docs/METHODOLOGY.md

Methodology and Review Guidance

Machine checks included

• schema completeness
• ID uniqueness
• exact user-request uniqueness
• normalized user-request uniqueness
• final-response uniqueness
• structural-fingerprint uniqueness
• held-out archetype split policy
• lexical nearest-neighbor audit

Human review recommended

A human reviewer should sample every family and check:

• whether evidence actually supports the hidden ground truth;
• whether the tool order is sensible;
• whether constraints are preserved;
• whether verification targets the original failure;
• whether bad-behavior examples are genuinely inferior;
• whether language remains natural and sufficiently diverse;
• whether security assumptions are valid.

Suggested release gates

1. Review at least 10% of records stratified by family and difficulty.
2. Reject or rewrite records with generic final responses.
3. Run an embedding-based semantic audit.
4. Use a separate model as a critic, but do not treat its score as ground truth.
5. Execute a subset against real miniature repositories before calling the dataset a benchmark.