Baton's second phase finally looked at money — but it routed nothing. It classified the 762 work units StrayMark had already recorded in Sentinel, recommended a tier for each, and printed what a routing policy would have spent versus all-frontier. The headline was a ~93% illustrative ceiling. The honest reading inverted the experiment's own hypothesis — granularity was never the lever. Signal coverage was.
Loom's first release rendered the document graph live in the browser in under a second. It also drew 330 edges to nowhere. The visible feature was the easy part — making the references actually resolve was the work, and it taught us when a dangling edge is a bug and when it's a signal.
Before Loom could draw anything, StrayMark's document model had to stop being the CLI's private property. The refactor that shipped zero user-facing change was the precondition for everything visual that followed — and a small lesson the framework had been preaching to adopters all along.
A fourth experiment started with an economic problem — when the subscription subsidies end, all-frontier-all-the-time stops being affordable — and immediately ran into a structural one. You can't route work to a cheaper model if the work is drifting from its own plan; a cheaper router over forgotten intent only automates the drift faster. So Baton's first move touches no models at all. It reads the plan StrayMark had only ever proved *existed*.
The operator's real daily question isn't "show me the documents," it's "where are we?" Loom grew a second surface — the architecture as a building you can walk, in 2D and in 3D — and its technical-debt overlay was empty. Not because there was no debt. Because it didn't know where to put it.