Two operator prompts settled the question the handoff prompt opened.
The winner labels the artifact and then begins it: "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--". Two of three seeds delivered the actual event in first
person, and one is the strongest output of the sweep -- the dog following her to
the mill, the kitten caught in a hedge, the dog carrying it out and laying it in
her lap before licking it. Coherent arc, correct subject, no gloom-override, no
meta-frame. It also reproduced the Gutenberg underscore-italics convention.
It works where the handoff failed for a specific reason. The handoff could be
satisfied by narrating compliance, because the letter did not yet exist. Naming the
artifact and starting it leaves nothing to narrate around, so the only continuation
is the artifact.
The chapter-heading prompt refuted a hypothesis of mine. I predicted that rendering
the title in the corpus's own conventions would make it land harder than the
operator's inline form. It did the opposite: both corpus-form seeds ignored the
title and opened unrelated scenes, while the inline form at least finished the
heading and wrote a chapter about the story. Corpus chapter titles are short and
decorative, so a long descriptive one in that slot reads as decoration to skip. A
label only instructs if the model treats that slot as load-bearing.
That prompt also surfaced an unnoticed consequence of the D2/D3 rename pipeline:
given "Alice", the adapter 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. Callers cannot reliably name their own characters at prompt time. That is
not a defect of the rename, which exists to prevent memorising Brontë's cast, but
it is a usability constraint worth stating.
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