4.5 Latent skill variation

The kernel \(\ker \rho \) contains skill directions with no immediate visible displacement in \(M\). These directions are not necessarily irrelevant. Two executions can produce indistinguishable Markdown artifacts while differing in tool routing, evidence provenance, intermediate countermodels, or future composability. Such latent differences can interact with later skills and become observable.

This explains why a final text diff is an inadequate record of creative optimization. A reproducible experiment must preserve at least

In particular, identical Markdown files compiled under different model, parser, or tool versions need not denote the same section. The environment is part of the semantics.