# Working

## Step 1 — Problem statement
**Decision:** Redesign earning/spending rules, tracking, limits, and visible information for an hour-based mutual-help exchange so it stays stable, fair, and useful.
**Bounds:** Organizers control credit issuance/spending rules, what is tracked, limits, and member-facing information. They do NOT control members' intrinsic willingness; the medium is time-credits, nominally one-hour-one-credit.
**Success:** Active give-and-take holds steady or grows over a year AND no class of easy services systematically drains value. **Failure:** runaway hoarding or deficit drift kills participation, OR a few low-value services dominate.
**Three coupled failure modes observed:** (a) credit pools in non-spending holders and stops circulating; (b) deficit-holders drift away; (c) over-rewarded easy services flood and crowd out needed help.

## Step 2 — Operative primes (search_prime + search_by_facets, err toward inclusion)
Ran `corpus_stats` (643 primes / 625 archetypes, embedder live), one blended `search_prime`, and a 7-facet `search_by_facets`. Surfaced and inspected (get_prime on the two pivots):
- **tragedy_of_the_commons** (distinctive; fused-top via "shared pool degrades under private optimization") — the master diagnosis: private benefit / dispersed cost.
- **mechanism_design_and_incentive_structure** (rules so self-interest yields collective good; carries the crowd-out + Goodhart cautions, T5).
- **free_riding / social_loafing** (easy-service flooding, undercontribution).
- **reciprocity** (the exchange's core relation; balance over time).
- **liquidity / circulation / turnover** (credit must keep flowing, not pool).
- **price_mechanism / value_commensuration / scarcity** (mispricing of effort vs. reward).
- **homeostasis / equilibrium / feedback** (self-correcting adjustment toward balance).
- **speculative_bubble / loss_aversion** (hoarding psychology; lower-weight).

## Step 3 — Salience rank (load-bearing)
1. tragedy_of_the_commons (the structural core — the shared medium degrades).
2. mechanism_design_and_incentive_structure (the lever organizers actually hold).
3. reciprocity (the relation being governed; balance-over-time invariant).
4. circulation/liquidity (the hoarding/stagnation failure).
5. price_mechanism / value_commensuration (the mispricing failure).
6. feedback/homeostasis (keeps the fix self-correcting).
7. free_riding (the flooding failure, largely absorbed by #2/#5).

## Step 4 — Operative subset (prune to ~6)
Keep 1–6 above. Drop speculative_bubble/loss_aversion (descriptive of hoarding, not actionable levers), drop free_riding as standalone (handled by pricing + flooding caps). Rationale: each retained prime maps to one of the three failure modes plus the self-correction requirement.

## Step 5 — Context model (typed relational structure)
Nodes: Members{hoarders H, deficit-drifters D, flooders F, ordinary O}; Organizers Org; CreditPool CP (the medium); ServiceCatalog SC{easy/over-rewarded e, needed/scarce n}.
Edges: H —holds→ CP (does not recirculate); D —owes→ CP (drifts out); F —floods(e)→ SC (crowds out n); Org —sets rules→ {CP,SC}; Member —earns(credit) / spends(credit)→ Member; SC.e —drains value→ CP. Primes annotated: CP-stagnation=circulation/liquidity; mispriced(e)=price_mechanism/value_commensuration; SC-degradation=commons; Org→rules=mechanism_design; member↔member=reciprocity; demand-signal→price=feedback.

## Step 6 — Meta-model (domain stripped)
A finite shared medium of reciprocal obligation circulates among many agents under open access. Each agent captures full private benefit of issuing/holding while the cost (stagnation, mispricing, depletion of needed contribution) is dispersed. Absent feedback, the medium pools in non-recirculating holders, drains via mispriced low-cost issuance, and the cooperative pool collapses self-reinforcingly. Need: governance rules + price/value coupling + circulation pressure + balance-repair + condition-linked feedback that make individually rational acts preserve collective viability.

## Step 7 — Archetype query (find_archetypes_for_prime + search_archetype)
For tragedy_of_the_commons: **commons_governance** (source), **reciprocity_protocol_design**, iterative_reciprocity, public_goods_provision, harmful_emergence_containment.
For mechanism_design: **arbitrage_prevention_mechanism_design** (source), versioning_and_quality_discrimination, iterative_reciprocity.
search_archetype (meta-model) top: **circulation_loop_design**, equilibrium_restoration, balance_preservation, liquidity_reserve, bioaccumulation_prevention.
Pulled full records for commons_governance, reciprocity_protocol_design, arbitrage_prevention_mechanism_design, circulation_loop_design.

## Step 8 — Reason via both views
- **commons_governance** action-logic (bound→rights/duties→monitor→consequences→replenish→adapt) maps cleanly: bound the credit pool, set issuance/spend rights, surface balances, attach soft consequences to hoarding/deficits, fund recirculation, revise. Matches meta-model's "condition-linked rules."
- **reciprocity_protocol_design** supplies the balance criterion + imbalance signal + repair path + generosity buffer: legitimate temporary imbalance, persistent imbalance made visible and repairable, anti-exploitation. Directly targets hoarding and deficit-drift.
- **circulation_loop_design** supplies turnover cadence + driving gradient (idle balances should flow back) — credit demurrage / decay so the medium refreshes rather than pools.
- **arbitrage_prevention_mechanism_design** supplies the fence against over-rewarded easy services: the "one-hour = one-credit" rule is the arbitrage seam (low-effort hour priced equal to high-value hour). Calibrate so easy-to-flood services cannot be cheaply minted past demand.

## Step 9 — Anti-signatures / fit
- commons_governance anti-sig "actually a one-time two-party dispute" / "central authority can just allocate" — NOT tripped; this is recurring, distributed, legitimacy-sensitive. FITS.
- reciprocity_protocol anti-sig "one-shot purchase," "support should be unconditional" — NOT tripped (ongoing relation). FITS; heed its caution: no punitive ledger, preserve dignity.
- circulation_loop anti-sig "movement theater without a real gradient" — avoid blunt expiry; tie decay to a need gradient. Use mildly.
- arbitrage_prevention anti-sig "product legally must be equal terms," "fence needs disproportionate surveillance" — heed: keep pricing legitimate and light; do NOT abandon the simple time unit wholesale, only cap/curve it. mechanism_design T5 (extrinsic crowd-out of intrinsic goodwill) — keep incentives soft.
Final design below.

COST: ~9 operations, ~28k tokens

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===
Treat the credit not as money to be accumulated but as a shared circulating resource the whole community depends on. The system fails for three linked reasons: credit pools in people who stop spending, drains away from people who fall too far behind, and gets minted too cheaply by a few easy services. Fix all three by changing how credit is issued, how it must move, and what everyone can see.

**Keep balances inside a healthy band.** Give each member a band, say roughly +20 to -20 hours around zero. You can keep earning above the upper edge, but credits earned past it accrue more and more slowly (a soft cap), and you cannot draw far below the lower edge until you give again. This removes both extremes at once: hoarding stops paying off, and deficits cannot silently spiral. New members start at zero with a small starter allowance so they can receive help before they have given, which keeps the door open.

**Make idle credit gently flow back.** Apply a small demurrage: balances sitting unused above a comfortable cushion decay by a few percent a month into a community pool. This is not a penalty on saving for a real need; the cushion protects ordinary saving. It simply ensures the medium keeps moving instead of freezing in a few accounts. The pool then funds onboarding allowances and the maintenance work nobody wants to log, so the leak becomes a recirculation loop.

**Decouple reward from raw ease of supply.** The "one hour earns one credit" rule is the seam being exploited: a low-effort service that anyone can offer earns the same as scarce, hard-to-find help. Keep the one-hour baseline as the floor, but let reward bend toward what the community actually needs. When a service category is already oversupplied relative to requests, each additional hour of it earns slightly less; when a needed service goes unfilled, requests for it can carry a modest bonus. Members see, for each category, a simple "needed / balanced / oversupplied" tag drawn from the live ratio of open requests to offers. Effort and scarcity, not just clock time, shape the payoff, so flooding an easy service stops being a winning strategy.

**Make condition and contribution visible, without a punitive ledger.** Show each member their own balance, their band position, and the category tags; show the community the overall health of the pool (total credits, how fast they are circulating, which needs are unmet). Visibility is for recognition and self-correction, not shaming: individual balances stay private, and the framing is "here is what the community needs," not "here is who owes." This turns vague goodwill into something people can act on while protecting the relationships the exchange runs on.

**Give imbalance a repair path before people drift.** When someone nears the deficit edge, the system nudges them toward easy ways to give and toward unmet needs they can meet, rather than locking them out. When someone is hoarding, nudge them toward spending or gifting into the pool. Persistent one-sidedness becomes a conversation and an offer, not a silent exit. Keep some help outside the credit economy entirely: genuine emergencies and basic welcoming should never be gated on balance.

**Let the rules adjust to conditions, and review them with members.** Set the band width, demurrage rate, and the strength of the need-based reward bend as dials, and tune them from observed behavior: widen the band if it is too tight, raise demurrage if credit is still pooling, soften the reward bend if it feels transactional. Revisit the dials on a regular cadence with member input, so the rules stay legitimate and trusted rather than imposed. Watch for the real risk that strong incentives crowd out the goodwill that makes the place work; keep every lever gentle, and prefer information and nudges over hard penalties.

**Final operating rule:** Credit is a flow, not a hoard. Keep every member's balance inside a moderate band, keep idle credit gently moving back into the community, and let reward bend toward genuine need and scarcity rather than raw clock time. Steer with the lightest visible nudges that keep the medium circulating, and adjust the dials with the members whenever balances stop moving or any easy service starts to dominate.
===RECOMMENDATION_END===
