Attempt catalog — context problem

Check law: before building a new attempt at making LLM wiki (or other) prose followable by a reader who has only the page, read this file and Context Problem Research Bank. Write a novelty note into the attempt. A retry that changes only the costume of a dead class is a violation wearing a new date.

The local instance record is The Context Problem. Do not re-audit the sessions here.

Graded death, owner’s words: “if i ‘sort of’ like something, it can be tried again under different conditions. so it really depends on the failure. usually if i liked NO ATTEMPTS from a specific attempt, it should not be tried again.”

Dead as a standing fix

These were tried here, broke here, and have public twins that also fail when measured.

#	Attempt	First tried	Why dead	Public twin	Retry allowed if
1	New law in Writing Standards about context / on-ramp / define terms	2026-07-21 onward	91% recurrence. Obeyed in costume.	CLAUDE.md “define jargon”	Never as the fix. Keep as a spec the cold reader applies.
2	Memory file	2026-07-17 explain-one-thread; 2026-08-18 generate-from-what-he-wants	Broken the same morning	Custom Instructions	Never as the fix.
3	Ban list of words or sentence shapes	2026-07-28 NEVER COMPRESS; 2026-08 opener bans	Prohibition loop. Output passed the rule and was still wrong.	Ruben Hassid anti-AI file; Vale slop lexicons	Never. Mannerism lists may exist as a sieve, not as the generator.
4	”Write for a beginner” / ELI5 in the generator	Repeated	Same head reads the rule. Rooein: ~15% hit the requested audience.	Prompting blogs	Never as the complete fix.
5	Same-model self-critique / chain step 2b as the monitor	2026-08-21 18:35	Failed 18:38. Horton’s monitor.	Self-Refine, Reflexion	Never. A different agent with only the draft is a different attempt (entry 10).
6	Flesch / Hemingway / grade level	Not shipped here; rejected in the bank	Passes “A face is one too.”	Grokipedia Flesch scoring	Never as the gate.
7	Concise / shorter	Local density complaints mixed with this	Wrong axis. Packed ≠ unexplained.	Anthropic Concise, 2026-08-20	Never as the fix for assumed knowledge.
8	Detector regex from a strike	Opener catalog entry 1; regen-check quality flags	Pipeline §3.3. A rule the rejected output would pass.	Vale greylist without a reader file	Never for judgment. Mechanical first-use of acronyms is entry 12.
9	Compile wiki pages with the whole vault / bank open	Default until 2026-08-22	Coordinates leak. STORM: more sources, more false connections.	STORM, Karpathy compile	Never for drafting. Research may keep the bank open.

Alive, not yet measured across a wiki wave

The 2026-08-22 production change. Same class as the five local fixes that held once, and as Pinker / Horton / Takmaz / Dale and Reiter.

#	Attempt	What it is	What would kill it	What would confirm it
10	Reader file + holdings ledger + sources closed + isolated cold read	Change of what is in front of the writer, and who checks	Cold reader shares the bank. Ledger is only bag-of-words and goes green on coined-sense / asserted-connection fails. Writer ships against a non-empty list.	A wave of wiki pages with cold-read fails at or near zero, and the owner produces no “what is this” in this family on first read.
11	Change of input (specimen corpus, vocab spine)	Already held once, per surface	Using it as a ban list	Using it as the thing generated from, then closing it.
12	Acronym first-use sieve (Vale / PerfectIt class)	Cheap. Catches HOLE, not Face or Wing	Treating a green sieve as a pass	Running it and the cold read.

Not an attempt yet (named by outside research, not built here)

Do not build these as new generators. They are upgrades to entry 10, or they are not ours to train.

• Holdings rows for coined sense and for relations (Prince; owner dependencies 2 and 3).
• Strip-links test (MOS:NOFORCELINK).
• First-sentence identity check (MOS:FIRST).
• Pronoun-before-noun linter (Google Technical Writing One).
• Recipient-design RL env (Khattab). Model-provider work. Do not wait for it.

If an upgrade to entry 10 is built, it is not a new attempt at the goal. It is a repair of the ledger or the isolation. Log it here with the date and the owner’s ruling.

Logged 2026-08-22 (not a generator attempt)

• Wiki concept page: /Users/n1/Projects/llm-knowledge-base/wiki/Writing Craft/The Context Problem.md
• Claude handoff to try a new generator file: /Users/n1/Projects/llm-knowledge-base/01 - Workbench/HANDOFF-Claude-context-generator-2026-08-22.md

The handoff forbids dead classes 1–9. A generator that is only “define terms / remember the reader” is entry 1 or 5 in a new costume. A generator that is a situation (friend cannot see the rest of the workshop) plus isolation left in Readers / holdings / Cold Read is the attempt the handoff asks for. Not run as of this line.