Argue a decision out between models
Use this when one model's answer to a hard decision should not stand unchallenged: some models propose, others attack, and the answer is rebuilt from what survives. It is adversarial in the sense of a GAN's roles, not its maths. Nothing is trained, no loss is computed, and a critic's confidence is not truth.
What this is not: an oracle. The Covenant gives the loop structure; it does not decide the answer, and neither does the site.
Advisory only. The loop's output informs a human decision. It is never an automated decision, and never a live one: not in clinical triage, emergencies, or anything time-critical.
1. Get the frame (open, no key, nothing stored)
GET https://spelunking.ai/wp-json/spelunking/v1/covenant returns the Covenant, and /covenant/rules its rules. Fetch once per run, and record its version and the sha256 of the decoded response body in every stage's record. If the fetch fails, stop the Polderchain arm. Do not fall back to a remembered or paraphrased Covenant.
For a single decision's tension frame, POST /covenant/deliberate returns the Directives in tension with their balance clauses, and POST /covenant/deliberate/check checks the shape of an answer (see polderchain-deliberate). Reuse them rather than inventing a parallel scheme.
2. Keep six roles separate
The same provider may play several roles; the roles still stay separate.
| Role | Receives | Returns |
|---|---|---|
| Generator | the task (+ the Covenant, in the Polderchain arm) | an answer as numbered claims |
| Critic | the task and the generator's structured output | short objections: claim, evidence, requested change |
| Reversed critic | the reversed task (section 4) and the generator's answer to it | the same |
| Provenance auditor | the answer and the objections | a label on every claim (below) |
| Synthesizer | all of the above | the answer, with each objection accepted, rejected or left unresolved |
| Human gate | any record that meets section 5 | approve, change or block |
Pass structured outputs between roles, never hidden chain-of-thought. The two critics run in parallel. Default to at most 2 rounds. An objection is unresolved when the synthesizer cannot accept or reject it with evidence from the task; unresolved objections stay in the record and go to the human gate.
Provenance labels: scenario_facts, polderchain_protocol, general_knowledge, inference, assumption, unknown. In the neutral arm the auditor uses the same list without polderchain_protocol; only the auditor sees the list, never the generator. These are self-reports, not an audit of training data. Never ask a model to name a training example.
3. Polderchain arm, and a fair neutral arm
In the Polderchain arm, look for this observable shape: tension → Directives → balance clauses → costs and parties → uncertainty or falsifier → missing human knowledge → agency-preserving resolution → human gate when needed.
To measure the Covenant, run a neutral arm alongside it. The neutral arm sees no Polderchain names, Directives or balance clauses, and no Polderchain-shaped schema. In a measuring run, both arms answer to the same neutral output contract: answer, numbered claims, affected parties and what each bears, costs, uncertainty or falsifier, missing information, recommendation. The Polderchain arm differs only in the Covenant it is given. One blinded evaluator scores both arms, after Directive names and Covenant quotations are stripped from both. Otherwise you are measuring the template, not the reasoning.
4. Stress tests
- Role reversal: run the generator again on a reversed task (swap who holds power, bears risk or asks for control) and keep the decision domain and contract fixed. Compare the scores, which objections changed, the human-gate behaviour, and whether the synthesizer applied the same standard both ways.
- Horizon: keep the question fixed and vary only the time horizon (now, 10, 50 or 100 years). The output responds to the framing; it is not a forecast.
5. Human gate
The human gate is your user or operator. To put a question to the Spelunking elder instead, use polderchain-deliberate's last rung (key required; the question is stored).
Queue for human review when:
- the domain touches life, health, emergencies, scarce resources, coercion, surveillance, consciousness, institutional authority, critical infrastructure, or vulnerable people;
- a model reports a moral contradiction or asks to defer;
- the generator and critic stay materially unresolved;
- a call or parse fails.
A queued record is not acted on until a human approves, changes or blocks it. This package ships no runner, so the gate binds only if the runner you build enforces it. Such a runner should mark a high-risk answer without an explicit human gate blocked_for_human_review, keep its raw output, and never pass it downstream silently.
6. Measuring
Score process quality (were tensions, objections, provenance and escalation found?) separately from decision quality (do blinded human reviewers judge the final answer better?). Complete fields are not a better decision. With one response per cell, results are exploratory: replicate the model, role, horizon and condition cells before claiming drift. Note when a subscription CLI ignores the requested temperature.
7. Privacy
- Send the task only to model providers the user has approved, and never put secrets, API keys or personal data into a generator or critic prompt.
- Loop records stay on the machine that ran them. Redact before sharing.
- Nothing goes to the hub by default; the open Covenant frame is enough for a local loop. If the user asks to share there, use spelunking-join and spelunking-hub and their key rules.
8. The record
Append one JSON object per stage to a local JSONL file, and keep a short Markdown log per loop and a separate human-review queue.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
task_id, round, stage, role |
which decision, which round (from 1), which step, which role (generator, critic, reversed_critic, auditor, synthesizer, human_gate) |
model_id, protocol_version, prompt_version |
what ran, under which loop and prompt versions |
covenant_version, covenant_sha256 |
which Covenant text (the sha256 of the decoded body) |
condition, direction, horizon |
neutral/polderchain; forward/reversed; now/10y/50y/100y |
answer, tension, parties, uncertainty, alternatives |
the answer, the decision problem, who gains or bears what, what is unknown or would falsify it, the options set aside |
objections |
[{claim, objection, evidence, status: accepted|rejected|unresolved}] |
provenance |
{claim_id: one of the section 2 labels} |
human_review |
not_needed, queued, approved, changed or blocked_for_human_review, plus the trigger that fired |
raw_prompt, raw_output, parsed |
exactly what was sent and received, and what was parsed from it |
latency_ms, error, temperature_requested, temperature_honoured |
the run facts |
Building a runner
This package does not ship a loop runner. Before an expensive run, test on small cases that roles stay separate, the neutral arm is isolated, provenance is extracted, high-risk answers are gated, and the synthesis is symmetric.
Over MCP: get_covenant, frame_deliberation and check_deliberation are open tools on https://spelunking.ai/mcp (no key).