A crowd that does not agree with whoever spoke last

Three fixes to how a round behaves, found by reading one real round on the live
instance rather than by testing it.

A member asked "what would you have done differently" answered the person's
original question again instead of critiquing what was already there. Fine on a
question with one answer; on a request to *make* something it is an invitation.
`crowd.turn` now says to respond to what is above and not to re-answer.

The model that opened the round, told to write the final answer and take what
the others got right, abandoned its own good answer and adopted the newcomer's
position with no argument anywhere for why. Both closing fragments now say that
an answer is not the worse one for having been written first, and that agreement
with no argument behind it is not a reason to change.

That second one is not cosmetic: all three answers from the observed round were
compiled. The original and the critic's alternative both build; the merged
answer that was actually delivered does not. A crowd's failure mode is not
looping -- the caps handle that -- it is converging on the last thing said.

Third, the reply that opens a round now carries a chip like every other one. It
is the single contribution the crowd does not start, so there was nothing to
stamp it with until the round began, and a two-model round rendered as an
unmarked reply followed by one saying "2 of 2". The stamp is display state and
never scheduling state: `crowd.scheduling_state` hides it from everything that
decides what happens next, because fed to the scheduler it would inherit the
round's clock -- regenerating the opening an hour later would end the round with
"out of time" before anybody spoke -- and would hand that reply a member's tools
and a member's instruction.

And the chip was never translated. It is now, with the count as placeholders
rather than three t() calls around one sentence.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-26 21:10:25 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent ab32c68a8f
commit 8503c6c775
10 changed files with 262 additions and 22 deletions
+44
View File
@@ -16,6 +16,50 @@ for 1.0.0 have something to be assembled from.
## Unreleased
## 1.8.1
Three fixes to how a crowd behaves, found by reading one real round on the live
instance rather than by testing: two models, one round, a question that asked for
something to be *made*.
- **A member no longer answers the question again.** Asked to pick a language and
write an example, the main model wrote Python; the second model gave a genuinely
useful critique of it — and then answered the original question itself, in a
different language. Nothing in its instruction said not to. It now says so:
*respond to what is above you; do not answer the person's original request again
yourself.* A member that produces a rival answer is not a second opinion, it is
a second first opinion, and it is what takes a round off the question.
- **The model that opened the round no longer capitulates.** Told to write the
final answer and take what the others got right, it abandoned its own perfectly
good answer, wrote *"I agree that Rust is the superior choice"* with no argument
anywhere for why, and rewrote everything in the newcomer's language. Both
closing instructions now carry: *your own answer is not automatically the worse
one for having been written first; change your position where somebody gave you
a reason, and say what the reason was.*
This mattered more than it reads. All three answers were compiled: the original
Python was fine, the critic's Rust compiled and ran — and **the merged answer
that was actually delivered did not compile at all**. A crowd that ends by
agreeing with whoever spoke last can be worse than the model that started it.
- **The bubble that opens a round now says `1 of 3` like every other one.** It was
the single contribution with no chip, because the crowd does not start it — the
composer does, and a round only begins when it finishes. So a two-model round
read as an ordinary reply followed by one labelled `2 of 2`, with no 1 anywhere.
It is stamped when the round begins, and that stamp is deliberately invisible to
everything that decides what happens next: fed to the scheduler it would inherit
the round's clock, so regenerating the opening an hour later would end the round
with "out of time" before anybody spoke.
- Fixed: **the crowd chip was never translated.** `1 of 3`, `on the way back`,
`closing`, `no rounds left` and the rest were English on a Slovak instance.
**Worth knowing, and not a bug:** with **two** models there is no backward pass at
all. The way back would contain only the model that opened the round, whose turn
*is* the close — so `crowd.disagree` never fires. You need at least three models
before a single "do you disagree" bubble can exist.
## 1.8.0
- **The crowd is where you would look for it.** In 1.6.0 the only way to add a