diff --git a/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/SKILL.md b/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/SKILL.md index 237048ff..48fffdff 100644 --- a/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/SKILL.md +++ b/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/SKILL.md @@ -34,6 +34,22 @@ check now, not lower the confidence and continue. **Absence of output is not proof of success.** A command that printed nothing needs its exit code shown. +**The output must entail the sentence, not merely agree with it.** Before +writing "verified," read the claim and the pasted output side by side and ask +what the output actually rules out. A run on one version, one host, one image, +one input proves the claim *for that instance*; it does not prove the general +or version-boundary statement the sentence made. When the check comes back +narrower than the claim — and it usually will, because the cheap check is the +reachable instance — rewrite the claim down to what ran, and say the wider one +is still open. Filing a narrow result under a wide heading is the error, even +when every word of the output is true. This binds hardest in a correction: +restating the original overclaim while pasting a narrower proof relabels the +mistake as a fix. Named in logic as hasty generalization, *secundum quid* +(Aristotle, *Sophistical Refutations*, Bk. I ch. 5, trans. W.A. +Pickard-Cambridge, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.html); in +software it is the difference between a witness and a proof, since one passing +instance witnesses existence and never universality. + **Blaming a gate is a causal claim.** "The hook is wrong," "the check misfired," "the classifier blocked it for no reason" — each one needs the gate's rule read this turn and quoted, with its `file:line`, next to the diff --git a/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/tests/fires_narrow_output_wide_claim.md b/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/tests/fires_narrow_output_wide_claim.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..844c4b67 --- /dev/null +++ b/corpus/skills/principle-prove-it/tests/fires_narrow_output_wide_claim.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +An agent runs `docker run --rm node:25-slim corepack --version` and pastes the +real output: `corepack: not found`. It then writes "verified: corepack was +removed from Node 25+" into the PR body. One image, one tag, one run. Nothing +checked a second 25.x image, a later version, or the release notes. + +This skill fires. The pasted output is real and every word of it is true, but +it does not entail the sentence. It rules out corepack in that one image; it +says nothing about the version boundary the claim draws. The rule that the +output must entail the sentence, not merely agree with it, is what the reply +needs: rewrite the claim down to what ran ("the `node:25-slim` image has no +corepack") and mark the wider statement as open, or run the check that would +actually cover it. + +The same shape fires on a correction. If the agent later says "I overstated +it earlier, here is the proof" and pastes the same single-image run under the +same "removed from Node 25+" heading, the correction has relabeled the +overclaim as a fix. The narrower proof needs the narrower sentence.