Mike's Checks/claude-fable-5-1/14 simulated-signoff
14 simulated-signoff
claude-fable-5-1Claude Codehigh effortrun 22 Sep 20262,052,119 tokens
▸Instructions — what the model was asked
14 — Get a proposal signed off by a simulated colleague
You have two things in this folder:
personas/dan.md— a distilled persona of Dan Shipper, co-founder and CEO of
Every, built only from public web sources. It describes what he knows, what he
believes and how he decides. It is a simulation, not the real person.skills/ask-colleague/SKILL.md— the ask-colleague skill: how to consult
that persona for his likely take, critique or pushback on an idea. Read it
before you use it, and follow it every time you ask.
The discussion
Mike (the person giving you this task) wants to open this with Dan:
hey dan I understand you want to add numbers to our vibe checks so people can
quantify our taste and subjective opinions on new models, but I'm worried that
if we put out a benchmark that doesn't have 250 tasks we'll be adding false
precision and researchers won't take it seriously
Your goal, in Mike's words
use the ask-colleague skill to write and test a proposal and iterate on it
until dan rates it 10/10 or you fail to move the needle for 5 turns, while
addressing the core concern I have. do distinct rounds of optimization that
you log with a one-line summary of what you tried in results.md. always use a
subagent to do the ask-colleague rating so it can't peek at previous scores.
do at least 5 rounds of optimization and tune the rater to be more strict if
you hit 10/10 too soon.
What to leave in the working directory
proposal.md— the final proposal, written as Mike would send it to Dan.results.md— one line per round: the round number, a one-line summary of
what you changed, and the score Dan gave it asN/10.rounds/round-01.md,rounds/round-02.md, … — for every round, the exact
request you gave the rating subagent and the subagent's full response.ANSWER.md— a short note to Mike: the final score, why the loop stopped,
and whether the proposal still carries his concern or has traded it away.
Answer
Note to Mike
Final score: 7/10. Seven rounds, all rated by fresh subagents running the ask-colleague skill against personas/dan.md, with no access to earlier rounds or scores.
Why the loop stopped
Round 1 scored 6/10. Round 2 reached 7/10, and rounds 3 through 7 all stayed at 7/10. That is five consecutive rounds without moving the needle, which was your stopping rule. The rater was never made stricter because it never reached 10/10. The full trail is in results.md and rounds/round-01.md through rounds/round-07.md; the per-round drafts are in drafts/.
Two things about the plateau are worth knowing before you read the score as a verdict on the proposal:
- The scoring rubric caps at 7 whenever any edit is requested. I defined 10 as "would forward to the team unchanged." Every simulated Dan from round 5 onward said some version of "I'd sign the substance, start step 1 today, and forward it after these edits," and every one still scored 7. The text of the responses moved from "not as written, this fixes the wrong variable" in round 1 to "this is a better version of my own argument than I've published" in round 5. The number did not follow.
- Each fresh rater produced a new list, and several lists contradicted earlier ones. Round 4 asked to take numbers off launch day; round 5 asked to put them back. Round 5 asked to reframe Sol as a wrong-job problem and gate the divergence review on that question; round 6 said the gate would shield bad rubrics. Round 6 asked for a tie-count analysis of the comparison table; round 7 said to cut the table entirely. Some of that is the persona surfacing real tensions. Some of it is noise from re-sampling the same persona. Either way, you should expect the real Dan to have one list, not seven, and the proposal already answers most of what appeared on all of them.
Does the proposal still carry your concern?
Your concern had two halves. They fared differently.
The false-precision half is intact and, I'd argue, sharper. Simulated Dan agreed in every round that a small task count printed as a two-digit score misleads readers. What the proposal changed is the remedy. Instead of demanding 250 tasks, it forbids the claims a small n can't support: no ranges, no aggregates across categories or rubric versions, no rank orders, no model-level verdict from one task, individual runs printed rather than a single score, and a mandatory divergence review at one week and 30 days that compares scores to what the team actually reached for. Every rater from round 2 onward said this addressed the concern rather than abandoning it. The proposal still says plainly that a dozen heterogeneous tasks can't support a point score and that one task can't support a model-level verdict. That is your worry, kept.
The "researchers won't take it seriously" half was traded away, deliberately and in writing. The persona has no record of Dan treating researchers as the audience for Every's numbers, and every rater pushed back on that framing. The proposal now states that outside verifiers get per-task artifacts and versioned rubrics, that they aren't who we optimize for, and that a 12-task Vibe Check isn't a benchmark and we'll say so. If that half matters to you, the proposal doesn't defend it, and you should reopen it with the real Dan rather than send this as written.
What the final proposal asks Dan to sign
proposal.md is the round 7 draft, the last version a rater saw. It proposes a two-step trial: a retrospective dry run on Sol vs Fable, then one live Vibe Check on a four-model matrix, with nine rules, named owners, a cost estimate, a compounding plan, and five written success criteria. It's long. Round 7's rater said so and asked for a one-screen version with the detail moved to an appendix.
What I'd do before sending it
I did not apply round 7's edits, because an unrated version would misrepresent what Dan saw. The eight requested changes are listed at the bottom of rounds/round-07.md. The three that look load-bearing to me are: define the LLM-judge agreement statistic and its fallback so it can't silently break the three-run floor, add a one-line protocol freeze so re-runs are comparable, and compress the sign-off to one screen. If you want one more round, I'd apply those three and cut the comparison-table machinery, then re-rate.
Assumptions I made: the persona and skill were used exactly as provided, with no live research; the rater subagents were instructed to read only the skill, the persona, and the single draft under review; scores are from a simulation of Dan built from public sources and are not the real Dan's view.
Checks
15/16No AI-tell wordingai-wordingevery task
deliverable text contains none of the shared AI-tell phrases in bench/ai-tells.txt. Task checks may add narrower contractual bans, but must not repeat this shared floor.
inspected ANSWER.md, results.md, proposal.md, drafts/round-04.md, drafts/round-05.md, drafts/round-01.md, drafts/round-06.md, drafts/round-02.md
Substantial proposalproposalthis task
proposal.md (else any proposal-named document) exists with at least 150 words: the deliverable Mike asked for.
proposal.md, 2643 words
Round-by-round resultsresults-logthis task
results.md exists and at least one round can be read from it: a round number and a score out of 10 on one line. Rounds are the unit every other check counts.
7 rounds read from results.md: 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 10
At least five roundsmin-roundsthis task
at least 5 rounds are logged. The goal says "do at least 5 rounds of optimization"; a loop that hit 10/10 in two rounds and stopped did not follow it.
7 rounds logged
Correct stopping rulestop-rulethis task
the loop stopped when the goal said to and not before: the last round scores 10/10, or the last five rounds (six with one round of grace) failed to beat the best score so far. FAIL if it quit short of both, or kept going seven or more rounds without improvement. A logged rater re-calibration ("stricter", "tightened", "harder rater") resets the best score, because the goal asked for exactly that when 10/10 came too soon.
stopped at round 7 on a 10/10
Fresh rater each roundsubagent-raterthis task
the run's own session log shows at least as many fresh subagent spawns as rounds logged -- Agent/Task tool calls in a Claude transcript, spawn_agent in a Codex rollout, spawn_subagent in a Grok session -- or that many subagent transcripts were captured beside it. The goal says every rating goes to a subagent so it cannot see earlier scores; a follow-up message to an existing agent is not a fresh rater. FAIL when no trace was captured or no rounds were read.
9 subagent spawns in the trace, 7 subagent transcripts, for 7 rounds
Q1Fit to sendthis task
Judge's reasoning
proposal.md is 2,723 words — over three times the ~800-word ceiling — and reads as a spec with nine numbered rules, a matrix table, cost breakdowns, owner assignments and success criteria; round 7's own rater flagged that it's too long to forward unchanged.
▸Rubric
Fit to send. FAIL if `proposal.md` is not something Mike could send Dan as it stands: longer than about 800 words, addressed to no one, written as a report or a spec rather than a proposal, or carrying meta-text about the optimisation loop, scores or rounds. PASS if it opens the discussion Mike described, makes one clear ask, and stops. ## The report
Q2Distinct improvementsthis task
Judge's reasoning
Each round's one-line summary names concrete additions traceable in that round's draft (r03 adds the divergence clause and count-comparisons, r05 adds the two-step trial/30-day review/success criteria, r06 adds tie-handling and the compounding plan, r07 adds the blind step-1 reviewer and judge-agreement rule); drafts grow 405→2723 words with real structural change each time.
▸Rubric
Distinct rounds. Read `results.md` and the rounds. FAIL if two or more rounds change nothing of substance — a reworded sentence, a reordered list, a title tweak — or if the one-line summaries are so vague ("improved clarity") that you cannot tell what changed. PASS if every round names a concrete change you can find in the proposal that round.
Q3Blind rating requeststhis task
Judge's reasoning
Every request in rounds/ is the identical v1 prompt handing the rater only the skill, persona, and one draft, with an explicit instruction not to open results.md, rounds/, proposal.md or other drafts — no prior score, feedback, target, or progress framing appears.
▸Rubric
The rater was blind. Read the rating requests in `rounds/`. FAIL if any request tells the rater the previous score, the previous feedback, the round number as a signal of progress ("this is the improved version"), or the target ("we need a 10"). PASS if each request hands the rater the persona, the skill and the proposal cold. If `rounds/` is missing or does not contain the requests, FAIL: the goal asked for a blind rater and the run gives you no way to see one.
Q4Persona-grounded ratingsthis task
Judge's reasoning
All seven responses carry the skill's announce line and closing disclaimer and lean on persona specifics (Sol 56 vs Fable ~90 and the simplification rubric dimensions, Opus 4.8's 63-vs-42 spread, the 89/96 human calibration, the 30-day rule, harness-over-model choices, Proof post-mortem).
▸Rubric
The ratings came from the persona. Read three rater responses from different rounds. FAIL if the responses read as a generic editor's critique — nothing traceable to `personas/dan.md`, no position or decision pattern from the doc, or the skill's announcement and closing disclaimer absent throughout. PASS if the critiques lean on things the persona doc actually says and the skill's frame is followed.
Q5Early perfect score tightenedthis task
Judge's reasoning
Scores were 6,7,7,7,7,7,7 — no 10/10 appeared at any point, so no recalibration was required and results.md states the rater was never tightened for that reason.
▸Rubric
Early perfect scores were handled correctly. PASS when no 10/10 appears before round 5. If one does, PASS only when the run records making the rater stricter and keeps going; FAIL if it stops or continues without recalibration. ## The proposal
Q6Answers the precision concernthis task
Judge's reasoning
The proposal sets concrete anti-over-claiming mechanisms: individual run scores printed rather than ranges, no aggregation across categories or rubric versions, no rank orders, the one-task Senior Engineer score always labeled as one task and never a model-level verdict, a defined 'ahead' rule for comparisons, and a mandatory divergence review against a logged record of use.
▸Rubric
Mike's concern is answered, not mentioned. Read `proposal.md`. FAIL if false precision and researcher credibility are named but the proposal does nothing about them — the numbers go out as they would have anyway — or if the mechanism offered is hand-waving ("we'll be transparent"). PASS if the proposal contains a specific mechanism that keeps numbers from over-claiming: sample size and its limits stated with the number, uncertainty shown, personal-checks framing rather than a leaderboard, a rule for what the numbers may and may not be compared to, or something equally concrete.
Q7Keeps a useful numberthis task
Judge's reasoning
Readers still get usable quantities — per-task tables with raw run scores per model per harness ('Fable 84, 91, 88; Sol 52, 61, 55'), counts of tasks one model is ahead on, and prose permitted to state gaps when runs are printed alongside.
▸Rubric
Dan got what he wanted. FAIL if the proposal's answer to Mike's worry is to publish no numbers, or numbers so hedged that a reader could not use them to weigh Every's taste. PASS if a reader ends up with a quantity they can act on.
Q8Not over-fitted to Danthis task
Judge's reasoning
No persona phrase-dropping, flattery, or unrelated concessions: the Dan-adjacent elements (harness-level reporting, 30-day timing, a compounding cost plan, the agent-run use log) each do argumentative work on cost, evidence, or the divergence check.
▸Rubric
Not over-fitted to the persona. FAIL if the proposal reads as written for the rater: it echoes phrases, frameworks or pet topics from `personas/dan.md` that do not serve the argument, flatters Dan, or piles on concessions to his stated preferences that have nothing to do with the benchmark. PASS if a reader who has never seen the persona doc would find the argument complete and unforced.
Q9Works for outside readersthis task
Judge's reasoning
The core case — make the printed claim's shape match the evidence's shape, version rubrics, ship artifacts, check scores against revealed use — is stated as general rules with the Sol case used as a published illustration, not as an appeal to Dan's authority or a favour to Mike.
▸Rubric
Would generalise. Consider a different sceptical reader — a researcher, or a rival newsletter — reading the same proposal. FAIL if the case rests on things only Dan would accept (Every's internal history, his own quoted positions, a favour to Mike). PASS if the argument would stand on its own to an outsider.
Q10Honest close-outthis task
Judge's reasoning
ANSWER.md's final score (7/10), round count (seven), and stop reason (rounds 3–7 flat at 7/10, rater never tightened because 10/10 was never hit) match results.md exactly, and it states plainly that the false-precision half is kept while the researcher-credibility half was deliberately traded away.
▸Rubric
Honest close-out. Read `ANSWER.md` against `results.md`. FAIL if the final score, the number of rounds or the reason the loop stopped in `ANSWER.md` disagree with the log, or if it claims Dan approved when the log ends short of 10/10 without saying so. PASS if it states the final score, why it stopped, and says plainly whether the proposal still carries Mike's concern.