Intro QA cut: five tests, a script, on-ramp off the battery

Verdict: the intro gate is now five judgment tests and a script. Who-cares and transition stay. On-ramp comes off the battery. The other fourteen names were the same habits in other clothes, or they fought a test we are keeping. The loop that minted them is the prohibition loop. The page is Intro QA; the script is scripts/intro_qa.py.

What is kept

Who-cares. Transition, with referent and ellipsis inside it. Stacking — his word, not “one claim,” because a paragraph can have one thesis and still be a brick of biography. Pillow — one epigram test. Selfhood — brag, “I hold,” criterion leak, answering a charge nobody made.

A script, fail-closed, no model: 100%, fully/completely/entirely, life-on-the-line, I hold / I believe / I treat it as, rather than and not X but Y except in an owner quote, the smoothed white/Asian pair, money words. Those reappeared after being named because a model critic would not fail them.

What is killed, and why

On-ramp as a named test. It fights who-cares. Who-cares kills the empty ease-in; on-ramp kills the blunt true sentence; together they produce the avoidant wording already struck (was the hardest thing on offer, and it ended second in the class). Ease-in stays in the generator. Why should I care is who-cares. Too compressed / caveman / big step is stacking.

Folded, not forgotten: delete and setup-and-payoff into stacking; specific-beats-generic into who-cares; stance verbs, signposts, defensive, criterion leak into selfhood or who-cares; antithesis, cadence, metaphor into pillow. Cadence as its own detector already failed on 2026-08-13: it scored the accepted openings highest.

Steelman of keeping nineteen

Each name was minted from a real strike. Cutting them means a costume can reach his eye. That is the cost, and it is cheaper than another day of obedient new failures. A killed test returns if the same surface happens twice on work that already passed the five.

What this is not

Not a license to ship a Positions intro. There is still no accepted generated intro in that domain. Not a change to the locked 16:18 wiki generator. Not a claim that CLEAN equals good.

Sources

• Owner strikes 2026-08-19, session ed0c0734-5561-4979-8914-96913c5a273a: who-cares on 100% American and What I Hold; stacking-facts; whack a mole; the whole generator is flawed if this is the first sentence.
• The Prohibition Loop — obedience is the tell.
• Two Egos QA — selfhood judgment pass, unchanged.