max / makenotwork

painhours: stop the default factors self-promoting to Critical DEFAULT_FACTOR was 3, the arithmetic midpoint of 1-5, which reads as the neutral choice. It is not: with the exponents this crate ships, a 3x3 item crosses BAND_CRITICAL in week 4. Any ingest that omitted the factors therefore promoted itself to Critical within a month, before a human had judged it. GoingsOn's /dellm migration ingested 446 problems at once and 159 of them crossed the line together on day 28, which is what surfaced it. Drop the default to 2 (~10 weeks to Critical), and pin the property rather than just the number: DEFAULT_TRIAGE_WEEKS names the window the default is chosen against, and default_does_not_self_promote asserts both ends of it, that an unscored item stays out of Critical inside the window and still reaches it within a year. Anti-starvation is why the age term exists, so a default that never escalated would be its own bug. The test guards the whole tuning block, not just the constant: raising an exponent or lowering PAINHOURS_K far enough now fails here instead of quietly re-arming the fuse.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: Max Johnson <me@maxj.phd> · 2026-08-07 21:36 UTC

Signed with PGP, not checked

Commit: e6fb77a25c837bf988c62f2a33adb5c3090fe698

Parent: 3b143af

1 file changed, +48 insertions, -1 deletion

M shared/painhours/src/lib.rs +48 -1

			@@ -77,7 +77,33 @@
77	77		const BAND_MEDIUM: u32 = 20;
78	78
79	79		/// Default 1-5 guesstimate for both `pain` and `scale` when unspecified.
80		-	pub const DEFAULT_FACTOR: u8 = 3;
	80	+	///
	81	+	/// Not the midpoint, deliberately. 3 is the arithmetic middle of 1-5 and
	82	+	/// reads as the neutral choice, but neutrality is a property of the curve, not
	83	+	/// of the number: with the exponents above, a 3x3 item crosses
	84	+	/// [`BAND_CRITICAL`] in week 4. Any ingest that omits the factors would
	85	+	/// therefore promote itself to Critical within a month of arriving, without a
	86	+	/// human ever having judged it. That is not a default, it is a fuse.
	87	+	///
	88	+	/// 2 crosses Critical at ~10 weeks instead, which leaves room for a real triage
	89	+	/// pass before the score starts making claims on someone's attention. An
	90	+	/// undertriaged item still climbs, because anti-starvation is the point of the
	91	+	/// age term; it just no longer outruns the triage it is waiting for.
	92	+	///
	93	+	/// [`default_does_not_self_promote`](tests::default_does_not_self_promote) pins
	94	+	/// the relationship, so changing an exponent or `PAINHOURS_K` cannot quietly
	95	+	/// re-arm it.
	96	+	pub const DEFAULT_FACTOR: u8 = 2;
	97	+
	98	+	/// The triage window [`DEFAULT_FACTOR`] is chosen against: an item carrying only
	99	+	/// the defaults must not reach [`BAND_CRITICAL`] inside this many weeks.
	100	+	///
	101	+	/// Eight weeks is two monthly audit passes, so a finding nobody has scored gets
	102	+	/// looked at twice before the ranking starts insisting on it.
	103	+	///
	104	+	/// Public because it is contract, not trivia: a caller deciding whether to score
	105	+	/// a finding by hand is really asking how long the default buys it.
	106	+	pub const DEFAULT_TRIAGE_WEEKS: u32 = 8;
81	107
82	108		/// Seconds in a week, the unit age is measured in.
83	109		const SECS_PER_WEEK: f64 = 7.0 * 86_400.0;
			@@ -242,6 +268,27 @@
242	268		assert!(painhours(3, 3, 4) > painhours(3, 3, 1));
243	269		}
244	270
	271	+	/// The invariant `DEFAULT_FACTOR` is chosen for: an unscored item must not
	272	+	/// climb to Critical before anyone has had a fair chance to triage it.
	273	+	///
	274	+	/// This is the guard on the whole tuning block, not just the default. Every
	275	+	/// constant above feeds the crossing point, so raising an exponent or
	276	+	/// lowering `PAINHOURS_K` far enough will fail here, which is the intended
	277	+	/// warning: the escalation curve and the default have to be picked together.
	278	+	#[test]
	279	+	fn default_does_not_self_promote() {
	280	+	let d = DEFAULT_FACTOR;
	281	+	assert_ne!(
	282	+	band(d, d, DEFAULT_TRIAGE_WEEKS),
	283	+	Priority::Critical,
	284	+	"an item carrying only the default factors reached Critical within \
	285	+	{DEFAULT_TRIAGE_WEEKS} weeks, so undertriaged input promotes itself"
	286	+	);
	287	+	// And it must still climb eventually: anti-starvation is the reason the
	288	+	// age term exists, so a default that never escalated would be its own bug.
	289	+	assert_eq!(band(d, d, 52), Priority::Critical);
	290	+	}
	291	+
245	292		#[test]
246	293		fn fresh_blocker_reads_high() {
247	294		// The calibration claim in PAINHOURS_K's docs: pain 5, scale 5, week one