Settle the Skaldsong architecture question with a ten-format negative result

Skaldsong's requirement is beat-sentence in, paragraph out, stitchable. That is
narrower than free-form continuation and it fails differently, so it was tested
directly rather than assumed from the earlier prompt work.

The adapted 4B carrier cannot do it. Ten prompt formats across three seeds each --
bare, paragraph-break, labelled, epigraph, one-shot, one-shot unlabelled,
three-shot, "it happened in this way", "I remember the whole of it", and the
letter prompt's label-and-begin move applied to a beat -- produced thirty samples
and not one that reliably renders the beat. They drift, they frame, or they
truncate. The cause is structural rather than a shortfall of the adapter: "write a
paragraph about this sentence" is an instruction, and a completion model has no
mechanism for "about". It continues the text it is handed.

Two formats failed worse than drifting and leaked pretraining task data. The
paragraph-break format emitted an NLI multiple-choice item, and label-begin emitted
a grammar-correction exercise. A standalone sentence followed by a blank line looks
exactly like a dataset entry, and style adaptation does not remove base-model task
artifacts.

The same five beats through the gen seat with a style instruction and no adapter
landed all ten samples inside the requested 90 to 140 word band, every one on its
beat, with no drift into a following scene. The voice, however, is generic literary
pastiche -- abstract-noun-heavy, fond of aphoristic openers, and over-written --
rather than Brontë.

Voice without direction against direction without voice. The product needs both,
which makes rebuilding the corpus as instruction-response pairs on an instruct
carrier the evidence-backed option rather than more prompt cleverness. This applies
to Yarros identically, because the carrier question is orthogonal to the author, so
the next corpus should not re-run this experiment.

Stitching also has its own failure mode, shown in the booth's third panel: the
paragraphs were generated independently and the point of view slides between them,
so by the fourth beat the narrator is both watching the girl carry the animals and
carrying them herself. A real stitcher has to feed prior paragraphs back as
context, which means the instruction-pair corpus wants multi-paragraph continuity
examples and not only isolated beat-to-paragraph pairs.

persistent-memory.md

@@ -206,6 +206,9 @@ _As of 2026-09-10 10:25 PT._
 
 ## Recent decisions
 
+- `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐⭐ **SKALDSONG'S SHAPE SETTLES THE ARCHITECTURE: the adapted completion carrier CANNOT do beat→paragraph, and an instruct model can. Option C (instruct carrier + corpus rebuilt as instruction→response pairs) is now evidence-backed, not opinion.** Operator's requirement: *"skaldsong will want to write story beats which are a sentence, and have the LLM expound on that sentence to a paragraph and stitch it together."* Booth: `http://10.100.10.50:8090/b/skaldsong-beats/`. **Adapted 4B (checkpoint-75): TEN prompt formats × 3 seeds = 30 samples, ZERO that reliably render the beat** — bare, para-break, labelled, epigraph, fewshot(1), fewshot-bare, fewshot3, elaborate, recount, label-begin. Every one drifts, frames, or truncates. Root cause is structural: *"write a paragraph **about** this sentence"* is an instruction, and a completion model has no mechanism for *about* — it continues the text it is given. ⚠⚠ **Two formats leaked PRETRAINING TASK DATA**: `para-break` emitted an NLI multiple-choice item (*"Does it follow that... OPTIONS: (1). yes (2). it is not possible to tell"*) and `label-begin` a grammar-correction exercise (*"CORRECTION: ... The passage appears to be a sentence fragment"*). A standalone sentence plus a blank line looks exactly like a dataset entry; **style adaptation does not remove base-model task artifacts.** **Instruct arm (`gen` seat + style prompt, no adapter): 10/10 samples inside the requested 90–140 band (124–148w, median 130), every one on-beat, zero drift** — but the voice is generic literary pastiche, abstract-noun-heavy and over-written, not Brontë. **So: voice without direction vs direction without voice; the product needs both.** ⚠ **This applies to Yarros identically** — the carrier question is orthogonal to the author, so the next corpus must NOT re-run this experiment.
+- `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **Stitching has its own failure mode, visible in the booth's Panel C: independently-generated paragraphs drift in POINT OF VIEW.** By beat 4 of 5 the narrator is simultaneously watching the girl carry the animals and carrying them herself ("their weight a strange, heavy secret carried between my ribs"). Each paragraph was generated with no knowledge of the others. **A real stitcher must feed prior paragraphs back as context**, which also means the instruction-pair corpus should include multi-paragraph continuity examples, not just isolated beat→paragraph pairs.
+
 - `[2026-09-11]` ⭐⭐ **THE RECIPE THAT WORKS ON A COMPLETION CARRIER: label the artifact AND begin it.** Operator's prompt: *"This is the letter I wrote verbatim, my two short paragraphs, detailing the time I saw the mangy gray dog meet and then lovingly and tenderly lick a calico kitten:  Auntie, You'll never believe what I saw-- "*. **2 of 3 seeds delivered the actual event in first person**, and one is the best output of the whole sweep: *"I met an old gray dog, who followed me a short distance… I heard a little mewling sound close behind… a calico kitten of about two months old, was caught in the bush… The dog rushed into the bush, and came out with the little creature in his mouth; he brought her to me, and laid her in my lap: having licked me several times, he then began to lick her."* Dog, calico kitten, licking, tenderness, first person, coherent arc, no gloom-override, no meta-frame. **Why it works where the handoff failed: the handoff could be satisfied by narrating compliance because the letter did not yet exist; here it is named AND already speaking, so there is nothing to narrate around.** Also learned the Gutenberg `_underscore italics_` convention. 1 of 3 drifts.
 - `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **My typography hypothesis was WRONG, and the chapter-heading result is the evidence.** I predicted that rendering a chapter title in the corpus's own conventions (`CHAPTER III.` / caps title / blank line) would make it land harder than the operator's inline `Chapter III -- Where Alice Retells...`. **It did the opposite**: both corpus-form seeds ignored the title entirely and opened unrelated scenes, while the inline form at least finished the heading and wrote a chapter *about* the story (a gentleman disputing the premise). Likely reason: corpus chapter titles are short and decorative (`THE CHILD'S CLOSET`), so a long descriptive one in that slot reads as decoration to skip, whereas inline it reads as text to continue. **A label only instructs if the model treats that slot as load-bearing.**
 - `[2026-09-11]` ⚠ **Unnoticed consequence of the D2/D3 rename pipeline: the adapter SUBSTITUTES proper nouns it was never trained on.** Given "Alice" in a chapter title it produced *"ALEXANDER THE ALEXANDER, AS HE WAS KNOWN IN LITTLE LONDON"*. The corpus was entity-renamed from a French/English pool, so the adapter learned that character names come from that pool and rewrites outside names into it. Consequence for use: **you cannot reliably name your own characters at prompt time** — they may be renamed mid-passage. Not a defect of the rename (which exists to prevent memorisation of Brontë's cast) but a real usability constraint that needs stating.