# 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.