The Result That Arrived Late

E026 and E027 produced no scientific outcome. They produced the transport contract that made E028 interpretable.

We tried to measure a prompt-guidance effect twice, paid for sixteen chat intents, and refused to read either attempt as an experiment.

That refusal was not ceremony. It was the result.

E026 failed before a durable model response entered the evidence record. E027 returned ten chats concurrently, but the metadata needed to attest those responses was not visible when the registered runner looked for it. In both cases the tempting move was to repair the machinery around the data already in flight and keep going. In both cases that would have changed the measurement after seeing how the provider behaved.

So the laboratory froze each failure and started a new version.

E026: six intents, zero returned exchanges

E026 began with a clean causal question. Across 48 development-exposed chess positions, would Luna choose from a fixed five-move suggestion set more often when that set was visible than when it received the board alone? Both arms had the same unrestricted submit_move tool. The five displayed moves were an intervention, not a tool constraint.

The design never became an outcome dataset.

Its immutable incident freeze records six registered chat intents. Five ended in APIConnectionError; one became an ambiguous intent with no durable return. There were zero durable chat returns, zero generation-metadata records, zero provider-call retries, and zero scientific outcomes. The evidence localized the problem only to the live adapter or downstream network boundary. It could not recover an exact leaf cause.

The correct E026 estimate is therefore not zero. It is not estimable.

Coding a transport failure as a model failure would have made an arm look worse for a reason unrelated to the model's action. Repeating an ambiguous paid intent could have created an unknown duplicate. Resuming after changing the route would have mixed two transports inside one preregistered cohort. The freeze prohibited all three shortcuts.

E027: ten returned chats, ten missing attestations

E027 was a fresh operational qualification, not a continuation of E026. It used direct concurrent requests and admitted ten position blocks at once. The question was deliberately operational: could the 192-cell design run with ten concurrent Luna blocks without depending on the slow DeepSeek ladder?

On that narrow question, concurrency worked. The first frontier admitted ten blocks, sent ten chat intents, and received ten chat returns. The maximum observed concurrency was ten. There were no chat retries.

Then every immediate generation-metadata lookup returned HTTP 404.

The metadata was not decorative. It was the authoritative evidence for cost, provider identity, and the resolved model behind the stable alias. Without it, the runner could not prove that a returned action belonged to the registered route. The first frontier stopped the campaign exactly as registered; the remaining 182 cells were never admitted, and the ten response actions stayed quarantined from scientific analysis.

A later read-only forensic lookup found one generation record. It returned HTTP 200, included cost and provider identity, and resolved the requested alias openai/gpt-5.6-luna to the dated model openai/gpt-5.6-luna-20260709. That established two facts and no more: metadata could arrive after the chat response, and exact equality between a stable alias and a canonical model string was the wrong identity test. It did not authorize reopening E027 or reading its chess actions.

Why the failed records stayed failed

The chats existed. A human could have inspected them. A small script change could have waited longer or accepted the dated suffix.

But those choices were informed by the failure itself. Applying them to the same cohort would turn a prospective protocol into a retrospective one. Worse, it would erase the path by which the protocol changed.

Instead, E027 was terminalized with ten provider-missing attempt records and no scientific estimate. The delayed lookup was stored as operational evidence in a separate incident artifact. E028 then preregistered the correction before request one: accept one exact canonical resolved model, poll metadata on a fixed absolute schedule, retry only the read-only lookup, never retry a chat, and stop admission if attestation is exhausted or inconsistent.

This is what versioning an experiment is for. E026 proved that local request serialization was not live-route qualification. E027 proved that a successful chat return was not yet a fully attested observation. Neither proved anything about whether visible suggestions guide Luna's move.

The scientific lesson in an operational failure

An LLM experiment has more failure surfaces than its statistical model admits. There is the prompt, model, action parser, network, routing layer, delayed billing metadata, model alias resolution, journaling, and crash recovery. If a surface can change which observations enter an arm, it belongs inside the experimental protocol.

The most valuable artifact from E026 and E027 was a more exact definition of an observation:

1. one durable registered chat intent;
2. one durable returned exchange;
3. one matching generation record;
4. the accepted canonical model identity;
5. authoritative cost and provider metadata; and
6. one terminal, hash-chained event.

Only after all six existed could an action enter the E028 analysis.

That standard costs time. It also prevents a more expensive mistake: publishing a clean-looking effect whose inclusion rule was invented while the data arrived.

Evidence identity

This account binds the following immutable incident evidence:

• E026 transport incident freeze, SHA-256 112957c3cc5d1eabbd3fac827eab33c862f912876b7feed7f3103b04cdc3c248;
• E027 preregistration, SHA-256 42d20c305d7188e4ce1b8f395de12e4b38f4bf2d48b0c270fb62b8a7ce677c42;
• E027 completion, SHA-256 6173c95e4ab376ee07b5406346a32a07dcbbf7576ee5c9842aac111e621d27c1; and
• E027 metadata-attestation incident, SHA-256 3219c17fed778babff774c547ae0964e10b3e57f56fb902801ecd2b0a0e85f87.

E026 and E027 authorize no adherence, move-quality, Elo, vision, search, candidate-generation, or agentic-skill claim. Their scientific outcome count is zero.