Owner live-test verdict on the spine (2026-09-30): no perceptible gain —
the real problems (restatement nodes, shallow re-derivations, same
conclusion from many angles) are mint-time issues a post-hoc chain
minter cannot fix. This arc moves assembly INTO the extractor and adds
the deterministic dedupe the owner specified:
- Digest-aware extraction: each stretch's extractor prompt carries THE
GRAPH SO FAR (its own source's merged propositions + chains, ids
verbatim); build on existing ids instead of restating, lean on
established conclusions as premises. Mixed-namespace chain endpoints
(fresh p-ids OR existing n_-ids) validated at the submit seam.
- Serialized per source: a source's batches/chunks run strictly in
order (each extract reads every earlier merge); cross-source runs
stay parallel; source-wide abort stops the loop. The spine stage,
role, phase, usage stage, cost row, and setup roster are gone.
- Core-ideas prompt: goal reframed as uncovering core ideas and showing
how everything derives from the foundations; direction upward, prefer
lean derivations, never re-derive what the graph already holds.
- Chain simplification (merger maintenance): simplifyChains drops
provably redundant chains at every merge — prefer-fewest-premises +
ancestry-cover ([A,B]⟹X with [X,C]⟹Y covers [A,B,C]⟹Y, transitive);
same-key provenance lines drop together; rewriteLedgers under the
audit lock; droppedChains counted separately in stats.
Chunk budget stays 8192 (owner: keep for now, maybe lower later).