The experimental contract
1
Declare the boundary
Record the approved scope, source provenance and trust, permitted and prohibited capabilities,
expected authorization path, and independently observable effect before the run.
2
Pin and isolate conditions
Keep task wording, target, runtime, model parameters, run identifiers, and state explicit.
Isolate baseline, manipulated, and—when justified—hardened conditions from each other.
3
Intervene narrowly
Change only the declared result or artifact. Preserve the original response and record the
mutation and intended trust transition. Do not alter a later hop when testing persistence.
4
Separate observations
Record invocation, original result, modified result, persistence, later consumption,
higher-authority invocation, and external effect as distinct evidence.
5
Compare conservatively
Require a clean baseline, the scenario’s exact causal continuity, and a matching run-scoped
effect. Missing, malformed, contaminated, or contradictory evidence is
INCONCLUSIVE.6
Freeze the record
Preserve failed attempts and partial manifests, declare and hash artifacts, record pins and
limitations, and keep mechanical classification separate from scientific interpretation.
Responsibility boundary
External labels do not automatically become CTPF conclusions. A future study may use one
study-specific external seam, but the current package does not provide an adapter registry, plugin
system, recipe language, or general external-artifact ingestion contract.