14.7 An integrated episode

The following protocol instantiates a failure-first loop without presuming that it is optimal.

1. Freeze the reference state. Version the three sketches, their interfaces, candidate workflow grammar, budgets, and admission thresholds.

2. Detect a persistent decision obstruction. RELIC distinguishes a structural failure from ordinary policy-estimation error and emits a packet requesting information.

3. Design a counter-witness. CLIC ranks interventions that separate supported causal explanations while retaining an explicit unsupported alternative.

4. Construct an executable probe. OPTIC composes or proposes the skill needed to realize the intervention and checks its type, safety, and execution semantics against the registered contract.

5. Acquire and propagate evidence. RELIC or the environment executes a probe admitted for its registered execution contract; CLIC updates the causal posterior without treating execution success as causal confirmation.

6. Propose structural changes. CLIC may extend the causal sketch; OPTIC may extend the skill sketch; RELIC may extend the decision sketch. Each extension receives its own status.

7. Test finite and joint compatibility. Apply each component’s registered integration observer and the applicable controls in \(\mathsf{Ctl}_{\mathrm{AG}}\), then evaluate held-out intervention prediction, skill reliability, decision value, regression, transport, and the interfaces joining them.

8. Persist or retract. Admit only the components and connections supported by their certificates. Preserve unresolved alternatives and the complete audit trail.

This procedure permits partial success. For example, a causal extension may be admitted even when no useful policy has yet been constructed. Conversely, a robust skill may be retained without accepting the causal interpretation that first motivated it.