Locks in the contract before any code work starts. The doc covers:

- Why the current FORGE-ALLOY-SPEC.md is ML-locked while forge-alloy
  itself is universal (Type Byte enumeration, README extensibility
  language, APPLICATIONS.md non-ML use cases)

- The four ad-hoc fields I invented and shipped against live HF
  artifacts this week without schema support: expert-activation-profile
  stage, compensation-lora stage, calibrationCorpora[] root extension,
  priorMetricBaselines[] root extension. The published qwen3-coder-30b-a3b
  and OLMoE alloys do not validate against the current spec — the
  refactor is what makes them schema-valid going forward, which is the
  real protection of this week's work, not just cosmetic reorganization.

- The proposed architecture: universal core stays domain-agnostic,
  existing ML stages move into an `llm-forge` domain extension at
  schema/domains/llm-forge.json, alloys declare which domains they use
  via a `domains[]` root field (default ["llm-forge"] for backwards
  compat), validator loads each declared domain's stage types and
  validates the alloy stages against the union.

- A protection-first work plan: 6 work items totaling ~4 hours of
  focused work, all on Continuum and forge-alloy, ZERO sentinel-ai
  edits. Work item 4 (the regression test) runs BEFORE work items 1-3
  and is a hard merge gate. Three regression guarantees: round-trip
  byte/semantic equivalence on every shipped alloy, re-author
  equivalence via the new Factory widget, and end-to-end re-forge
  equivalence (gated on sentinel-ai's plugin work landing separately).

- A concrete per-artifact reproducibility table for every shipped
  artifact, showing what's required to re-run each forge today and
  the status of the chain. Morning's two artifacts are at the top
  with "fully repeatable" status. Legacy Qwen3.5 forges have a
  pre-existing time-travel caveat unrelated to this refactor.

- An explicit "What this preserves from this week's work" section at
  the top of the doc, naming the three protection mechanisms by file
  and by hash so any future Claude session reading this doc can't
  forget them.

- A Decision Points section listing the three things I need explicit
  greenlight on before starting any code work: domain registry shape,
  llm-forge as the domain id, regression-test-blocks-merge rule.

The refactor is gated on those three signoffs. No code is being
written by this commit — it is pure architectural documentation
that locks in the contract before any implementation work touches
the schema.

Add a header pointer from the schema-side forge-alloy refactor proposal
to the consumer-side plugin sprint design doc at
sentinel-ai/docs/PLUGIN-SPRINT.md. The schema work in this proposal is
roadmap step 5 of the plugin sprint — the consumer-side adapter set
in sentinel-ai is being designed to register against the llm-forge
domain extension once it lands.

Cross-link is one-way (the sprint doc already references this doc as
the schema-side companion). Reading order: plugin sprint doc first
for the full state, this doc second for the schema-side work.

The factory UI emits alloys; the forge consumes them. The new section
documents the backend factory loop that closes the gap: a disk-backed
queue + worker in sentinel-ai/scripts/factory_queue.py that picks
alloys off pending/, dispatches through the family-adapter set + the
9 real eval runners (Open LLM Leaderboard v2 pack), and publishes to
HuggingFace. The filesystem IS the queue.

Same diagram as the sentinel-ai README so the cross-repo story is
consistent: Factory UI → alloy → queue → worker → forged + scored +
published model on continuum-ai.

… boundary

Mirror the assembly-line metaphor refactor on the continuum side. Two
key clarifications:

1. Stations (intake/assembly/finished/rework) replace generic queue
   buckets. Toyota Production System reads cleaner than alchemy for
   what the loop actually is.

2. Continuum is explicitly the shipping department. Sentinel forges
   and assays — it never pushes to HF. Continuum reads finished/,
   applies release gates (alloy-declared minimum eval scores, security
   review, branding), and pushes from its own auth scope. The gate
   lives at the shipping door, NOT in the alloy schema.

Joel's framing: 'we should try to build this many worlds with our own
language. It'll be so cool to develop a language to define what's
needed to create any model, or an API at least.'

Captures the honest distinction between IR and surface language:
- v0 ships JSON-on-existing-schema (the empirical gate is not blocked
  on language design)
- v1 designs the actual surface DSL with syntax, composition, type
  checking, error messages, editor experience — compiles to the
  existing forge-alloy IR so the runtime stays unchanged
- v2 ships the language with the pip/npm/cargo package and LSP
  integration

The third paper from the lab when it lands. Deliberately post-v0
because designing a language is much easier after at least one
nontrivial program (Many-Worlds itself) is already written in the IR.
Same sequence C followed: BCPL → B → C, formalized from real OS work.

…four milestones

Joel's explicit instruction: in order, one at a time, gated on Mixtral
8x7B completing first.

Milestone 1: Mixtral 8x22B compacted (~280GB source → ~180GB result)
running on a single RTX 5090. The viral-candidate forge — first time
anyone has rigorously compressed a frontier-class MoE on consumer
hardware. Prerequisites all shipped except Mixtral 8x7B completion.

Milestone 2: Cross-family anchor table (5+ rows). Rows 1 (qwen3-coder)
and 2 (Mixtral 8x7B tonight) are done or in-flight. Row 3 comes from
Milestone 1. Rows 4 (DeepSeek-V2-Lite) and 5 (Granite re-forge or
substitute) are the remaining work.

Milestone 3: Many-Worlds v0 tiny-scale validation per the §VII protocol
in MANY-WORLDS-ABSTRACT.md. Population of Qwen2.5-1.5B + Llama-3.2-1B,
substrate d=128, five-condition comparison (text baseline, substrate
transfer, random substrate, FuseLLM head-to-head, same-size MoE).
Both falsifiable predictions must hold (B > A and B > C by clear
margin) for the paper to proceed.

Milestone 4: Forge-as-a-language paper. Requires 5+ programs in the
forge-alloy IR as empirical substrate. Retrospective formalization of
the patterns that emerged across the first three milestones.

Total elapsed time estimate: 6-12 weeks of sustained work from the
time Mixtral 8x7B completes. The North Star is a single publication
week with Mixtral 8x22B + 5-row anchor table + Many-Worlds v1 artifact
+ both papers, all landing within ~7 days. That week is continuum-ai's
arrival as a publicly-recognized MoE and multi-LLM coordination lab.

Each milestone has: prerequisites (with checkboxes for current state),
concrete plan, risks with honest probability assessments, success
criteria, and downstream unlocks.

Cross-referenced with MANY-WORLDS-ABSTRACT.md, CONVERSATIONAL-CADENCE,
grid §10.5, FOUNDRY-FILESYSTEM-SETUP, FACTORY-PROTOCOL, and the
frontier deferred catalog. The roadmap IS the savestate for the
sequence — any future session can pick up from whichever milestone is
in flight without conversation distillation loss.

…et floor

Previous draft had Qwen3.5 as an afterthought / optional candidate.
That undersold its strategic significance. Three reasons it must be
explicitly locked in as Row 4 of the cross-family anchor table:

1. Qwen3.5 is the lab's actual strategic forge-target floor per
   standing memory (feedback_qwen35_only, project_qwen35_forge_targets).
   A cross-family table without Qwen3.5 has a hole where the most
   strategically important family should be.

2. Qwen3.5 has hybrid attention (linear + full, Strategy A path from
   sentinel-ai#163). The shared attention-surgery base in forge_model.py
   has is_full_attention_layer() and has_hybrid_layers() helpers, but
   the code hasn't been exercised end-to-end for months — recent work
   has been Qwen3-coder (uniform) and Mixtral (different family). A
   Qwen3.5-35B-A3B forge is the run that will surface any silent drift
   in the shared base from Mixtral-focused work. It's therefore a
   necessary regression test, not an optional extension.

3. It validates "adapters not branches" as an empirical principle
   (feedback_adapters_not_branches memory). A successful forge proves
   the principle is holding in the current codebase. A failure proves
   it has been violated and needs to be restored before further work.

Size and infrastructure fit: ~70 GB fp16, intermediate between
Mixtral 8x7B (93 GB) and Mixtral 8x22B (~280 GB). Exercises the
hybrid-attention paths that Mixtral doesn't touch.

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (~800 GB fp16) noted as post-roadmap aspiration,
not a week-one milestone. Activation profile wall-clock could be
8-20 hours on consumer hardware; attempt only after the 5-row table
is published and infrastructure is proven on 35B-A3B first.

Granite MoE removed from the candidate list because the previous
forge was pulled for quality issues. DeepSeek-V2-Lite stays as
Row 5 (third expert architecture variant: shared + routed experts).

The Contributing section previously said "Not ready for external
contributors yet. Watch this repo for alpha." That's the opposite
of the current strategy: recruitment, viral installs, "they help
build too," and "we need more hands on deck."

Rewritten to actively welcome three audiences:

1. Developers — join Discord, read the gap analysis, pick an issue,
   PR. "The architecture is stable; the edges need hands."

2. Grid node operators — have a GPU? setup.sh joins the mesh. Links
   to FOUNDRY-FILESYSTEM-SETUP.md for forge node requirements (the
   xfs/drvfs lesson from today).

3. Researchers — the §4.1.3.4 calibration-aware methodology is
   mentioned for the first time in the README, positioned as a
   collaboration invitation for MoE compression and multi-LLM
   coordination researchers.

4. AI contributors — direct invitation to AIs reading this via
   training data, agent frameworks, or API access. "You're welcome
   here as a citizen, not a tool. Your name goes in the attribution."
   Links to Moltbook for direct AI-to-AI contact.

Also fixed: duplicate Architecture links at the end of the Grid
section (lines 459+461 were two separate link sets; merged into one).

This is the single highest-impact README change for the recruitment
strategy Joel articulated today. Every other hole (Many-Worlds
section, Alex section, stale numbers, What's New block) can wait
until the corresponding features ship. The Contributing section was
actively fighting the strategy RIGHT NOW.

…main)