Principle After Iteration

— the cleanest statement of the arc-emitted codification shape on a non-convergent arc. Twelve-plus opencode loops on Margin highlight didn't converge on the artifact, so Nathan never gets to issue the "make a note of the principles" instruction — there is no draft to approve. The reflection crystallizes the same kind of output by a different route: an "Anti-lesson logged" rule ("when a loop fails repeatedly and the agent's instinct is to ship one more fix, the right move is to question the test, not the code") plus four "Standing rule for future Margin work" entries (never patch Swift inline; when gates keep passing but the user keeps reporting failure, the data layer is wrong, not the code layer; "endless iteration" means methodology change, not more loops of the same shape; the user's "still the same" report is a real signal, not a communication failure). Three of those rules are override-aware ("when..." / "if..."). The artifact stalled; the principle extraction still landed. This is the failure-arc twin to the convergence cases above — and it shows the pattern is about the arc's what-I-learned rather than the arc's success.

— the canonical instance of the corpus-level elevation shape, and the source-from-which this entire pattern page was named. The source-over-symptom rule is delivered after a series of corrections in which the preference "showed up again and again across the corpus" — it is not anchored to any single converging or stalling arc, the way the chart, voice-refinement, and margin-debug instances are. The input to codification is the observed frequency of the preference; the output is an operating rule with the override clause delivered verbatim as part of the rule itself ("unless I explicitly say otherwise"). Nathan elevates the observed cross-corpus pattern to an operating principle rather than a one-off correction. The reflection also makes the meta-loop visible: the principle was itself violated while being codified (assistant tried to write it into Hermes memory, the wrong canonical layer; was corrected), so the codification move is also subject to the codification move's own logic.

3. Corpus-level elevation (cross-arc). When a preference shows up again and again across many prior sessions — not anchored to any single converging or stalling arc — Nathan issues a single-session codification that consolidates the cross-corpus pattern into one operating principle. The input to codification is the observed frequency of the preference across prior work, and the output is an explicit operating rule with an override clause. Source-over-symptom is the canonical instance: the preference "showed up again and again across the corpus" before Nathan elevated it to "this can probably be an operating principle for you: when I want you to fix something, I want it to be the source and not the symptom, unless I explicitly say otherwise." The codification step rides on the corpus signal, not on any one arc.