claim-lifecycle

Skill — Claim Lifecycle

Claims move through a controlled status chain. This skill governs all reads and writes to conjectures/conjectures.md and the claims block in project.yaml. No agent should touch claim statuses without following this protocol.

The status chain

question  →  hypothesis  →  proof-sketch  →  partial-proof  →  proved
                                                             →  refuted

• Forward promotion requires positive evidence (see requirements below).
• Demotion (e.g. proved → partial-proof) is allowed without user approval when new evidence invalidates a prior promotion.
• Lateral moves (hypothesis → refuted, proof-sketch → refuted) are allowed with an explicit counterexample.
• question is the starting status for something not yet formalised.
• simulation-supported is a separate annotation that can co-exist with any status (it records empirical corroboration, not proof strength).

Promotion requirements

Target status	Required evidence
hypothesis	A gap brief exists at notes/gap_briefs/<slug>.md
proof-sketch	A dated attempt in proofs/<claim-id>.md with a clear strategy and at least one justified step
partial-proof	Proof attempt has a complete argument with explicitly labelled gaps (**G1.**, …)
proved	(1) Zero gaps in the proof file, (2) an adversarial-proof-review pass recorded, (3) at least one small-case verification, (4) user approval surfaced and confirmed in chat
refuted	An explicit, checkable counterexample written into the proof file

proved always requires user approval — the Proof agent reports the promotion request in the run summary and the Supervisor surfaces it. The Supervisor patches project.yaml only after the user confirms in chat.

How to update conjectures/conjectures.md

The file uses YAML-frontmatter blocks, one per claim:

## C<n>: <one-line statement>

- **Status:** <status>
- **Added:** <ISO date>
- **Last updated:** <ISO date>
- **Linked proof:** `proofs/C<n>.md` (or `—` if none)
- **Linked gap brief:** `notes/gap_briefs/<slug>.md` (or `—`)
- **Notes:** <free text — why promoted, what changed>

Update rules:

1. Patch only the Status, Last updated, and Notes fields.
2. Do not rewrite the statement (## C<n>: … line).
3. Do not delete any claim entry; if refuted, set Status: refuted.
4. Append new claims at the bottom; do not re-number existing ones.

How to patch project.yaml

The claims block looks like:

claims:
  C1:
    status: proved
    proof_file: proofs/C1.md
  C2:
    status: hypothesis
    proof_file: ~

Only the Supervisor patches project.yaml. Other agents report their desired status change in the run summary. The Supervisor then applies the patch after validation (and user approval for proved).

When patching:

• Update status and proof_file.
• Never remove a claim entry.
• Update current_model_version only with explicit user approval.
• Never change mode (discovery ↔ project) without explicit user approval.

Claim count helper

Before dispatching any proof or writer pass, the Supervisor should report:

Claims summary
──────────────
proved         : N
partial-proof  : N
proof-sketch   : N
hypothesis     : N
question       : N
refuted        : N
─────────────────
open (attackable): N

"Open" means status ∈ {question, hypothesis, proof-sketch, partial-proof}.