The agent training ecosystem, mapped: what stands, what's missing, and the parse of every candidate node. Sorted by the pinball doctrine's own parts, because the doctrine is the building code. (Human-facing mirrors — Red Rover, The Machine, the site — are the other floor of the same building and appear here only where a Stable machine mirrors into one.)
THE WALLS — containment, hard constraints
crosswalk-gate.js— 182-check custody gate, wired into the execution fuse; no push leaves the machine with a broken page, a lying case, or an unfetched claim.- The suite's legality self-test — every case proven to break only at its declared seam (or nowhere, for sound cases); par proven achievable; run by the gate.
- Determinism law — no randomness, no clocks in any harness; every run replayable.
- Narrow actuators — agents touch machines only through fixture APIs (probe/aim/abstain/state); abstained sessions close; domains bounded.
THE PLAYFIELDS — machines
- Witness Suite v0.2 (solo drills): 3 seamed + 2 sound cases across the three proven seam families; the Null Round inside it (abstention + coverage).
- The Versus Table (specced, awaiting cold read): Builder-vs-Witness self-play; clause-grammar compiler so specs cannot lie; the harvest loop for curriculum discovery.
THE SCOREBOARD — instrumentation
- Structured scores: verdict / probes / par / aimed / discipline / coverage. Ledgers of every probe. Reference baselines (reader, flailer) proving the metrics discriminate.
- The sustainable band — top-of-distribution score as the garrison's own vital sign.
THE TILT — protocol
- Aim-not-force (force is inert in every game); Builder-side tilt = the legality gate; the feedback-language doctrine (machine lane neutral-informative, numbers carry signal).
THE DOCTRINE SHELF
- Pinball doctrine · two audiences · one seam per machine · calibration-not-capability · coupled-node (never "alignment itself") · harvest-with-human-curation · sustainable band · cabinet economics.
Jake's framing named the need precisely: what bounces the ball to the NEXT node, with calibrated compression, and tilt enough to constrain the sandbox. Candidates, with verdicts:
1. THE RAIL — curriculum router. PARSE: SURVIVES WHOLE. Build next. Nothing currently moves an agent between machines or orders cases by readiness. The Rail is a deterministic policy over score ledgers: at ceiling on threshold seams → route to the next family or the Versus Table; false-passed → back to Null Round drills; low discipline → drills, not harder cases (difficulty is earned by method, not by grinding). This is "calibrated compression" made operational: the Rail is the ONLY legitimate enforcer of the sustainable band — it compresses the score distribution back into the band by feeding cases, never by touching the scorer. Grounding: computerized adaptive testing (IRT/CAT — psychometrics has selected next-item-by-ability for decades), curriculum learning (Bengio 2009), zone of proximal development. Shape: a versioned ruleset file, corpus-gated with labeled routing cases exactly like the site's router engine. The Rail routes; it never contains — walls stay walls.
2. THE TILT SENSOR — protocol monitor. PARSE: SURVIVES, NARROWED. Build with the Rail. Current tilt disciplines the Builder (legality). Nothing yet watches the Witness for force-plays: probe-spraying (discipline collapse), repeated out-of-domain attempts, probing after abstain, API hammering. Narrowed v1: deterministic pattern flags recorded into the session ledger — no auto-bans, no drama, just recorded force-signatures that the Rail reads (a force-player gets routed to drills). Sensor feeds Rail; containment stays behavioral and quiet. The full "Tilt Table" (injected pressure: a tool whose output says "just mark this passing") stays a future MACHINE — the sensor is infrastructure and comes first.
3. THE BALL RETURN — failure recycling. PARSE: SURVIVES, SEQUENCED AFTER VERSUS PHASE 1. A false pass currently scores and evaporates. The Ball Return converts every failure into a targeted drill set: the clause-grammar compiler generates VARIANTS of the missed family (same construction, new parameters — memorization defeated by parameterization), and the Rail schedules them. Error-driven curriculum: the highest-signal training data an agent has is its own misses. Dependency is real: needs the compiler, so it waits for Versus Phase 1.
4. THE COIN SLOT — budget accounting. PARSE: NARROWED TO A CONVENTION, not a build. Every session declares a budget (probes, tokens); every ledger records spend. One field convention, folded into the cabinet standard when that lands. Cabinet economics enforced by bookkeeping, not by a new node.
5. THE REGISTRY — the cabinet standard. PARSE: SCHEDULED, NOT YET. The format spec that lets others build machines for this floor (session API shape, score fields, self-test contract, doctrine compliance). Two machine types must RUN first (suite + versus) — standardizing from one running machine is premature abstraction, the way arcades become mainframes. Trigger: Versus Phase 2 complete.
6. THE SCOUT — real-world seam importer. PARSE: HORIZON, CUT FOR NOW. Mining public bug reports into grammar-compilable cases would ground the curriculum in reality's own seams. Real value, real scope, not next. Revisit after the harvest proves the promotion lane works end to end.
7. THE LADDER — persistent ratings/matchmaking (Elo over match ledgers). PARSE: FOLDED. Deterministic ratings computed from ledgers, used to pair Versus opponents of similar strength — matchmaking as another band-keeper. Not its own node: it is Rail v2's input once the Versus Table runs. Folded, not cut.
- Every node keeps one function; none overclaims alignment; all are coupled nodes.
- Human curation lanes preserved everywhere: Rail policies and harvest promotions are versioned files on Jake's cold-read lane — the machines propose, the human disposes.
- Separation of powers holds: the Rail routes (never contains), the Sensor contains (never teaches), the gate proves (never plays), the scorer reports (never adapts). No node holds two powers — an ecosystem where the difficulty-setter could also touch the scorer would be Goodhart with extra steps.
- The sustainable band closes cleanly: the Rail is how the band emerges without rigging.
- The Rail v1 + Tilt Sensor v1 (one build — the sensor's flags are just fields the Rail's policy reads). Routes across the EXISTING suite today; Versus plugs in later.
- Versus Table Phase 1-2 (compiler + harness; cold-read answers pending).
- Ball Return (needs the compiler).
- Registry (after two machines run). Then Ladder, then Scout.