PostTrainLLM Closure and Fresh-Experiment Gate

The historical model and experiment work is fully accounted for. Issue #136 is closed. Serial Swift and browser builds, current CLI runtime evidence, responsive rendered review, dependency-security disposition, completion validation, tests, coverage, current-SHA CI, deployment, and the live guest audit all passed for the completion release. This document preserves the factory sequence as lab context. It is not a second task queue.

Issue #137 remains the only external release queue: it owns notarization and the final public distribution receipt. Issue #138’s controlled ReST, Parakeet, WebGPU, and Needle experiment tranche was completed on 2026-09-03 with four tracked decisions and no open experimental run. Neither issue revives the historical TODOs below.

Fresh work begins only when the owner has chosen a new question—normally after completing a relevant path in docs/learn/path-registry.json—and opens a scoped GitHub Issue that names:

• the baseline and candidate recipe;
• the frozen primary and regression evals;
• the data source and leakage boundary;
• the bounded time, compute, RAM, and cost budget;
• the ship, retry, and reject thresholds.

Issue #138 satisfied the written-spec and owner-review portions of that gate; its bounded runs are now closed. No other training, model download, PRD expansion, or parked lane is authorized merely because it appears below. Conditional next actions, TODO markers, and blockers in retained historical documents explain what was not built; they do not mean the closed project is incomplete.

For the full documentation path, start at docs/README.md. Browse all 76 final attempts at /experiments, the 18 recipe contracts at /recipes, and the nine ready paths plus thirteen buildable artifacts at /learn. The artifact contract is tracked in docs/learn/artifact-journey.json. For reviewed external products and techniques, use docs/external-products-reviewed.md.

Release Acceptance Envelope

The completion claim is split into five receipts. A green earlier receipt does not imply that a later one happened.

The completed release ran the boundary in this order:

1. Build and test the native CLI serially; run commands, help, version, unknown-command, and factory/experimental discovery smokes against that binary.
2. Run pnpm --dir browser run build, including the docs/agent builders and generated-link checker.
3. Preview the production output and refresh the design receipt at 390, 768, and 1440 px. Kill every preview/browser process started for the review.
4. Re-run completion, test, coverage, quality, and git diff --check after any fixes.
5. With source-publication approval, commit and push the exact checked tree, wait for current-SHA CI, explicitly trigger deployment, and verify the live guest journeys.
6. Reconcile PROJECT_STATUS.md and Issue #136 only after the live SHA and surfaces match, then close the project from the AI-work perspective.

Retained Factory Thesis

posttrainllm is a Mac-local specialist factory:

target -> data -> post-training -> eval -> package -> report

The canonical loop now has both retry and ship examples. Character Chess is now a documented failed lane, not the active target. Its owned 44.53M model passed the eight-position wiring gate, then the owner-approved target-masked 10k pilot reached 10.54% validation exact versus 6.16% analytic random (+4.38 points) and 10.33% test exact versus 6.23% (+4.10). That missed the frozen +10-point gate. More importantly, both raw and guarded policies won 0/6 games against random legal play; eight guard interventions produced no wins. Do not run the 100k, 1M, or 2M stages under this recipe. Preserve the failed artifact and its reusable masked-SFT, legal-candidate, guard, ladder, and replay infrastructure. No new training target is selected; choose one before another model run.

The Everyday Specialist Benchmark and specialist capability graph are now completed infrastructure. Their first measured routed-system attempt is a useful negative result: Pace v8 plus Apple on-device fallback cannot meet the frozen selective gates (perfect-router oracle 96.4% versus a 99% final bar). Do not tune those gates or present the development cascade as qualified. A future routed candidate needs better leaves and a newly frozen evaluation, not more threshold search on this public set.

Fresh-Experiment Operating Rule

Every newly authorized task must answer one of these:

1. Can we prepare or improve the data?
2. Can we post-train a candidate?
3. Can we evaluate it against a frozen baseline?
4. Can we package it as a specialist artifact?
5. Can we report score delta, regressions, cost, latency, RAM, and a decision?

If not, it is outside the closed lab and needs a separately scoped project.

Post-training tasks must also name a recipe, not only a method. Use docs/techniques/ before training:

• docs/techniques/method-vs-recipe.md defines the standard.
• docs/techniques/sql-technique-backlog.md is the closed SQL recipe lineage.
• docs/techniques/trainloop-teardown.md records the latest external teardown.

“Try DPO”, “try RLVR”, or “try a different LoRA rank” is not specific enough. The recipe must name the failure mode, data, eval gate, slice gate, and stop rule.

OpenSpec completion reprioritization (2026-07-25)

The owner explicitly reprioritized finishing all OpenSpecs. That decision started the no-model foundation tranche of build-mac-local-autocorrect-specialist without selecting or training a new model target. The verified foundation is documented in factory/autocorrect-foundation.md: versioned contract/taxonomy/threshold fixtures, tiny consented original fixtures, strict evaluator, source-first leakage/provenance checks, Mac keyboard simulator with edit traces, bounded tiny-overfit/pilot manifests, distribution report, and an Apple protocol assessment.

Codex/frontier calibration (task 2.5), pinned base-model research, and the approved three-candidate offline bake-off (tasks 4.1-4.5) are complete. The 18-row smoke ruler required no repair. FLAN-T5-small is frozen as the smallest plausibly trainable base: it stayed within the resource envelope but reached only 6.25% zero-shot error reduction, 66.67% clean preservation, and 86.67% protected-span preservation. Exact commands and measured evidence are in factory/autocorrect-model-shortlist.md and evals/autocorrect/base-bakeoff-v1.json.

Tasks 5.1-5.2 completed 2026-07-25 without training. The ordinary supervised recipe is frozen in evals/autocorrect/adapter-recipe-v1.json and the encoder-decoder LoRA path is implemented in scripts/research/autocorrect_adapter.py; both are documented in factory/autocorrect-adapter-recipe.md. Measured forward-only on CPU against the real pinned base: 48 adapted modules, 344,064 trainable parameters (0.4471%), and logits bit-identical after injection (max absolute delta 0.0). 19 offline tests pass via bash evals/autocorrect-adapter-smoke.sh. LoRA is hand-rolled so torch, transformers, and peft stay off the project dependency surface.

Task 5.3, the repeated-data overfit gate, ran 2026-07-25 with owner approval and passed: exact match 1.0 at step 50 of 200, loss 1.585 -> 0.030, 0.28 min, 1,135 MiB peak RSS on MPS. Evidence: evals/autocorrect/tiny-overfit-result-v1.json. Read the caveat before quoting it — the fixture has one unique target, so the score measures capacity and wiring, not correction, and the diagnostic probe showed copy bias, memorization leakage, and instruction echo on unseen input.

Tasks 5.4-5.5 ran 2026-07-25 with owner approval and the pilot regressed: error reduction +0.0625 -> -0.8125 on the unchanged frozen suite, unnecessary edit rate 0.839 against a 0.005 bar. The failure mode is overcorrection, not copy bias — the model became a paraphraser. Evidence: evals/autocorrect/pilot-result-v1.json.

Two blockers came out of it:

1. The pilot was truncated by construction. It stopped at step 50 of 300 on stop_on_clean_preservation_below: 0.995, but the base’s own zero-shot clean preservation is 0.667, so that ship-grade bar fires at the first evaluation regardless of training.
2. Tasks 5.6-5.7 are rejected, not pending. An edit-aware objective up-weights edit positions, which targets the opposite of the measured failure and would push overcorrection past 5.7’s own reject condition.

Do not run further training under adapter-recipe-v1 — it has reached its stop rule and its movement policy forbids moving bars inside a live run. The next step is a v2 recipe that separates training stop rules from ship bars, draws on more of the 26 available source documents, and adds a meaning-change guard. That is a spec change, not a training run.

Historical Factory Sequence (inactive)

The sequence below is retained because it is the correct execution order if a future issue reactivates the factory. None of its steps is currently assigned.

0. Keep Public Artifacts First-Class

Public artifact inventory lives in docs/factory/public-artifacts.md. The portable before/after proof for an artifact is its report card; the published cohort and its documented absences are in docs/factory/report-card-cohort.md.

Before starting a new run or release push, update the artifact entry with:

• measured evidence
• blockers
• next release action

Then recompile the report cards and confirm no drift:

python3 scripts/factory/publish_report_cards.py
python3 scripts/factory/publish_report_cards.py --check

New runs should emit the optional eval-validity.json and cost.json fragments. Without them no candidate can reach a fully verified ship — frontier-ceiling, frozen-eval identity, leakage, and cost/time have nowhere to live, and every current card lists that as a blocker.

Current shipped research artifact: qwen3-4b-rest-fused, with package metadata, public weights, a narrow routing decision, and a fresh paired requalification receipt. Its legacy-package report card remains not fully verified because the card format cannot import the raw run-folder validity fields.

All six public Hugging Face models now have dedicated case studies under /artifacts, including the rejected and missing-evidence releases. Use those pages—not Hub request counts—as the public explanation of model quality, limitations, and next evidence action.

The last report-only priority was qwen06-sql-routed-v1. Its canonical report run can be rendered with:

python3 scripts/sql/render_sql_factory_run.py --out runs/2026-07-02-sql-routed-qwen06-v1

1. Pick the Factory Target

Choose exactly one target before training.

Queue state (2026-08-05): no active training target is selected. Character Chess stopped at the 10k gate: it learned a small, repeatable held-out move signal but no demonstrable advantage over random legal play in the bounded full-game screen. Its 100k/1M/2M stages are rejected under the current recipe; the earlier SQL and ReST lanes remain closed or report-only.

The last POC target was the SQL specialist. Its low-compute fixture is evals/sql-poc/; the brief is docs/specialists/b1-sql-poc.md.

Frozen target (2026-07-03): qwen06-sql-hygiene-dpo-v1 — the single preference-tuning/output-hygiene candidate from cleanup task 4. Frozen before training:

• Baseline model: Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B + synthetic expanded adapter (runs/2026-07-02-sql-expanded-qwen06/qwen06-sql-expanded.lora), the synthetic side of qwen06-sql-routed-v1. Frozen baseline scores: synthetic execution 0.860, synthetic exact 0.840, clean-SQL raw rate 0.000 (0/50 raw completions are a single bare SQL statement).
• Candidate method: posttrainllm dpo on evals/sql-poc-expanded/preferences.jsonl (108 hygiene pairs; verified zero prompt/gold overlap with the dev set), composed with the SFT adapter at inference via the existing multi-LoRA stack (--lora sft --lora dpo). First plan was bake-lora then DPO on the merged base, but bake-lora did not support DoRA adapter magnitudes at freeze time and the SFT adapter is DoRA — recorded as a tooling gap, not worked around with new infrastructure. (Gap closed 2026-07-04: bake-lora now bakes DoRA magnitudes. The frozen candidate keeps multi-LoRA composition; do not re-plan a frozen run.)
• Eval suite: posttrainllm generate + posttrainllm eval-sql --db-dir evals/sql-poc-expanded/dbs on the frozen 50-row evals/sql-poc-expanded/dev.jsonl, plus the clean-SQL raw-output metric (single statement, starts with SELECT, no fence/prose, nothing after ;).
• Regression suite: the public64 b-mc2 exact gate (0.531) is unchanged by construction — the public adapter and router are untouched. Recorded as a skipped recheck, not a measured one.
• Ship bar: synthetic execution >= 0.86 (no regression) AND clean-SQL raw rate >= 0.80. “Ship” means the candidate replaces the synthetic side of qwen06-sql-routed-v1 as current-best; it does not unblock public packaging, which stays gated on a public execution benchmark.

Outcome (2026-07-04): retry-training. The ref-free SimPO run collapsed the policy (composed execution 0.860 → 0.080, clean-SQL 0.000; the adapter alone generates fence spam). Full schema-valid run artifacts and report: runs/2026-07-03-sql-hygiene-dpo-qwen06/. Clean-SQL scorer now exists at scripts/sql/score_sql_clean_output.py. Next candidate: reference-anchored DPO (or SimPO at ~10× lower lr / ≤50 steps) on the same frozen pairs, evaluated composed. Gotcha for future runs: record the posttrainllm binary provenance — the 2026-06-25 release build scores identical preds at 0.000 where the 2026-07-02 debug build scores 0.860, and composes multi-LoRA differently.

Retry outcome (2026-07-11): retry-training — collapse fixed, hygiene still unmet. Reference-anchored DPO (--loss-type dpo --beta 0.1, r4 q/v, 50 steps, lr 5e-6) on the same 108 frozen pairs, evaluated composed. Result: no collapse — composed execution 0.860 → 0.900 (+0.040), DPO-adapter-alone 0.120 (healthy, not fence-spam), DPO step-1 loss 0.6931 ≈ log 2. But clean-SQL raw rate stayed 0.000: 41/50 outputs changed yet all keep the Answer:/Explanation: prose wrapper. Execution bar passes, hygiene bar fails → not shipped. Reproduced the 0.860 baseline exactly first with a fresh swift-build DEBUG binary (git 74cb267). Full run: runs/2026-07-11-sql-hygiene-dpo-refanchored-qwen06/ (assembled via scripts/factory/assemble_factory_run.py; validates + publish-check passes). Next: higher-pressure ref-anchored DPO (150-300 steps and/or beta 0.3, lr 1e-5), watching exec; else fix the SFT data to emit a bare SELECT. Takeaway: reference anchoring is the validated cure for the SimPO collapse; format hygiene is a separate, still-open pressure problem.

Higher-pressure retry outcome (2026-07-11): retry-data — composed DPO ruled out for hygiene. Ref-anchored DPO at beta 0.3 / 200 steps / lr 1e-5 drove the loss to 0.0073 and pushed composed execution to 0.920 (+0.060 vs baseline), but clean-SQL stayed 0.000: the composed output keeps Answer: and the DPO-alone output keeps The answer is:. Across two pressure regimes (gentle 50-step and aggressive 200-step) composed rank-4 q/v DPO never removed the prose wrapper while execution only rose — output format is SFT/base-controlled, not DPO-reachable. Decision: retry-data. Run: runs/2026-07-11-sql-hygiene-dpo-refanchored-b03-s200-qwen06/.

Diagnosis correction (2026-07-11): the SFT data is already clean — 108/108 evals/sql-poc-expanded/train.jsonl targets are bare SELECT with no wrapper. So the Answer:/The answer is: lead-in is the base Qwen3-0.6B prose prior, not a data defect; a data rebuild would be a no-op. The hygiene goal needs a generation-strength fix, not a data-content one: (a) stronger SFT (higher rank / more epochs / more bare-SELECT examples) to overpower the base prior, or (b) inference-time steering (few-shot bare-SELECT exemplars, a stop sequence, or constrained-generation SELECT prefix). Since eval-sql already extracts the inner SELECT (exec 0.92), a cheap deterministic output post-process is also a legitimate hygiene fix. Execution is not the problem (0.860 → 0.920 across retries) — only the output wrapper is.

TrainLoop-style additions required for the next SQL retry (2026-07-04):

1. Method-vs-recipe registry: docs/techniques/.
2. Case-study report shape: docs/factory/case-study-template.md.
3. Candidate-selection curriculum before another open-generation hygiene retry: scripts/sql/build_sql_candidate_choice.py and scripts/sql/score_sql_candidate_choice.py.
4. Slice metrics: scripts/sql/score_sql_slices.py.
5. Trace review: scripts/sql/review_sql_trace.py.
6. Batch-first rollout plan: scripts/render_batch_posttrain_plan.py.
7. LoRA diagnostics on every meaningful adapter: scripts/lora_geometry.py.

No next SQL candidate should be reported without slice-metrics.json and trace_review.md.

Good targets:

• Pace planner/action-surface specialist.
• Routed file-ops successor that preserves breadth better than qwen3-4b-file-ops-distilled.
• A second narrow domain only if its eval is already frozen.

Exit criteria:

• Baseline model named.
• Candidate method named.
• Eval suite named.
• Regression/breadth suite named.
• Ship/reject threshold written down.

2. Freeze the Eval

Use existing eval plumbing first:

• eval-gate
• BFCL or Pace fixtures
• eval-compare
• failure/breadth fixtures
• latency/RAM/tok-s measurement where feasible

Do not train against a moving target.

Exit criteria:

• eval-baseline.json exists.
• Baseline command is recorded.
• Pass/fail threshold is recorded.
• Known eval limitations are recorded.

3. Prepare Data

Use existing data tools before writing new ones:

• traces-to-data
• corrections-to-data
• reasoning-classify
• quality-filter
• dedupe
• synthesize / magpie only when teacher data is needed

Exit criteria:

• Dataset manifest exists.
• Source provenance is recorded.
• Dedup/filter stats are recorded.
• Held-out split is locked.

4. Train the First Candidate

Use the cheapest method first:

1. SFT / LoRA.
2. DPO or preference tuning only after good/bad pairs exist.
3. ReST/RLVR-style loops only when the reward is verifiable.
4. Merge/routing only after measuring breadth damage.

Exit criteria:

• Training config is saved.
• Train log is saved.
• Adapter/model artifact path is recorded.
• No extra model/base churn happened mid-run.

5. Evaluate and Decide

Compare candidate to baseline and incumbent.

Required report fields:

• score delta
• pass/fail
• regressions
• breadth retention
• latency
• RAM or peak RSS when available
• token throughput when available
• cost/time
• artifact path
• ship/reject/retry decision

Exit criteria:

• report.md exists.
• decision.json exists.
• Specialist package is created only if the decision is ship.

Historical Verification Reference

These commands describe the retained factory verification surface. They are useful inside a newly authorized experiment, but they are not recurring work items in the closed lab.

0. Run the no-GPU factory smoke set for the TrainLoop-style additions: bash evals/sql-choice-smoke.sh, bash evals/sql-trace-review-smoke.sh, and bash evals/lora-geometry-smoke.sh. 0.1. Run the stricter publish evidence smoke: bash evals/factory-publish-check-smoke.sh. 0.2. Run the docs golden-path smoke: bash evals/docs-world-class-smoke.sh. 0.3. Run the factory-run assembler bridge smoke: bash evals/factory-run-assemble-smoke.sh. 0.3.1. Run the durable lifecycle smoke: bash evals/factory-run-lifecycle-smoke.sh. 0.4. Run the fine-tune report card smoke: bash evals/fine-tune-report-card-smoke.sh. 0.5. Run the autocorrect no-model smokes: bash evals/autocorrect-foundation-smoke.sh and bash evals/autocorrect-adapter-smoke.sh. Both are now in the CI evals job.
1. Verify live command evidence emission on the next approved factory run. Done (2026-08-22): closed as superseded (#69). The infrastructure is merged and smoke-verified; live-run verification is now implicit in the next real factory run rather than a standalone ticket. Bridge (2026-07-11): scripts/factory/assemble_factory_run.py is the generic report-artifact bridge. It turns the emitted fragments (config, dataset, eval-baseline, eval-candidate, decision, optional artifact/slice-metrics/trace_review) into a canonical run folder with derived provenance.json (git + real dataset SHA-256) and report.md (eval delta computed, not typed), and the output passes both scripts/factory/check_factory_run_publish.py and the typed Swift FactoryRunFolder validator (smoke: bash evals/factory-run-assemble-smoke.sh). scripts/sql/render_sql_factory_run.py remains the SQL-specific one-shot renderer. Lifecycle metadata (2026-07-25): new native renders and generic assemblies emit versioned run-status.json, update verified advisory current/latest pointers, and record boundary transitions only after durable metadata writes. factory-run init/status/transition/list/reconcile are metadata-only; stale active runs remain active-with-warning until explicit operator action. Legacy folders remain valid and can be imported explicitly without invented history. This does not resume training or alter decision.json/publication authority. --factory-run flags (2026-08-04): opt-in integration has Swift sft record bounded training/cost/artifact evidence, eval-gate record the frozen primary suite’s canonical baseline/candidate pair, and eval-compare derive compatible slice metrics. Typed writes cross lifecycle boundaries only after durable validation, and bash evals/factory-run-live-evidence-smoke.sh proves the full metadata path without loading MLX. The next owner-approved factory run exercises these flags as part of its normal flow; any command-integration defect found then gets its own focused issue.
2. Run scripts/sql/build_sql_spider_execution_gate.py against a local Spider DB bundle and score the current routed candidate on execution accuracy.
3. Measure routed SQL latency, RAM/peak RSS, and tok/s (harness ready: scripts/sql/measure_sql_routed_perf.py).
4. Run exactly one preference-tuning/output-hygiene candidate. Done 2026-07-04 — decision retry-training (see frozen-target outcome above).
5. Report and decide package vs retry. Done 2026-07-04 — schema-valid run + report in runs/2026-07-03-sql-hygiene-dpo-qwen06/; retry lane defined there.

Use docs/prds/PRIORITY.md only when a task needs PRD-level acceptance criteria. Do not work from the full PRD list directly.

Parked

These remain parked unless an explicitly reactivated factory run needs them:

• browser polish
• Astro migration
• public launch/HN prep
• ANE/CoreML research
• VLM porting
• Tier 5 research
• broad Mac app GUI polish
• new PRD expansion