docs(skills): loop-methodology laws from the diraq-esr-realism campaign

packages/extension/skills/debugging/SKILL.md

@@ -79,6 +79,47 @@ Before diving into debugging quantum optimal control code, verify these fundamen
 - **Common causes:** Timestep too large for operator norms, stiff dynamics, numerical overflow in matrix exponential.
 - **Investigation:** Reduce $\Delta t$. Check $\|H\| \cdot \Delta t$. Examine which timestep first produces NaN. Verify no division by zero in custom objectives.
 
+### The Vacuous Solve (silent control-drop) — 2026-10, measured
+- **Symptoms:** The solver consumes thousands of iterations, the variables MOVE (extracted
+  knots differ from the seed), but the internal objective/fidelity is **bit-identical to the
+  seed value across every option, setting, and formulation change** (max_iter, mu_strategy,
+  member count). Post-solve quality is entirely explained by regularizer drift.
+- **Common causes:** The problem's dynamics integrator never received the controls — template
+  integrator auto-resolution silently resolving to a control-free path (Piccolo 2.2.0
+  measured: `SplineIntegrator` auto-wiring left the objective constant); or reading a STALE
+  `fidelity(qtraj)` (the construction-time ODE solution) that masks movement in the other
+  direction.
+- **Investigation:** Evaluate the objective at the SEED and assert the post-solve value has
+  MOVED (a descent method cannot end where it started, bit-identical). Pass integrators
+  explicitly. Verify extracted solutions through independent scorers, never the problem's
+  internal readouts. Provenance: harmoniqs/diraq-esr-realism 2026-10-23 overnight §4.
+
+### The Silent Edit (no-op transformations) — six measured instances
+- **Symptoms:** An edit reports success but behavior never changes; archaeology shows the
+  pattern never matched (trailing comma, already-replaced form, reverted block). Worst case:
+  stacked no-ops make the file's edit history untrustworthy and force a clean rewrite.
+- **Common causes:** `str.replace`/`sed` succeed on no-match by design; kwargs that miss
+  their consumer get swallowed; later edits revert earlier ones through shared patterns;
+  LLM memory of what landed is not evidence.
+- **Investigation/Prevention:** Every programmatic edit ASSERTS its pattern matched
+  (`assert old in s`) and the critical line is grep-verified after the write; multi-edit
+  confusion resolves by rewriting clean with git as arbiter; numbers are never hand-copied
+  between files when a formula can be evaluated (machine-pinned literals, rtol ≤ 1e-9).
+  Provenance: six instances in harmoniqs/diraq-esr-realism loops 4–10.
+
+### The Silent OOM (death right after initialization)
+- **Symptoms:** A process dies immediately after "optimizer initialization complete" with no
+  error in any log — the OOM killer SIGKILLs without a traceback.
+- **Common causes:** Dense interior-point Hessians over unitary trajectories scale as
+  (2·d²·N)² — a 36-dim member block at N=21 needs ~25 GB. Member counts are memory decisions.
+- **Investigation:** Compute the Hessian memory before launching; prefer small-d blocks.
+  Check `dmesg`/journalctl for oom-kill records where readable.
+
+### Background process death at harness boundaries
+- **Symptoms:** `nohup … &` jobs are gone by the next interaction; logs end mid-init.
+- **Cause:** Sandboxed tool environments reap the process group when the call returns.
+- **Fix:** `setsid nohup … &` detaches the session (measured both ways, 2026-10-23).
+
 ### Infeasibility (conflicting constraints)
 - **Symptoms:** Solver reports "infeasible" or "locally infeasible"; no solution found.
 - **Common causes:** Control bounds too tight for the target gate, conflicting time and fidelity constraints, target gate unreachable in given time.

packages/extension/skills/research/SKILL.md

@@ -232,6 +232,16 @@ invariants; impossibility checks on noise denominators; FD sanity gates on deriv
 quantities; raw artifacts are the evidence, prose is not. Promotion of any result to
 catalog/status is human-only, always.
 
+**Every measured axis carries its own wiring gate** (2026-10, three measured instances:
+loop-3 playback-unwired, loop-6 detuning-axis-unwired, loop-10's S2-objective probe) — an
+unwired axis returns 0s (or a unit-slip returns ~0.5) and banks a wrong verdict with every
+other gate green. A spec whose axis lacks a positive wiring check (loader reproduction,
+monotonicity, a closed-form anchor cell) is an incomplete spec; critics reject on this
+class. Bonus idiom: a symmetric ±σ telegraph arm's MEAN equals the closed-form single-node
+cost exactly — a free wiring validator for detuning axes. Analyzer findings are verified by
+the director before being applied (2026-10, a factually-wrong receipts finding was caught);
+a critic's arithmetic is never trusted over the test file's machine-pinned literals.
+
 ## Failure modes to watch
 
 - **The thin brief** — a subagent with a fresh context and a vague brief rediscovers
@@ -242,3 +252,12 @@ catalog/status is human-only, always.
   that's an open loop in §5, never an outcome in §2.
 - **Summary drift** — after each compaction, the audit in §9 is the check that the summary
   still points HERE rather than becoming a competing source of truth.
+- **The silent no-op edit** — programmatic edits that report success but never matched
+  (six measured instances, 2026-10): every edit asserts its pattern and grep-verifies the
+  critical line; before `git add -A`, inspect status and account for every path (silent
+  subagent failures leave partial state that a blind add commits); after multi-edit
+  confusion, rewrite clean and let git arbitrate.
+- **Unattended runs** — plain `nohup` backgrounds die at tool-call exit in sandboxed
+  harnesses; `setsid` survives (measured both ways). Chain unattended cells through a
+  driver script; commit the state to the ledger BEFORE the night starts so any compaction
+  is safe.

packages/extension/skills/verification/SKILL.md

@@ -50,6 +50,14 @@ Skip any step = lying, not verifying
 | Regression test works | Red-green cycle verified | Test passes once |
 | Agent completed | VCS diff shows changes | Agent reports "success" |
 | Requirements met | Line-by-line checklist | Tests passing |
+| Edit applied | The edit's pattern ASSERTED a match and the critical line grep-verifies post-write | The edit command returning, "it should be in there" |
+| Options/kwargs reached their consumer | A probe shows behavior change (tiny `max_iter` moves the reported count) | No error raised on pass |
+| Numeric literal in a test/spec | Machine-pinned from the computing formula, rtol ≤ 1e-9 | Hand-copied digits, tolerance-sized rtol that masks drift |
+
+The edit row is the 2026-10 law (six measured instances in one campaign): `str.replace`,
+`sed`, and kwarg passes all **succeed on no-match by design** — an unverified edit is an
+unverified claim, and stacked silent no-ops leave a file whose edit history must be
+rewritten clean with git as arbiter.
 
 ## Quantum-Specific Verifications