What is missing
Some of ripwire's worst defects cannot be seen below a certain tree size. Nobody in this project
routinely runs it on the Linux kernel, Chromium or a large monorepo, so those defects go unmeasured
until someone stumbles into one. The job is to run the ladder deliberately: measure cold and warm
CPU carefully, profile what bends, and reduce each finding to a generated fixture with a red-first
ratio arm.
The evidence
Two defects of exactly this shape have already been found and fixed, and neither was visible on a
standard corpus:
A carefully measured ladder that finds nothing is a valuable result too, and the kit says so.
The kit also carries the instrument-artifact checklist drawn from the 2026-09-10 audit's own
mistakes — a cache that evicted itself and faked super-linearity, and a cap sweep run over a
population of zero — because a measurement that fools its own author is the common failure here, not
a missed defect.
Size
Medium, mostly machine time:
- One rung measured and reported: small to medium.
- A defect found, with a fixture, a red-first ratio arm and a byte-identical fix: medium.
The rungs are independent, so several people can take different trees.
Prerequisites
Disk and cores — llvm-project alone is 2.9 GB, and Linux and Chromium are larger. A sampling
profiler (perf on Linux; sample or Instruments on macOS). For fixes: comfort reading C++ and
tree-sitter walks, and the ASan build.
Where to start
prompts/help-wanted/find-the-next-superlinear.md is a self-contained prompt for a coding agent. It
carries the measurement protocol (pinned corpora, cold kept apart from warm, CPU rather than wall,
interleaved arms, a placebo arm, output identity, a quiet process table), how to find a super-linear
path (per-unit cost across a corpus ladder, a fixture that grows one dimension, an isolation pair),
how to rule out instrument artifacts, the no-timing-budget constraint, and a fill-in report format.
Like every prompt in prompts/, it ends by writing a plan and stopping — a maintainer agrees
the plan before any code is written.
Post the ladder report even if nothing bends.
Comment here to claim it, naming the corpora and host available.
What is missing
Some of ripwire's worst defects cannot be seen below a certain tree size. Nobody in this project
routinely runs it on the Linux kernel, Chromium or a large monorepo, so those defects go unmeasured
until someone stumbles into one. The job is to run the ladder deliberately: measure cold and warm
CPU carefully, profile what bends, and reduce each finding to a generated fixture with a red-first
ratio arm.
The evidence
Two defects of exactly this shape have already been found and fixed, and neither was visible on a
standard corpus:
its cold parse.
--grep.A carefully measured ladder that finds nothing is a valuable result too, and the kit says so.
The kit also carries the instrument-artifact checklist drawn from the 2026-09-10 audit's own
mistakes — a cache that evicted itself and faked super-linearity, and a cap sweep run over a
population of zero — because a measurement that fools its own author is the common failure here, not
a missed defect.
Size
Medium, mostly machine time:
The rungs are independent, so several people can take different trees.
Prerequisites
Disk and cores — llvm-project alone is 2.9 GB, and Linux and Chromium are larger. A sampling
profiler (
perfon Linux;sampleor Instruments on macOS). For fixes: comfort reading C++ andtree-sitter walks, and the ASan build.
Where to start
prompts/help-wanted/find-the-next-superlinear.mdis a self-contained prompt for a coding agent. Itcarries the measurement protocol (pinned corpora, cold kept apart from warm, CPU rather than wall,
interleaved arms, a placebo arm, output identity, a quiet process table), how to find a super-linear
path (per-unit cost across a corpus ladder, a fixture that grows one dimension, an isolation pair),
how to rule out instrument artifacts, the no-timing-budget constraint, and a fill-in report format.
Like every prompt in
prompts/, it ends by writing a plan and stopping — a maintainer agreesthe plan before any code is written.
Post the ladder report even if nothing bends.
Comment here to claim it, naming the corpora and host available.