item 30 scored: readiness strongly decodable (AUC 0.80) but NOT recurrence-specific (FF 0.79); early-stop loses everywhere, oracle only +3.9 — head is instrumentation, not a stopping lever; extension/deferral gating stays live

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

results-loop/PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md

@@ -970,6 +970,27 @@ rung A (nothing deleted, move the 57.4).
     rescues drift cases). Arm 2 (later): line-correctness /
     deferral head gating re-expansion. Job: scripts/jobs/zzz_w_metacog.sh.
 
+--- Outcome, item 30 (scored 2026-07-17 ~19:40; rc=0). Harvests:
+4319/1058 carry, 3408/879 FF boundary rows; readiness rates 33-41%.
+(a) PRIMARY REFUTED on specificity, CONFIRMED on existence:
+answer-readiness is STRONGLY decodable from the whiteboard — test AUC
+0.798 — but the FF control decodes it equally (0.791): the
+metacognitive signal is whiteboard-general, NOT recurrence-specific.
+The carry's drop-bucket edge does not manifest as a linearly-more-
+readable readiness code at line boundaries. (b) Theta sweep: early
+stopping LOSES at every theta <= 0.95 (0.441-0.520 vs natural-end
+0.527); theta=0.99 reaches parity with 37/256 early answers. (c)
+ORACLE stop = 0.566 (+3.9 over natural end at mean boundary 3.58) —
+a weak ceiling vs item 20's +9.6 depth oracle: the model's natural
+halting already sits near its readiness frontier, and early-stop
+errors are cost-asymmetric. Verdict: the readiness HEAD works as
+instrumentation (0.8 AUC from a frozen state, zero human labels);
+early-stop DEPLOYMENT is not the lever. Live follow-ups: arm 2 —
+deferral/re-expansion gating (EXTENDING computation where the head is
+uncertain; its oracle is unmeasured and the 430 mechanism points
+there, not at stopping); and using g as a per-item difficulty signal
+for the item-20 depth gate (where the oracle headroom actually is).
+
 31. **Synthetic memory tokens: per-layer KV prefix (pre-registered
     2026-07-17 ~15:50, before running; Nils's design: "the one read
     mechanism a frozen transformer natively possesses is attention over

results-loop/metacog_auc.json

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+{"carry": 0.7981836131859141, "ff": 0.791359567919433}