Stage S8 — Precipitation
Purpose
This is the stage that exists because of a named v1 pain point: recurring and long-running investigations are not being turned into skills or durable memories, so the next occurrence costs the same one to two hours that a skill or a memory entry would cut to minutes (stated 31.08.2026).
Precipitation is the case paying for itself. It is mandatory, it is recorded, and nothing is a legitimate outcome — provided it is justified.
What runs this stage
| Agents | support.curator — the only profile that confirms proposals into shared memory |
| Isolated sub-agents | — |
| Memory domains | owns support/experience; reads and proposes to support/methodologies, owned by support.resolution. The owner alone activates shared revisions (Modules). |
| Skills it runs | skill creation goes through governance (Agent Framework § 6); the catalogue itself is Agents Memory and Skills |
| Its branch of the graph | Data and Information Module § 0 — the working stages' tree, memory branch and skills · the component list is Components — Support |
Every stage also uses support.root — the only profile that reaches the human — and the platform's write_executor and write_auditor (Gating).
Inputs → Outputs
In: the case after S6 verification — closure is the customer's (D49) and precipitation does not wait for it — its papers, its mechanism, what was reused, what was missing, and the budget it used. Out: a precipitation decision in the ledger, plus the mandatory experience entry and at most one optional result: a skill, an article, an index line, or a justified nothing.
0. The approach — why v1's memory does not fire, and what changes
F v1 does precipitate: 548 memory files, 509 analyses (frozen baseline 31.08.2026), 56 known issues and living checklists exist (Baseline § 2). What fails is retrieval and application: the 20.05.2026 audit found four error families recurring after their rule already existed, and cached knowledge that is 10–60× cheaper than rediscovery going unused (write-time discipline, measurement). The pain is therefore not "we do not write things down"; it is that what is written down is flat, retrieved by grep on one-line descriptions, and has to happen to be read at the moment it matters.
P The approach, in the order it pays back (decision 02.09.2026):
| # | Move | What it fixes | Where it is specified |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mechanics, not memories. Anything that must always happen becomes a pipeline phase with a required output — the nine investigation mechanics, the closing walk reconciled like a plan, the assertion form | the "rule existed, was not applied" family: a phase cannot be forgotten, a memory file can | Stage Investigation § 1, § 3 below |
| 2 | Retrieval at the moment of need, not at boot. Triage queries the experience index with the symptom signature before investigation starts and returns precedents as hypotheses; the investigator reads outward from its own node on demand | knowledge present but never consulted | Stage Classification § 5, Agents Memory § 2 |
| 3 | Skills over articles for anything executable. A diagnostic query pack, a compare checklist, a master-data operation is a tool the agent calls, with assertions — not prose it must remember to follow | the "checklist halted silently" family | Agents Memory and Skills, Agent Framework § 6.6 |
| 4 | Measure the firing rate, and let it decide. Migration of a domain is accepted only when the held-out triage hit-rate beats grep; consolidation passes are judged the same way; the retrieval mechanism (grep vs vector) is chosen by that number | rebuilding a corpus that does not fire | Agents Memory § 7.2 |
| 5 | Refine on use, not on writing. The 3 / 7 / 20 ladder revisits a skill or article when it has actually been used, with more evidence | entries written once and never revisited | § 2 below |
| 6 | Governance for memory. Proposed → active → retired, provenance on every write, version pinning per case, dependency-scoped eval re-runs | an article that quietly misleads every later case | Agents Memory § 7.4b |
P The one number that says whether this worked is the triage hit-rate on held-out v1 cases (Agents Memory § 7.2) — and it was measured on the v1 corpus on 02.09.2026, before any platform existed: 30 held-out resolved tickets, each presented as it arrived, against what the current memory/ offers a grep. The result is the baseline to beat — a cited precedent in the top five for 3 of 30 (10 %), 98 % of the 150 possible slots noise, and 7 tickets returning nothing (Measurements § TB). The target is ≥ 50 % top-5 hit-rate per domain before acceptance (D111, Metrics).
1. The decision
P Every closing case records an experience entry always, plus at most one of:
| Outcome | When | Produces |
|---|---|---|
| Skill | the investigation shape will recur and is mechanizable — a diagnostic query pack, a repeated master-data operation, a check sequence | a skill, published through governance (Agent Framework § 6.6) |
| Article | a pattern worth recalling: a mechanism, a trap, a rule of the running system | a memory article in the owning domain, under the writing practice |
| Index line | the domain's AGENTS.md one-liner needs updating so the thing is findable |
an index change in the same edit |
| Nothing | the case taught nothing new | the justification, recorded — not silence |
The mandatory experience entry is written case-locally by the agent that worked the case and filed as a proposal; the domain's curator promotes it into shared storage (D25/D56).
P The decision is an audit record, so precipitation rate and reuse hits are parsed rather than claimed (Metrics).
2. The recurrence ladder — 3 / 7 / 20 (a configuration default)
P Case journeys § 6 separates fix-shape occurrence, confirmed-trigger recurrence and clean execution. The existing mechanism/object signature drives this ladder; an evidenced trigger-family relation joins different repairs with one cause. Count canonical requests, not mirrors/subcases. The S8 job is keyed by request and verified result revision and durably queued at resolution. Later customer evidence or a contradiction creates an amended result/proposal while preserving earlier evidence. Closure and retries never silently double the count.
P Precipitation is not one event but a refinement ladder, driven by how often the same shape actually recurs (decision 01.09.2026); the three counts are a platform-policy value with the defaults below (Whitelabel Catalogue):
| Occurrence | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1st–2nd | experience entry only. Nothing is mechanised yet — a skill written after one sighting costs more than the investigation it replaced |
| 3rd | create the skill or the article. The shape has proven itself |
| 7th | first refinement pass. The agent revisits its own first version with four more cases of evidence and spends real time improving it — a version written from three examples will show it |
| 20th | second refinement pass. By now the shape is load-bearing and worth the cost of getting right |
Why a ladder rather than a threshold: a created skill is not a finished skill. The v1 corpus is full of entries written once and never revisited, which is a large part of why it does not fire. Scheduling the improvement at a known occurrence count means refinement happens because the thing is used, not because someone remembered it.
P The counter is the same fix signature the solution take uses, so one count drives both ladders.
P The ladder governs creation, not correction (Case Studies G-14). New skills and new articles wait for the third sighting; a wrong existing claim is corrected on the evidence, immediately, as a new article version with a CORRECTION ledger record — the writing practice of § 4 wins over the ladder for corrections. SD-1627 wrote three files on a first sighting; under this rule it writes one experience entry and corrects the one article it contradicted.
3. The closing walk
P Closing runs the v1 step-10 propagation walk, and — the part v1 got wrong — the walk is reconciled like a plan: every item is marked done or explicitly skipped with a reason. A silently halted checklist is the measured v1 failure mode; what the audit of 20.05.2026 counted is four error families recurring after their rule already existed (Baseline § 5) F: [audit, propagation rule].
The walk covers: the known-issue register (a closed ticket does not close its KI — 56 are open, KNOWN_ISSUES.md) · the living checklists (e.g. the policy sync compare checklist, which is meant to be extended by the cases that use it) · the experience index · the domain articles · the eval sets.
4. Writing rules
P Writes go only into the agent's own domain; cross-domain findings are handed to the owning domain's agent with their evidence, as a request record (Agents Memory § 2).
F The writing practice, inherited: belief order running system → consuming code → memory; four kinds of wrong (wrong, stale, ambiguous, environment-specific) with four different treatments; fix the claim where it is made; guide, not diary — no dates, sessions or incidents in article bodies, provenance in metadata, values replaced by the regenerating query; record the pattern, never the incident; no customer PII (rule).
5. Feedback into evaluation
P A precipitated skill or article changes what the module knows, so it re-runs the affected eval sets (CR-4). This is the loop that keeps precipitation honest: an addition that degrades the module's golden corpus is not an improvement, and the platform finds that out at publish time rather than on the next real case.
6. Consolidation — the dreaming pass
P On a schedule, separate from case closing — and this is where curation lives (decision 01.09.2026). The experiencing agent writes the entry while it still holds the context; the dreaming pass is what later catches the entry that only makes sense to someone who was there, and rewrites it for a reader who was not.
The pass: merge duplicates, re-read entries against the would this help a stranger test, prune what the running system has outgrown, resolve or explicitly mark contradictions, refresh each node's AGENTS.md one-liners, and run any 7th/20th refinement passes the ladder (§ 2) has fallen due. New nodes only when the § 2 gate is met — recurring content, a distinct owning profile, and a retrieval need the parent index cannot serve (Agents Memory § 5).
Challenges
- P Article proliferation: 548 v1 files with the recall problem this stage is meant to fix. The consolidation pass must be measured by the same triage hit-rate as migration (Agents Memory § 7.2), or precipitation just rebuilds the corpus that did not fire.