Audit The Oracle Coverage

audit-the-oracle-coverage

The matched pair build-the-oracle-before-the-answer (oracle exists) vs triangulate-without-oracle (no oracle) is a false binary. Most real work lives in the middle: a partial or proxy oracle that certifies something but not the whole claim, and the characteristic failure is treating that partial certificate as a full one. This skill is the three-way partition the binary was missing — exact / partial-proxy / none — and it routes each part to the right discipline instead of laundering a weak signal into confidence.

Fuses build-the-oracle-before-the-answer (P-1) with prove-the-coverage-denominator (P-11) applied to the oracle itself, and routes the uncovered residual to triangulate-without-oracle (P-9). Organon: P3 fault-model + P11 + P19 oracle + P37 residue-seed. Phase: JUDGE.

Procedure

1. State what the oracle actually certifies. Write the precise claim the check establishes when it passes — not the claim you wish it established. "All 412 tests pass" certifies the behaviors those tests assert, not "the code is correct."

2. Name the gap between proxy and target (P3). What is true of the target that the oracle does not see? Spec ambiguity it never probed, inputs it never ran, the distribution it was built on but no longer matches, the value it proxies but is not. If you cannot name a single thing the oracle misses, the audit did not happen — that itself is the red flag.

3. Partition the claim (P11 over the oracle). Label every part of what you are asserting as:

   • covered — the oracle directly certifies it;
   • proxied — the oracle correlates with it but with a known, named gap;
   • uncovered — the oracle says nothing about it.

4. Route each part to its discipline. Covered → trust it. Proxied → either strengthen the oracle (build-the-oracle-before-the-answer on the gap) or carry the gap as explicit risk. Uncovered → if it is testable, build an oracle for it; if it is irreducibly normative/strategic, route to triangulate-without-oracle and name the owner.

5. Report the partition, not a binary verdict. "Verified" is replaced by "covered: X; proxied with gap: Y; uncovered, routed to Z."

The gate

You may not report a claim as "verified" until its parts are partitioned into covered / proxied / uncovered, with at least one named thing the oracle does not certify. An audit that finds the oracle covers everything is presumed to have not looked — partial oracles always miss something; name it or the gate fails. The one escape: an oracle that provably enumerates the claim's entire finite case space may be declared exact, and then the finiteness argument itself is what the audit must produce. The proxied and uncovered parts must be routed, not folded into the covered set.

Example

A migration's test suite passes, and the instinct is "settled, ship it." The audit: covered = the 412 asserted behaviors; proxied = "preserves user settings" (the tests check three settings shapes, correlated but not the full space); uncovered = users with null locale and deleted workspace memberships (no test exists). Routing the uncovered case to a targeted fixture (build an oracle for the gap) finds one settings row that silently drops — exactly the case "all tests pass" was about to certify away. The binary "verified vs not" would have shipped it; the coverage partition caught it.