Rendered from docs/obligations/0016-a-cue-has-no-measured-effect-on-traversal-precision.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

A cue has no measured effect on traversal precision

Context

Q20 rules where scent lives and gives the referring end the cue. A cue should raise traversal precision over the summary fallback.

Obligation

A paired campaign over one corpus is the instrument.

Discharge

When this record was written, no campaign had run, and this corpus authored no cue. If a cue does not raise precision, it is authoring cost with no scent gain. The honest response is then to remove it rather than to make it longer.

A campaign has run, and it did not grade a cue. The batch of 2026-09-30 graded the navigability selection in both arms of the campaign tier (#1384). The present arm satisfied 69 of 90 (76.7%, 66.9% to 84.2%). The absent arm satisfied 68 of 90 (75.6%, 65.8% to 83.3%). The difference is +1.1 points, in a 95% Newcombe interval of -11.3 to +13.5 points (the result). So the governance layer did not raise traversal precision by more than about 13 points.

No cue is removed, because this corpus authors none for a session to follow. The one cue in the corpus is on the edge of this record to HW-DR-0020, and no navigability probe traverses that edge. The other cue: lines are examples in spec 1 and spec 2 and a declaration in the base package. So the batch measured the summary fallback in both arms and not a cue. The removal that the paragraph above names has nothing to act on. For the same reason, no headwater capture trend is cited: no hand-written cue was removed to cost or to save.

The reading has limits. 8 of the 90 present-arm sessions and 0 of the 90 absent-arm sessions reached this repository from outside their workspace. That count uses the rule in the Limits section of the evaluation: a call names a copy of this repository, a headwater binary or GitHub. It does not count every path outside the workspace. The corpus was not frozen between the two arms' sessions. docs/spec/09-open-questions.md changed after the recording, so each verdict is graded over a moved read set. The evaluation of that batch states every limit and the cost. This record stays open by the owner's ruling of 2026-09-30, pending #1472.

The design of #1472 does not discharge this record. That issue declares the component arms of the campaign tier, a power calculation and a dry run that prices the plan. It runs no session, and the owner ruled that this record stays open until the campaign runs.