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>

reports/reality-tests/playbook_lift_real_005.md

@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+# Playbook-Lift Reality Test — Run real_005
+
+**Generated:** 2026-05-01T04:04:14.242729367Z
+**Judge:** `qwen2.5:latest` (Ollama, resolved from config [models].local_judge)
+**Corpora:** `workers,ethereal_workers`
+**Workers limit:** 5000
+**Queries:** `tests/reality/negation_queries.txt` (5 executed)
+**K per pass:** 10
+**Paraphrase pass:** disabled
+**Re-judge pass:** disabled
+**Evidence:** `reports/reality-tests/playbook_lift_real_005.json`
+
+---
+
+## Headline
+
+| Metric | Value |
+|---|---:|
+| Total queries run | 5 |
+| Cold-pass discoveries (judge-best ≠ top-1) | 0 |
+| Warm-pass lifts (recorded playbook → top-1) | 0 |
+| No change (judge-best already top-1, no playbook needed) | 5 |
+| Playbook boosts triggered (warm pass) | 0 |
+| Mean Δ top-1 distance (warm − cold) | 0 |
+
+
+
+**Verbatim lift rate:** 0 of 0 discoveries became top-1 after warm pass.
+
+---
+
+## Per-query results
+
+| # | Query | Cold top-1 | Cold judge-best (rank/rating) | Recorded? | Warm top-1 | Judge-best warm rank | Lift |
+|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
+| 1 | Need 5 Forklift Operators in Aurora IL, NOT in Detroit (Detr | e-1723 | 4/2 | — | e-1723 | 4 | no |
+| 2 | Need 3 Warehouse Associates, but NOT anyone from Beacon Frei | w-2937 | 0/4 | — | w-2937 | 0 | no |
+| 3 | Looking for Pickers in Indianapolis, excluding the Cornersto | e-5033 | 0/1 | — | e-5033 | 0 | no |
+| 4 | 1 CNC Operator needed in Flint MI - we cannot use any Detroi | w-1360 | 0/2 | — | w-1360 | 0 | no |
+| 5 | Need 2 Loaders in Joliet IL but exclude all currently-placed | w-2998 | 0/4 | — | w-2998 | 0 | no |
+
+---
+
+## Honesty caveats
+
+1. **Judge IS the ground truth proxy.** Without human-labeled relevance, the LLM
+   judge's verdict is what defines "best." If `` rates badly,
+   the lift number is meaningless. To validate the judge itself, sample 5–10
+   verdicts manually and check agreement.
+2. **Score-1.0 boost = distance halved.** Playbook math is
+   `distance' = distance × (1 - 0.5 × score)`. Lift requires the judge-best
+   result's pre-boost distance to be ≤ 2× the cold top-1's distance, otherwise
+   even halving doesn't promote it. Tight clusters → little visible lift.
+3. **Verbatim vs paraphrase.** The verbatim lift rate (above) is the cheap
+   case — same query, recorded playbook, expected boost. The paraphrase
+   pass (when enabled) is the actual learning property: similar-but-different
+   queries hitting a recorded playbook. Compare verbatim and paraphrase
+   lift rates — paraphrase should be lower (semantic-distance gates some
+   playbook hits) but non-zero is the meaningful signal.
+4. **Multi-corpus skew.** Default corpora=`workers,ethereal_workers` — if all judge-best
+   results land in one corpus, the matrix layer's purpose isn't being tested.
+   Check per-corpus distribution in the JSON.
+5. **Judge resolution.** This run used `qwen2.5:latest` from
+   config [models].local_judge.
+   Bumping the judge for run #N+1 means editing one line in lakehouse.toml.
+6. **Paraphrase generation also uses the judge.** The same model that rates
+   relevance also rephrases queries. A judge that's bad at rating staffing
+   queries is probably also bad at rephrasing them. Worth sanity-checking
+   a sample of `paraphrase_query` values in the JSON before trusting the
+   paraphrase lift number.
+
+## Next moves
+
+- If lift rate ≥ 50% of discoveries: matrix layer + playbook is doing real
+  work. Move to paraphrase queries + tag-based boost (currently ignored).
+- If lift rate < 20%: investigate why — judge variance, distance gap too
+  wide, or playbook math too gentle. The score=1.0 / 0.5× formula may need
+  retuning.
+- If discovery rate (cold judge-best ≠ top-1) is itself low: cosine is
+  already close to optimal on this query distribution. Either the corpus
+  is too narrow or the queries are too easy.