strategy-passive-modules.md, and launch-titles-capability.md. Eleven of the seventeen carts carried two or three full specifications each. Any future pass that re-anchors a cartridge on Josh’s premise now has a single target.
What was recovered before deletion
Section titled “What was recovered before deletion”The audit names two Black Ledger elements as recoverable from blackledger-round-1-evaluation.md, deleted above. Both are recorded here verbatim in mechanism.
The four emergent collisions. Documented in the reviewed draft and cut by the v2.1 rewrite:
- Red herring. A large offshore transfer resembles money laundering and turns out to be legitimate subsidiary restructuring. Tracing the money further reveals the truth. Trains precision over assumption.
- Deletion. A deleted transaction has to be inferred from surrounding entries. One wrong piece breaks the solution.
- Shell network. The transaction graph branches rather than running in sequence, so the operator’s mental model has to be revised mid-case.
- Time pressure. Careful exploration buys certainty and risks timeout; fast pattern recognition buys speed and risks a false flag.
Scoring was asymmetric: a false flag cost 50, a missed guilty party cost 100.
Audio as evidence. PSG voice 2 assigned a pitch to each transaction class and played a 200 ms tone as the operator scrolled:
| Pitch | Transaction class |
|---|---|
| C4 | Legitimate operational |
| D4 | Unusual, possibly legitimate |
| E4 | Suspicious |
| F#4 | Highly suspicious |
A scroll through a list sounded like C, C, C, D, E, E, F#, C, which locates a suspicious cluster at positions 4 through 6 without reading a character. The reviewed draft documented screen-off auditory scanning as both an accessibility path and an expert technique.
What remains stale and unfixed
Section titled “What remains stale and unfixed”- The template that caused the drift lives outside this repo.
prompts/game-design-orchestration-prompt.md:29in the umbrella checkout (~/src/kinoshita) installs ICE Breaker as “THE GOLD STANDARD” with a target of about 1,100 lines and 58 sections, and instructs at line 272: “If in doubt about depth, re-read it.” ICE Breaker is the most-drifted spec in the corpus. That file needs deleting in its own repo and its own commit. - Seventeen module specs still carry retired hardware numbers. The 80-column, 25-row grid and a Row 24 action bar appear throughout
modules/. Each gets corrected at the point its cartridge is re-anchored. docs/plans/holds 26 files, 8 of them underpost-v0.1/, several dated April 2026 and referenced only by the documents deleted here. Not audited in this pass.