CR-2026-200 — Step 5 halt report: shipped and CI-green; the closing eye-test is blocked by an API drift outside the CR — v0.1

Date. 2026-08-10 · Author. Claude Code (execution). Operator: Marvin Percival. State. Engine main 469fc22, tag cr-2026-200-b81-grant-pathway, pushed; push run 31453801230 watched GREEN (the fourth consecutive). Acceptance-gate items 2–6: met. Item 1 — the closing eye-test — is halted mid-scene on an environment breakage outside this CR's fence, whose smallest fix reverses a recorded decision and therefore comes to the Operator.

1. The outage, precisely

Every responder-composed Companion reply in dev now fails: the Anthropic API returns 400 — '\temperature\ is deprecated for this model' on the responder's calls (read from the engine's supervisor log, two identical tracebacks, responder.py:76). The classifier still works — it runs on claude-haiku-4-5 where temperature=0 is accepted; the responder runs on claude-sonnet-4-6, where the API has newly deprecated the parameter. Server-composed (delegated_response) replies are unaffected. Onset: between this afternoon's CR-197 eye-test (responder worked at 12:52, with one late transient that was likely this rollout's first appearance) and tonight (deterministic by 22:58 — two consecutive turns, identical error).

Why the smallest fix is not mine to take: the responder's temperature=0 is CR-2026-169 D-1 — deliberately pinned at every LLM seam for answer consistency, with the reasoning in the code comment. Removing it reverses that decision. Two fix shapes for the ruling:

• (a) Unconditional removal at the responder — one line; loses the pin even if the API later re-accepts it, and drifts the responder from the every-seam-pinned discipline.
• (b) Retry-without-temperature on this specific 400 — preserves the pin wherever the API honors it, degrades only when forced, at the cost of a retry path. (The other pinned seams — classifier on haiku, manifestation organization etc. on their models — will hit the same wall whenever their models cross the same API line; shape (b) generalizes, shape (a) would need repeating.)

Candidate filing: B-85 — the dev responder is down for all prose replies; every pinned seam is exposed to the same drift as models roll forward.

2. What the halted eye-test already observed

• The denial turn classified request_draft (captured from conversation_turns — the classified-intent lesson applied live): the structural denial ran; only its prose fell to the fallback.
• The grant sentence then classified general_conversation — because the denial's prose was missing from history. This is a clean, unplanned demonstration of the context-dependence the B-81/B-82 record describes: the arc's second step leans on the first step's reply as classification context. The fallback path wrote nothing and claimed nothing (CR-2026-199 holding).
• The CR's centerpiece was observed in the product anyway, responder-independent: a held grant scoped to E0125, planted via the service layer, renders on the personal Memory-room held card as "Standing authority: the Companion may draft specifications in the project “CR-200 EYE-TEST (throwaway)”, asking you each time." — capability, scope by project name, and mode, no JSON, on the exact card carrying the Confirm control. Screenshot captured. The plant was discarded after the observation (the sanctioned reverse; residue in the append-only log).

3. State held for resumption

E0125 (13df4212…, with its seed/DST/shaping/manifestation and Test2's membership) is left in place so the eye-test resumes from Scene 1 the moment the responder is back; the three fallback turns in its history are noted (a fresh conversation may be preferable — resumption can start clean in the same engagement or tear down and re-create). Test2's session cookie is minted. No delegation was created by the misclassified turn (verified); the only personal-memory change tonight is the planted-and-discarded held grant above. The engine and frontend are left running the shipped code.

4. Awaiting the Operator

1. The ruling on the responder fix — shape (a) or (b) — and whether it files as B-85.
2. Whether the fix (once ruled) rides as its own micro-CR or an emergency adjunct, given it reverses/amends CR-2026-169 D-1.
3. On the fix landing: the eye-test resumes and CR-2026-200 closes on its gate item 1.

DUNIN7 — Done In Seven LLC — Miami, Florida CR-2026-200 — Step 5 halt report — v0.1 — 2026-08-10 The card is readable in the product; the voice in front of it is what broke — and not by our hand.