esh-pfi-infrastructure/persistent-memory.d/2026-09-27-semif-consumer-fit-spikes.md

SemIf consumer-fit spikes: Wyrd scene change, Cicada affect gate (2026-09-27, Prime)

Prime, 0904: "Two semif spikes -- Wyrd has a couple flags per turn on whether the scene should change, check the codebase, see if semif is a clean fit and then spike a couple of sample scenarios. likewise, cicada has a speech module and some reactions-- spike whether or not she should show emotion." No service change. Code and raw output: services/semif-serve/spike/ (consumer_fit.py harness; wyrd_cases.py, cicada_cases.py build the scenario files; consumer-fit-2026-09-27/ holds scenarios, .result.json and .log per run).

Method (applies to both)

• One /decide/shared per turn, every decision with "orderings": "rotations". Target: semif-serve 0.1.3 on fv-ml1 GPU 1, client on nh3-dev.
• Noise floor: the service is deterministic (acceptance: 144 rows twice, gap 0.0), and the harness asserts the same top on all 3 runs of every case. Repeats measure latency only.
• Null control: every case is also asked over a content-free state. It always picks the "nothing happened" option, so its accuracy is that label's base rate (Cicada 16/31, Wyrd 15/21). Evidence conditions are read against that, not against 0.
• Positive controls: cases tagged control, unambiguous by construction.
• Limits, stated: one labeller (me), authored inputs, 31 Cicada and 21 Wyrd cases per decision. Wilson 95% intervals are wide (30/31 → 0.84–0.99; 21/21 → 0.85–1.0), so nothing here resolves differences under ~10–15 points. The winning wordings were chosen on this same set, so their scores are optimistic until checked on held-out real play.

Wyrd: scene change (fit: yes for the CHOICE, no for the WRITING)

How it works today (from the code): no dedicated flag. The GM's gen structured-output calls carry it two ways. R8 (reflect): plot_direction.target_node, accepted only if it is an advanceable exit; plot_direction.intrude is "advisory" and never read anywhere. Path B: raw AddStoryNode + AdvanceToNode events, gated only by prompt prose ("Add + advance to a NEW node ONLY when the scene moves to a genuinely different place — never every turn"). Wyrd's archival memory already says "if it churns, tighten the prompt (or gate node-adds)". Three of the real campaigns in .wyrd-data/canon have ZERO story edges, so R8 can never fire there and every scene change went through ungated path B.

Fit: both are typed choices over one state, exactly semif's shape. Semif's exit options can only be "stay" plus the real advanceable exits, so it cannot name an illegal target. It cannot write the new node (title, summary, mood, image prompt) or the steering directive; the GM keeps those. So it would be a gate/selector in front of the GM, not a replacement.

Spike: 3 real seed graphs (The Fletcher, The Toll Road, The Last Vigil + one added edge), 21 authored turns in the campaigns' register (the transcripts are gone from conv-api: session_not_found). State = current scene + player action + narration.

decision	wording	correct	real moves found	controls
place: left this place?	r1 "has the scene moved … or does it still hold?"	16/21 (null 15/21)	1/6	4/7
place2	r2 location-anchored: "began at the {loc}; by the end, where are they?"	21/21, all unanimous, p ≥ 0.91	6/6	7/7
exit: which exit?	r1 "which one does this turn move the story into?"	18/21	6/6	6/7
exit2	r2 "only once the narration actually gets there"	16/21	1/6	4/7

• Round 1 place failed its positive controls (no better than the blind null), so the instrument, not the model, was broken. place2 was written after seeing that.
• exit r1 misses: two false advances on Toll-Road conversation turns (p 0.59 split, p 0.67 unanimous), and v-to-pub, where my label said stay and semif chose "Outside the Sanctum". On re-reading, semif's pick is defensible (they do run outside first). All its correct advances had p ≥ 0.87 except one at 0.67. A threshold would be tuned on the test set, so none is proposed.
• Latency: 4 decisions per turn, 133–179 ms end to end (101–141 ms server). The first request of two files took ~700–800 ms (n=2, cause not isolated). Either way it is in dead time and is far below the GM's reflect.
• Side findings from the code read, not fixed (they are Wyrd's): story_node.created_turn is never written, so "scenes so far (in order)" is alphabetical and includes unvisited seeds; and a late "ready" for an abandoned node's backdrop can still replace the one on screen.

Cicada: should she show emotion (a gate, not a mood ring)

Constraint found first: Cicada persistent-memory 2026-09-20, operator: "Affect is emitted once and fanned out … nothing derives affect a second time … A classifier inferring emotion from output text is the mood-ring failure." So semif does not pick her pose and never reads her reply. What is open: talk's /face loop measured the model gesturing on 8–11 of 18 mundane turns (target under 1 in 3), and its README names "the page dropping gestures" as the next lever, "a design call, not a tuning pass". The spike measures that lever: a gate on what the PERSON said, run beside the LLM.

wording	correct	mundane → "ordinary"	earned → "react"	controls
w1: descriptive options (news, joke, surprise, distress, a turn / command, plain question, small talk)	30/31	16/16	14/15	5/5
w2: "Should the assistant's face visibly react to this?" Yes/No	19/31	16/16	3/15	4/5

• w2 said "ordinary" to "My dog died this morning" at p 0.93. The wording carries the whole definition. Terse yes/no options fail; descriptive ones work.
• Adding the earlier lines of the conversation changed no scored answer.
• The one w1 miss: "Order four hundred pounds of cheese" → ordinary. Open (unscored) cases: "Goodnight" → react (p 0.58), "Thanks, you're the best" → react (0.89), "STOP THE TIMER" → ordinary.
• Latency ~105 ms end to end (76 ms server), under talk's ~0.4–0.6 s pose decode, so it adds nothing to the turn if it starts at end of utterance.

Recommendations (surfaced to Prime; nothing built)

• Cicada: the cleanest fit of the two. Gate gestures only: on "ordinary", drop the model's gesture and leave its pose alone. A miss then costs one missing gesture; gating poses would leave her neutral on bad news. It reads input, never her output, and never picks WHICH feeling, but it does override the model's affect. That is Prime's ruling to make, and the code would live in tts-stack talk /face, not in cicada (affect is not on cicada's v1 list).
• Wyrd: place2 is the node-add gate the archival note asked for. R8 exit choice works but its wording is fragile. Wyrd's v1 is met and no churn has been observed (2–6 nodes per real campaign), so by the roadmap gate this is a parking-lot item with a trigger: build it if live play shows churn, after labelling ~50 real turns as a held-out set.