outcome

The outcome ledger is the second loop. Filing notes earns nothing. The ledger earns trust. Brigade promotes a learned skill only when a real signal proves it helped, and rolls a regressed one back the moment a signal says it broke. The model never grades its own work. The whole ledger is append-only JSON and markdown under memory/outcome/, tracked in git and readable without Brigade.

Recording a result

brigade outcome capture <skill-or-card> --run-id latest records the result of a verify run, a real exit code rather than an opinion, against the artifact that produced it. brigade outcome record writes a result directly.

Both stamp each new record with two facts about the world at capture time:

A content_fingerprint, the SHA-256 of the artifact’s content, taken from the installed copy first and the registry master as a fallback.
A context manifest (Brigade version, interpreter major.minor, platform, plus best-effort harness and model tagged with their source) and a capability_fingerprint over the low-cardinality vector {harness, model_family, python, platform}.

brigade outcome capture my-skill --run-id latest
brigade outcome record my-skill

A content hash cannot see the harness a signal was earned under, so the two fingerprints answer different questions: content_fingerprint asks “is this signal about the text that still ships?”, and capability_fingerprint asks “did this signal come from a context like mine?“.

content_fingerprint

The fingerprint is what lets an edited artifact re-earn its score instead of coasting on signals for text that no longer exists.

Skill bundles. A skill’s content_fingerprint covers its whole bundle, every file’s path plus content hash, skipping .DS_Store and the skill.json sidecar. Editing a bundled helper invalidates the skill’s signals the same way editing SKILL.md does. A skill whose only content file is SKILL.md hashes to exactly sha256(SKILL.md), byte-identical to the prior scheme, so existing single-file records are never invalidated.
Card links. A card’s content_fingerprint folds in the transitive closure of the cards it [[links]], each reachable card’s content hash. Editing a linked card invalidates every card that reaches it. The walk is cycle-safe, deterministic, and tolerant of dead links: a [[missing]] link contributes nothing until that card exists, and a card with no resolvable links hashes to exactly sha256(card content).

Pre-fingerprint records are grandfathered into the current score, so a never-edited artifact keeps its score and rank output stays byte-identical until the artifact is actually edited.

Ranking

brigade outcome rank ranks each artifact by a Wilson lower bound, so something that passed twice never outranks something vetted across twenty runs. The default sort drops proven-stale records, those fingerprinted against a different revision, while keeping lifetime counts visible. An edited skill earns its score back against the text that now ships.

brigade outcome rank
brigade outcome rank --by-capability
brigade outcome rank --recency
brigade outcome rank --recency --recency-half-life 30

—by-capability

brigade outcome rank --by-capability sorts by “what worked under my current context”. It resolves the current runtime capability and scores each artifact’s content-current records earned under it, pulling a thin cohort toward the pooled rate by deterministic shrinkage (helped + kappa*pooled_rate)/(total + kappa) with a single documented kappa=4.0. The sort key is the shrunk estimate, then on-capability sample size, then the pooled score. Records with no capability fingerprint are grandfathered into the current-capability cohort, so a pre-context ledger’s default output stays byte-identical until signals under a different capability accumulate.

—recency

brigade outcome rank --recency weights the score it sorts by over recency-weighted counts, so a signal’s weight halves every half-life and credit earned under a drifted-away environment fades without rewriting the append-only log. The default half-life is 45 days. Override it with --recency-half-life DAYS. Recency applies to the pooled score by default and to the capability-shrunk score with --by-capability, and the two flags compose. It is off by default, so rank output stays byte-identical until you ask for it. The promotion ratchet never uses recency.

Explaining a decision

brigade outcome explain prints the full signal trail behind any decision: which run produced each result, the threshold it crossed, and the reversible action taken. It also surfaces a per-capability breakdown, so you can see how an artifact scored under each {harness, model_family, python, platform} cohort rather than only in aggregate.

brigade outcome explain my-skill

The ratchet: reconcile

brigade outcome reconcile is the gate. It is dry-run by default. With --apply it installs a skill that earned it across your harnesses, or rolls a regressed one back to its last good version.

brigade outcome reconcile
brigade outcome reconcile --apply

The ratchet is fingerprint-aware. outcome reconcile and outcome fork score the current-fingerprint cohort when deciding, so an edited skill must re-earn install_min_helped against the text that now ships instead of coasting on signals for text that no longer exists. The decision rules, the thresholds, cooldown, and forward-only ratchet, are unchanged. Only the score fed in narrows. Grandfathering keeps a never-edited artifact’s decision, receipt, and output byte-identical to before. Decisions that drop proven-stale evidence carry audit fields: content_fingerprint, lifetime_*, stale_records, and legacy_records, so a promotion that ignored old signals shows exactly which ones and why.

The default rank sort, capability scoring, and recency all read the ledger without touching it. Only reconcile --apply and fork change what is installed, and both are reversible. Schedule brigade outcome reconcile in your own cron to run it hands-off. Brigade still installs no daemon.

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