Crucible

A judgment engine: register a thesis, steelman each claim, measure against a substrate, refine the weakest axis.

crucible turns a thesis into a set of claims, each paired with the observation that would refute it. Independent adversaries steelman every claim by proposing the strongest test, the engine measures each one against a substrate oracle, and the weakest axis gets refined across rounds: strengthen the substrate, sharpen the measurement, or amend the thesis. The result is a verdict per claim, MATCH, DRIFT, or UNVERIFIABLE, grounded in the measurement rather than a judge's opinion. Every run writes a record you can re-check.

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Highlights

• Verdicts that recompute from the record. verdict_for(claim, measurement) is a pure function: within tolerance is MATCH, outside is DRIFT, absent or unmeasurable is UNVERIFIABLE, fail-closed. No model sits in the verdict step, so a fluent assertion cannot move a rechecked result.
• One-command runs with cleanroom review packets. crucible run --bundle DIR executes steelman, measurement, witnessed assessment, and disk recheck in one session, then writes a self-contained verifier packet (spec.json, run.json, report.md, review.md). crucible review DIR validates the packet boundary before handoff.
• A CI regression check. crucible ci compares a registry's verified-latest verdicts against a sealed baseline, exits nonzero when any claim loses standing, and emits a deterministic PR-comment Markdown matrix. New in 1.2.0.
• A refine loop that names the weakest claim. Grade each claim's measured margin, compute harmonic-mean cohesion, and re-measure across substrate rounds until the thesis is cohesively verified or the budget is spent. The loop reports the weakest axis instead of pretending a short thesis held.
• Drift tracking across rounds. crucible drift compares the latest two witnessed assessments and classifies each claim as held, moved, improved, or regressed.
• LLM-as-judge with the model outside the verdict. JudgeMeasure scores freeform outputs against a rubric; the judge produces a deviation once at the seam, the verdict still derives from verdict_for, and a judge that raises or returns garbage fails closed. New in 1.2.0.
• Oracle recheck packs. crucible recheck lists descriptor-bearing measurements, writes replay templates, and validates finished replay packs against the sealed rows without opening a second verdict path.
• A content-addressed registry with tamper detection. Every claim carries a sha256 receipt; the registry re-verifies stored claims (MATCH / MISSING / CORRUPT), checks thesis seals, rejects duplicate ids with different seals, and refuses tampered theses.
• Typed missing-evidence explanations. Every UNVERIFIABLE verdict names the exact evidence class it lacks and the concrete next action, derived from the same pure ladder as the verdict, so the explanation can never disagree with it. New in 1.2.0.
• Batch manifests, Markdown reports, creative measurement gates, native MCP. crucible batch runs a manifest of theses into one registry, crucible report renders deterministic Markdown, crucible measurement-gate verifies Telos creative measurement packets, and crucible mcp serves 13 tools over stdio.
• Zero third-party runtime dependencies. The core is pure standard library, Python 3.11+.

Install

pip install crucible-bench

The distribution is crucible-bench; it installs the crucible command and the crucible package (import crucible). For the examples and the newest commands, work from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/HarperZ9/crucible
cd crucible
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quickstart

Run the bundled demo from a clone. It registers a three-claim thesis, steelmans it, assesses it, and then shows tampering being caught:

python examples/demo.py

thesis "Binary search comparison bounds": 3 claims, seal bd7404c02eb2...
  MATCH        deviation 0 within tolerance 0.5
  DRIFT        deviation 8 exceeds tolerance 0.5
  UNVERIFIABLE claim states no falsification condition
counts: MATCH 1  DRIFT 1  UNVERIFIABLE 1
assessment seal 07dafef03f5c..., verified True
after flipping a DRIFT to a MATCH, verified False  <- caught

Then run the same thesis through the full loop into a registry:

crucible run examples/thesis-binary-search.json \
  --measurements examples/measurements-binary-search.json \
  --registry .crucible-registry

ran thesis bd7404c02eb2036e: 3 claim(s)
  steelman refutations: 3
  MATCH 1  DRIFT 1  UNVERIFIABLE 1
  assessment seal: 62f928fe21052041...
  re-derived from disk: True  {'seals_ok': True, 'thesis_ok': True, 'verdicts_rederive': True}

Add --json for the machine-readable run record, --substrate examples/substrate-binary-search.json instead of --measurements to go through the table oracle, and --bundle DIR to write a cleanroom review packet. A visual verdict surface lives at examples/crucible-demo.html.

A worked example

A thesis is claims plus falsification conditions:

{
  "title": "Binary search comparison bounds",
  "disposition": "publishable",
  "claims": [
    {
      "text": "binary search over a sorted array of 1024 elements does at most 11 comparisons",
      "falsification": "a measured worst-case comparison count above 11 for n=1024"
    },
    {
      "text": "binary search is more elegant than linear search",
      "falsification": ""
    }
  ]
}

The first claim is measurable: a measurement row binds to it by content hash, records a deviation and a tolerance, and the verdict follows. The second claim states no falsification condition, so it is UNVERIFIABLE by construction, and the assessment says exactly which evidence class is missing. Run it, bundle it, and validate the packet:

crucible run thesis.json --measurements measurements.json \
  --registry .crucible-registry --bundle reports/my-run
crucible review reports/my-run

The bundle gives a verifier only the spec and the artifact, with packet-relative paths. review fails closed on missing files, extra context, a spec.json that drifted from the run record, or a report.md that no longer renders from run.json.

To gate pull requests on the registry:

crucible ci .crucible-registry --write-baseline crucible-baseline.json   # on a known-good commit
crucible ci .crucible-registry --baseline crucible-baseline.json --out crucible-ci.md

A regression is a claim moving MATCH to DRIFT, becoming UNVERIFIABLE, or dropping out of the verified-latest set. The baseline seals its own cells, so a hand-edited baseline is rejected on load. The Markdown summary is deterministic and references the assessment seal behind every cell.

Command surface

Every command works identically from a source checkout via python -m crucible.

Extending the seams

The steelman and measure stages are seams with a stable API shape. Defaults are Null (propose nothing, measure nothing, UNVERIFIABLE), and the shipped edges include:

• TableMeasure: offline deviation against a provided substrate table, no model.
• SubprocessSteelman / SubprocessMeasure: configured commands over bounded JSON stdin/stdout, with timeouts, no shell strings, minimal environment, and output caps.
• TelosMeasure: consumes telos.witnessed-artifact/v1 envelopes and re-runs the named verifier rather than trusting the carried certificate.
• GatherDigestMeasure / IndexMeasure: sealed gather digests as evidence, and index.verification/1 records replayed against graph packs.
• JudgeMeasure: rubric-scored LLM judging behind an injectable backend, deterministic stub in tests, null by default.
• ProofMeasure: a proof or type checker (Lean, Coq, a type checker, any command) as the oracle for formal claims. It runs the checker over the claim's artifact: an accepted proof is MATCH, a rejected one DRIFTs, and a checker that is absent or errors is UNVERIFIABLE, fail-closed, so an unrun checker never reports a proof as holding. The measurement binds the exact command and the artifact hash, so a stranger replays the identical check. This is the oracle for the north star, verified discovery in math.

All edges map into the same Measurement to verdict_for spine. The verdict step never changes.

Documentation

• docs/INTRODUCTION.md: what crucible is, core concepts, and a first-ten-minutes walkthrough.
• ARCHITECTURE.md: module layout and the pure/impure boundary.
• USAGE.md: operator commands and the interop boundary.
• docs/ENTERPRISE-READINESS.md: the host-integration contract for unattended agent workflows.
• docs/RELEASE-READINESS.md: the 1.0 gate checklist.
• CHANGELOG.md: per-release detail, including what is merged but not yet on PyPI.

Status

crucible-bench 1.2.0 covers the full loop, one-command runs, cleanroom review packets, oracle replay, registry operations, creative measurement gates, and the MCP bridge, plus what landed since 1.1.0: the CI regression gate, LLM-as-judge, missing-evidence explanations, ill-posed measurement warnings, and the MATCH-provenance gate. The test suite currently collects 330 tests. Within Project Telos, crucible is the measured-judgment layer: it consumes gather evidence and index context and emits verdict packets that telos can surface and replay.

Why it matters

Everything above reduces to one property: a verdict is a pure function of a sealed record, so anyone holding the record can recompute it, and a tampered claim, measurement, or baseline is caught by re-hashing rather than by trust.

License

crucible is fair-source: open to read, run, and build on, with commercial use reserved so the project can fund its own development. See LICENSE for the exact terms.

Work with it

python -m pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m pytest

Keep the README, package metadata, and examples aligned with current behavior before opening a PR.

What this believes

This tool is one tool in a family that holds a single belief steady across every surface: knowledge open to anyone who can attain the means; acceptance decided by external checks, never reputation; every result re-runnable; honest nulls first-class; ownership earned by comprehension; learning woven into the work. The full text lives in CREDO.md. The long form of this belief: The Unbundling.

Zentropy Labs · order out of entropy. An independent lab building evidence-first tools that leave a re-checkable artifact behind. Built by Zain Dana Harper in Seattle. The full workbench is at Project Telos.