docs/agent-trace-draft.md

Agent trace — Mystery-Mail Guardian (PUBLISHED 2026-06-12, owner-approved)

Status: PUBLISHED with owner consent to build-small-hackathon/mystery-mail-guardian-agent-trace. achievement:sharing tag added to README. The published dataset card lives in dist/agent-trace/README.md; this file is the working draft it was built from. Sanitization was re-verified by automated secret scan before upload.

What this is

Mystery-Mail Guardian was built end-to-end with Claude Code (Anthropic) as the hands and a human owner as the director. This trace is the honest, sanitized record of how that collaboration actually worked — the prompts that steered it, the loop that ran it, and the evidence trail it left behind.

How the build was driven

• Planning first: every major phase started as a written plan (docs/superpowers/plans/) with TDD steps, verified against live docs rather than model memory (Gradio 6 API drift caught this way twice).
• The owner steered with short prompts, e.g.:
  • "the loading icon is broken … I provided this image and it gave this output which I think is wrong" → led to the prompt-echo discovery (the 1.3B model parroting our JSON schema back) and the single-overlay loader.
  • "make an Easter egg when the user switches to Japanese" → the Gen X Soft Club palette, held to the same WCAG-AA tests as the main themes.
  • "train the model more using our Modal credits" → answered with evidence instead of obedience: a labeled synthetic-letter dataset + eval matrix that showed safety behavior was already at ceiling, so no fine-tune shipped — the data made the call.
  • "enter a state of loop-craft … keep improving until June 14" → a self-rescheduling build loop with a committed worklist (docs/loop-worklist.md), one verified iteration per wake.
• Every iteration had the same gate: offline tests green → Modal GPU validation where behavior changed → deploy → live probes against the running Space → commit with evidence.

What the trace shows (highlights)

1. Live fire beats simulation. Three JSON-repair bugs and one genuinely unsafe model suggestion ("check with the tax bureau and ensure you pay soon") were caught on the deployed Space; the safety layer discarded the bad advice by construction (BUILD_LOG 06-11).
2. The QA harness caught real bugs on its first runs. Run #1 of the Modal matrix found a scammer's reply address leaking through key facts; the multilingual eval found Devanagari/Japanese scam letters under-flagged. Both fixed, gated, and redeployed the same day (BUILD_LOG 06-12).
3. A NO-GO gate did its job. A prompt improvement regressed one Spanish case ("within a set time" paraphrase); the deploy was blocked until the urgency heuristic was generalized with tests, then re-gated to GO.
4. Tooling archaeology, documented: launch(js=) dead in Gradio 6.17.3, js-only demo.load registered-but-never-run, head= dropped by Space SSR — resolved with head= + ssr_mode=False (BUILD_LOG 06-12).

Companion artifacts (already public in the repo)

• BUILD_LOG.md — the full field notes, including dead ends
• docs/modal-validation-report.json, docs/modal-eval-report.json — GPU evidence as committed JSON
• docs/loop-worklist.md — the autonomous loop's rules and backlog, as run
• Git history — every step, with co-authorship trailers

Sanitization checklist (verify before publishing)

• No API keys, tokens, or secret values (HF token lives only in the local cache + a Modal secret; never in the repo)
• No real personal data — every letter in datasets/examples is synthetic; phone numbers use the reserved 555-01XX range
• No private URLs or credentials in logs quoted here
• Owner approved publication (chat, 2026-06-12)
• achievement:sharing tag added to README after upload