reality_test real_005: negation probe — substrate gap is correctly out-of-scope

5 explicit-negation queries ("Need Forklift Operators in Aurora IL,
NOT in Detroit", "excluding Cornerstone Fabrication roster", etc.)
through the standard playbook_lift harness. Goal: characterize
whether the substrate has negation handling or silently treats
"NOT X" as "X".

Headline: substrate has zero negation handling. Cosine on dense
embeddings tokenizes "NOT in Detroit" identical to "in Detroit"
plus noise — there is no logical-quantifier representation in the
embedding space. This is a structural property of dense embeddings,
not a substrate bug.

Per-query observations:
- Q1 (Aurora IL, NOT Detroit): all top-10 rated 1-2/5 by judge
- Q2 (NOT Beacon Freight): top-1 rated 4/5 — accidentally OK
  because role+city signal pulled non-Beacon worker naturally
- Q3 (excluding Cornerstone): unanimous 1/5 across top-10
- Q4 (NOT Detroit-area): all top-10 rated 1-2/5
- Q5 (exclude Heritage Foods): top-1 rated 4/5 — accidentally OK

The judge IS the safety net: when retrieval can't honor the
constraint, the judge refuses to approve any result. That's the
honesty signal — `discovery=0` for the run aggregates it.

No code change. The architectural answer for production is:
- UI surfaces an "exclude" affordance that populates ExcludeIDs
  (already supported, added in multi-coord stress 200-worker swap)
- Coordinators don't type natural-language negation — they click
- Substrate's role: surface honesty signal (judge ratings) + don't
  pretend to honor unparseable constraints

Adding NL-negation handling at the substrate level would be product
debt — it would let coordinators type sloppier queries that
silently fail when the LLM extractor misses a phrasing. Don't ship
until production traffic demonstrates demand for it.

Findings: reports/reality-tests/real_005_findings.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

STATE_OF_PLAY.md

@@ -266,6 +266,7 @@ The list is intentionally short. Items move to closed when the work demands them
 | (probe)   | Reality test real_003: 40 queries (10 fill_events rows × 4 styles — `need` / `client_first` / `looking` / `shorthand`). Confirmed shorthand-vs-shorthand bleed is real: CNC Operator shorthand recording leaked `w-2404` onto Forklift Operator shorthand query (both empty role, gate disabled). Extended `extractRoleFromNeed` to handle `client_first` + `looking` patterns; shorthand stays empty (regex can't separate role from city without anchor). Re-run real_003b: bleed closed across all 4 styles in this dataset. 10 new sub-tests in `scripts/playbook_lift/main_test.go` lock the patterns + the documented shorthand limitation. Findings: `reports/reality-tests/real_003_findings.md`. |
 | (fix)     | LLM-based role extractor (real_004): `roleExtractor` struct with regex-first → qwen2.5 format=json fallback → per-process cache. Opt-in via `-llm-role-extract` flag + `LLM_ROLE_EXTRACT=1` env. Off-by-default preserves real_003b shipping config. 8 new tests including `TestRoleExtractor_ClosesCrossRoleShorthandBleed` — the load-bearing witness pairing with the matrix-side `TestInjectPlaybookMisses_RoleGateRejectsCrossRole` to prove the extraction-layer + gate-layer compose correctly on the exact real_003 failure mode. Findings: `reports/reality-tests/real_004_findings.md`. |
 | (scrum)   | 3-lineage scrum review on `7f2f112..0331288` (Opus + Kimi + Qwen3-coder via `scripts/scrum_review.sh`). Convergent finding (3/3): `roleNormalize` plural-stripper mangled non-plural-s tokens (Sales → Sale, Logistics → Logistic). **Fixed**: `nonPluralSWords` allowlist + `-ss` ending check + `strings.ToLower`/`TrimSpace` cleanup. New tests `TestRoleNormalize_NonPluralS` + `TestRoleEqual_NonPluralS` lock the edge cases. Kimi 2 BLOCKs were false positives (model-truncation artifacts per `feedback_cross_lineage_review.md`). Disposition: `reports/scrum/_evidence/2026-04-30/verdicts/role_gate_v1_disposition.md` (local). |
+| (probe)   | Negation reality test real_005: 5 explicit-negation queries ("NOT in Detroit", "excluding Cornerstone roster", etc.). Confirmed substrate has **zero negation handling** — cosine treats "NOT X" as "X" + noise. Judge IS the safety net (Q1/Q3/Q4 rated all top-10 results 1-2/5 — operator-visible honesty signal). **No code change needed**: production UI should handle exclusion via `ExcludeIDs` (already supported, added in multi-coord stress 200-worker swap), not via NL-negation. Findings: `reports/reality-tests/real_005_findings.md`. |
 
 Plus on Rust side (`8de94eb`, `3d06868`): qwen2.5 → qwen3.5:latest backport in active defaults; distillation acceptance reports regenerated (run_hash refresh, reproducibility property still holds).