Primary evidence is deterministic: on django, query.py rendered 2.12x its budget
on main and 1.49x with the bound, and the freed bytes reach the files below it
(+2,104 chars of source in the same five files). gin is a true control — the two
builds emit byte-identical explore output there, which is what makes its agent-run
deltas variance by construction.
Also records the harness trap that voided the first two batches: ab-new-vs-baseline
swaps src/ to the baseline ref mid-run, so a commit made while it runs captures
baseline sources. Check the "changed:" line before believing any run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>