gentle-ai-bench

Activation Contract

Load when touching bench/ in gentle-ai, adding or changing a journey, changing a product semantic a journey might pin, or diagnosing a bench failure in CI's Unit Tests job.

Hard Rules

• go test ./bench validates corpus declarations only. It does NOT execute journeys. The only driven proof is building the harness and the product binary and running the harness against it; a green go test ./bench claims nothing about execution.
• Reproduce CI, do not guess invocations: read the Unit Tests step in .github/workflows/ci.yml and copy its exact build and gentle-ai-bench run --binary ... commands. Use --only <journey-id> to drive one journey.
• Journey IDs are unique across every journeys_*.go file. The collision guard fails loudly naming both files; pick an unused ID by reading the corpus, never reuse a retired one.
• Every execute transition must carry a runnable command; the dead-execute guard fails the run otherwise.
• When a ratified product semantic changes, grep the corpus for journeys pinning the OLD behavior before shipping. The corpus is a second test surface beyond unit tests; a journey asserting the defect keeps the defect green.
• dead_end prints n/a unless the run actually measured one. Never fabricate a value to move the column.
• A by_design exemption costs a shape from the closed vocabulary plus a verified quote of the product's own next-action text. If the quote no longer tells the operator what to do, it is a defect wearing an exemption.
• Prefer a NEW journeys_*.go file when the shared ones are owned by open PRs; bump the core journey-count pin in the same change.

Execution Steps