# Working (discarded before grading)

## STATE

**problem.** A peer-to-peer hour-exchange (credits earned by helping, spent on others' help) keeps destabilizing: (1) members accumulate large idle credit balances and stop offering help; (2) others run deep deficits and drift away; (3) a few easy-to-offer services are over-rewarded relative to effort and flood the system, crowding out needed help. Participation is spiraling down. Levers: how credits are earned/spent, what is tracked, what limits exist, what info members see. Success = active give-and-take holds steady/grows over a year AND no easy-to-offer service class systematically drains value. Failure = hoarding/deficit-drift kills participation, or a few low-value services dominate.

## Verbs run (verb + why)

1. **corpus_stats** — sanity check the catalog is loaded (643 primes / 625 archetypes / semantic embedder live). Why: confirm retrieval is trustworthy before anchoring.
2. **match via search_by_facets** — the problem is oblique and instantiates *several* structures at once (a drifting unit of account; hoarding/idle stock; mispriced effort; free-riding crowd-out; participation collapse; measure→target drift). A single blended query would land in the wrong neighborhood, so I decomposed into 6 facet phrases and read the per-facet lists. This surfaced the three spines: a price/value-signal spine (price_mechanism, liquidity, scarcity, inflation), a collective-action spine (free_riding, social_loafing, tragedy_of_the_commons, responsibility_diffusion, mechanism_design), and a Goodhart spine (measure→target).
3. **match via search_prime** (×2) — targeted meta-model queries on the two facets the fusion under-resolved: the commons/free-rider structure (top: free_riding 0.74, tragedy_of_the_commons 0.73, with mechanism_design + property_rights in family) and the idle-stock/devalued-unit structure (turnover, buffering, deadweight_loss, inflation in neighborhood).
4. **match via search_archetype** — queried the *solution* shape directly ("keep a shared exchange in balance: stock circulates, price tracks real cost, free contributions cannot dominate"). Returned the three load-bearing archetypes: reciprocity_protocol_design (0.72), incentive_compatible_rule_design (0.71), price_signal_design (0.70), plus iterative_reciprocity, arbitrage_prevention, liquidity_reserve, balance_preservation.
5. **salience-rank / prune** — load-bearing: reciprocity_protocol_design (the give-and-take balance + imbalance + repair + exploitation-safeguard spine), price_signal_design (the mispriced-effort / over-rewarded-easy-service facet), incentive_compatible_rule_design (the gaming / proxy-optimization facet). Context-only: liquidity/inflation (diagnostic framing, not a lever), tragedy_of_the_commons (names the failure but its intervention = property rights, off-target here), balance_preservation (too generic). Pruned to the 3 operative archetypes; their union of source/related primes (reciprocity, incentive_compatibility, price_mechanism, public_goods, proportionality, equity, feedback) is the operative prime set.
6. **compose** — typed model: nodes = {members, credits (unit of account), services (typed by scarcity/need), ledger (tracked state), visible info}. Edges: earn (service→credits, annotated price_signal), spend (credits→service, annotated reciprocity), idle-hold (member→credits, the hoarding edge), over-supply (easy-service→credits, the arbitrage edge). Every operative prime annotates an edge — referential integrity holds.
7. **get_archetype** (×3: incentive_compatible_rule_design, reciprocity_protocol_design, price_signal_design) — pulled full component lists, anti-signatures, target invariants for the coverage check.
8. **lift (L2) coverage-enforcement** — I CHOSE to run a coverage check across the union of the three patterns' components. Statuses:
   - *Exchange Unit / Scarcity-or-Value Measure* → **instantiated**: hours stay the base unit, scaled by a need/scarcity multiplier so abundant easy services earn less per hour, scarce/needed ones more.
   - *Balance Criterion + Imbalance Signal* → **instantiated**: soft credit band (demurrage on large idle balances; gentle deficit floor), visible balance dashboard.
   - *Anti-Arbitrage Rule / Failure-and-Gaming Monitor* → **instantiated**: per-category supply caps + automatic reward decay on over-supplied categories; periodic re-calibration.
   - *Generosity Buffer / Access Floor / Participation Constraint* → **instantiated**: starting credit grant, no hard lockout, lifeline ability to keep receiving help.
   - *Adjustment Rule / Repair-or-Renegotiation / Transparency* → **instantiated**: quarterly recalibration of multipliers with member input + published reasons.
   - *Contribution Visibility* → **instantiated** but bounded (recognition, not surveillance).
   - *Exploitation Safeguard against coerced reciprocity / Emergency-unconditional-aid* → **correctly_declined**: help is voluntary, no dependency-coercion structure; anti-signature does not trip.
   - *Heavy Audit-and-Penalty / Deposit-Bond-Stake surveillance* → **correctly_declined (over-lift guard)**: a small community exchange must not be policed like procurement; reputation + visibility discharge the same anti-gaming function more naturally.
   No component left `missing` → STOP condition for L2 satisfied.
9. **evaluate-fit (gate)** — walked each archetype's anti-signatures. price_signal_design anti-sig "good is a right / no response path" → does NOT trip (members can choose what to offer/request). reciprocity anti-sig "one-shot trade / should be unconditional" → does NOT trip (ongoing membership). incentive_compatible anti-sig "problem is skill not strategy" → does NOT trip (the flooding IS a strategic best-response to mispriced rewards). All three kept.

**Coverage check chosen: YES.** Retrieval converged (3 mutually-reinforcing archetypes, anti-signatures clear); STOP.

COST: ~7 operations, ~14000 tokens

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===

The exchange is failing in three connected ways, and each needs its own mechanism while sharing one logic: make the credit a unit that has to keep moving, make its reward track real usefulness rather than ease of supply, and make idle wealth and chronic debt both gently self-correcting.

**Keep hours as the base unit, but stop paying every hour the same.** A flat one-credit-per-hour rule is what lets easy, abundant services flood the system: they cost little effort yet earn the same as scarce, hard-to-find help. Introduce a need multiplier on what an hour earns. Each service category carries a rate that rises when far more help of that kind is offered than requested, and falls when supply outruns demand. A wildly over-offered service should earn meaningfully less than an hour of genuinely scarce help (for example, a 0.5x to 2x band around the base hour). Members see each category's current rate before they offer, so the signal steers them toward what the community actually needs. Recompute these rates on a slow cadence (monthly or quarterly) from the running ratio of offers to requests, and publish the reason for each change so the rates feel like shared weather, not arbitrary fiat.

**Make hoarded credit quietly leak and deep deficits quietly recover.** Credit only has value if it circulates; large idle balances are dead capital that also signals to others that giving is pointless. Apply a mild demurrage: balances above a generous threshold (say, several times a typical month's activity) slowly decay, a few percent a month, so accumulation past what anyone reasonably needs is discouraged without punishing ordinary saving. Symmetrically, give deficits a soft floor rather than a wall: members can keep receiving help while in modest debt, but as debt deepens the system nudges them toward easy ways to give back and surfaces small, low-skill requests they could fulfill. Never hard-lock anyone out for being in deficit; the failure mode you are fighting is people drifting away, and a locked-out member is a lost member.

**Cap any single service's share and let over-supply decay on its own.** Beyond the rate multiplier, put a ceiling on how much of one easy category one member can bank in a period, so no one can mass-produce a low-value service into a fortune. Combined with the falling rate on flooded categories, this makes flooding self-defeating: the more a service is dumped in, the less each hour of it is worth and the sooner the member hits the cap.

**Show the system to itself.** Give every member a simple dashboard: their own balance and its trend, the current earn-rate of each category, and which kinds of help are most wanted right now. Visibility does the work that policing would otherwise require: contributions are recognized, imbalances are seen early, and people self-correct. Keep this recognition light and positive, not a surveillance ledger or a public shame list.

**Seed generosity and give a repair path.** Grant new members a starting credit so they can receive before they have given, which bootstraps participation. When the rates or rules produce a result that feels wrong, give members a regular, lightweight forum to flag it and adjust the multipliers — the calibration is a living agreement, not a fixed price list.

**Decline what does not fit.** Resist the urge to add bonds, deposits, heavy audits, or penalties; in a voluntary mutual-aid community those erode the trust the exchange runs on and would do more harm than the gaming they prevent. And never make any help conditional in a way that coerces dependent members — the demurrage and caps target idle wealth and dumping, not people who genuinely need help.

**Final operating rule.** Tune everything so that, for a typical member, the easiest way to gain standing is to give the help that is currently scarce, and the easiest way to lose standing is to hoard credit or flood an already-saturated service. When that is true, individual self-interest and the health of the exchange point the same direction, and the spiral reverses on its own.

===RECOMMENDATION_END===
