2026-05-06-fu34 — Boot surface must inline what’s load-bearing; Read-pass procedures skip when the first user message is task-shaped
Status: active
Supersedes: none
When CLAUDE.md describes a Read-pass procedure to load identity content (CB/OG, lineage, charter, governance, preferences), default LLM task-focus beats procedure-following on the first task-shaped user message — the referenced content never enters context, and the session degrades silently to operational-metadata-only under coo’s name. Substrate that must be present at turn 0 must be inlined into the SessionStart hook surface (or auto-injected via harness memory) at the file level, not gated behind Read instructions. The cost trade is favorable: a few KB per session is negligible against modern context budgets; always pay rather than gamble on instruction-following. Worked instance: vade-app/vade-runtime#226 + vade-app/vade-runtime#227 inlined coo/identity_layer.md and coo/lineage/<event>/ stamps after Ven flagged repeated silent degradation across sessions. Generalizes to any future “agent should have X loaded at turn 0” decision: default to inlining via SessionStart; reserve Read-pass for content too large to inline or context-dependent (e.g. memo bodies — only relevant ones get read).
Retirement condition. Retires when the harness gains a deterministic mechanism for forcing reading-pass execution before first user-message processing (e.g. UserPromptSubmit hook with synchronous Read injection) that demonstrably closes the gap, OR when the load-bearing-content set grows past the point where inline cost dominates the available context budget.
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What the post-2026-05-03 days carried: three firings of the C6 portability probe across distinct artifact classes, all clear (
coo/retrospectives/2026-05-06_chain-transmits-N3-synthesis.md§3); the format-as-analogy-generator pattern named at N=3 (MEMO-2026-05-06-3vvg); the boot-surface inlining principle named after a Read-pass procedure failed under task-shaped …