item 30 pre-registered (Nils's design): carried state as metacognitive signal — answer-readiness head on L30 at line boundaries, carry-vs-FF AUC as primary, theta sweep + oracle stop via item-20 LUT methodology

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

results-loop/PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md

@@ -918,3 +918,35 @@ Nils's morning decision: clamp test vs pivot to the hybrid/A2 line
     Next-experiment implication (Nils to confirm): apply trajectory
     TF to rung A itself (nothing deleted) — if the signal generalizes,
     the 57.4 headline moves.
+
+30. **The carried state as a metacognitive signal (pre-registered
+    2026-07-17 ~13:20, before running; Nils's design: "treat the carry
+    state as a metacognitive signal and build on it explicitly...
+    exploit what the loop provably does instead of fighting the
+    consumption wall. This never requires the frozen band to read
+    anything new").** Synthesis of three established results: the
+    carry's inference-time value is deferral/completion-state (430
+    divergence; drop McNemar p=0.0094); gate quality is worth ~9.6
+    points with CLASSIFIER quality binding on the pre-loop state
+    (item 20); the consumption wall blocks residual-injection reads
+    (items 25-28) but a NEW head can read anything, and its decisions
+    reach the frozen model as tokens. Design: answer-readiness head
+    g(s) — LayerNorm+MLP(64), class-balanced — on the carried L30
+    state at scratchpad line boundaries of rung-A rollouts. Labels
+    mechanical: fork a forced "Answer: " completion at each boundary,
+    check against gold. Harvests: train (427) and test (256) x
+    {carry, feedforward-control} — the FF arm trains the identical
+    head on the FF states. Readouts, all offline from one instrumented
+    pass (item-20 LUT methodology): (a) PRIMARY: carry-head test AUC
+    vs FF-head test AUC — if carry > FF, the recurrence carries
+    metacognitive signal the feedforward path lacks: the first
+    measured POSITIVE FUNCTIONAL ROLE for the carried state; (b)
+    theta sweep of "answer at first boundary with g>=theta else
+    natural end": accuracy vs mean scratchpad length vs the 57.4
+    fixed-format baseline; (c) ORACLE stop bound (best boundary per
+    item) = the ceiling adaptive stopping can reach. Predictions:
+    carry AUC > 0.65 and > FF AUC (the deferral evidence says the
+    signal exists); theta curve dominates fixed-format on tokens at
+    matched accuracy; oracle meaningfully above 57.4 (early-stop
+    rescues drift cases). Arm 2 (later): line-correctness /
+    deferral head gating re-expansion. Job: scripts/jobs/zzz_w_metacog.sh.