rework-budget

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# Rework Budget

Rules for pipelines where an artifact is built, reviewed, rejected, and rebuilt.
All of them were mined from a 52-round revision audit of a real production pipeline;
over half of all rounds were **repeats of a cause that had already appeared**.

## 1. Minimal successor — close open defects only

A successor round closes the previous round's open defects and does nothing else.
Everything unchanged is inherited by exact reference (path + hash), not regenerated,
not re-audited. The audit's cleanest rounds were labeled "minimal successor: closed 2/2
open defects"; the messiest regenerated a 90-page artifact to change two pages.

Specs revise the same way: as a **delta contract** naming which clauses it supersedes —
never a full rewrite. One full rejection triggered a 703KB spec rewrite; the delta that
actually mattered fit in a page.

## 2. Same cause twice = escalate

When the same cause category rejects a round twice, stop adjusting at that level and go up:

- render tweaks repeating → the spec is wrong, fix the spec
- spec fixes repeating → the direction is wrong, re-lock direction with the user
- direction flapping → you're guessing; ask the user one interpretation question

A third attempt at the same level was almost always waste in the audit.

## 3. A human rejection becomes a machine gate — same round

Mechanical checklists catch what's *wrong* (fonts, breaks, colors). They cannot catch
what's *lacking* — emptiness, density collapse, lost identity, underfill. Those arrive as
human rejections. The only way the next deliverable doesn't pay the same human round:
convert every human rejection into a quantitative gate (a number, a classifier, a grep)
and append it to the checklist **in the round where it happened**.

## 4. Identity gates — machine-check at build time

Three defect families that each burned multiple rounds, all machine-detectable:

- **Stale identity.** Artifact metadata (PDF Document Info, XMP — *including orphan
  objects via raw scan*) must match the current course/revision; zero tokens from other
  courses or past revisions. A fix that cut the catalog reference but left the raw string
  got re-rejected one round later.
- **Exact requirements.** The user's exact copy and contract numbers (minimum font sizes,
  required notices) live in a machine-comparable list, checked at build. Four audit
  findings in one round were all trivially automatable.
- **Single canonical mapping.** When two frozen inputs can disagree (a TOC's page numbers
  vs. rendered folios), name one canonical source in the binding input and machine-compare
  the other against it. Two "frozen" canons that silently disagreed cost an entire
  90-page candidate.

## 5. Lock only what deserves locking

Hash-lock tables belong on **frozen canonical inputs** — not on every document. In the
audited workspace the receipt ritual had spread to 130 of 148 documents (2.79M characters
total). When everything is locked, locks stop being signal.

From minxnnu-cloud/make-new-things, MIT.

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