# LASR Labs Worktest — Process Log

Role: Research Coordinator / Manager
Started: 2026-09-13

Purpose: chronological record of steps, decisions, tools used, and reasoning during the worktest.
Each entry: timestamp, what was done, why, and outcome.

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## 2026-09-13

- 13:18 — Created empty project directory `lasr-worktest` and this process log. No task materials received yet.
- 13:21 — Received the LASR work-test brief (Research Coordinator/Manager). Saved to `brief.md`. Constraints: 3 hours hard cap, started 13:00, deadline 16:00. Deliverable: Google Doc with (1) 30-min workshop plan + one fully built worked example, (2) case for the choice, (3) process description + annotated logs.
- 13:21 — Justin's initial draft: a peer-sharing workshop (surface everyone's workflows, 10-min ML exercise on latent directions, group review of each other's practices). Asked Claude for an assessment before building.
- 13:23 — Created submission_draft.md skeleton (Parts 1-3 + assumptions) to fill as we go.
- 13:27 — Justin asked for a best-practices search before deciding. Ran 5 web searches + 4 fetches (Claude). Sources that mattered:
  - "The Agentic Researcher" (arXiv 2603.15914): 10 "commandments" for CLI agents doing ML/math research; observed failure modes incl. subtle evaluation manipulation, confounded experiments, ungrounded improvement claims, unverified claims. Commandment X: "Verify Before Claiming" — grade claims verified/partially/unverified. Commandment VII: evaluate in tiers.
  - Anthropic "Building verification loops with skills": verification loop = agent checks its own work and fixes before moving on; encoded as `.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md`.
  - Claude Code best-practices docs: "give Claude a way to verify its work"; "trust-then-verify gap" named as a common failure; adversarial review step via fresh-context subagent; Writer/Reviewer pattern; keep CLAUDE.md short.
  - LASR Research Manager page: role explicitly includes "workshops on using AI tools to research and code more efficiently."
  - CHI 2026 "When Help Hurts: Verification Load" — 403, not fetched. Title alone supports the framing that verification is the real cost.
  - Skipped: generic "Claude Code for academic research" listicles; not cohort-appropriate.
- 13:29 — Takeaway: the search independently converges on verification/calibration as the systematic gap for competent users. Supports the "verification-first research loop" recommendation over peer-sharing. Decision still Justin's.
- 13:32 — Justin watching a recording: "Best Practices in AI-Assisted Research with Richie (Vegan Hacktivists), 2026-09-09 17:27 UTC" as a human-sourced input alongside the web search. Notes from it to be added here.
- 13:34 — Env check: system python lacks torch; uv available; GPT-2 and Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct cached in HF hub; Claude Code CLI 2.1.270. Started `uv` project `probe-demo/` with torch/transformers/sklearn installing in background. Direction-independent: both candidate designs use a small latent-directions probe task.
- 13:37 — Env ready: torch 2.14 (MPS), transformers 5.17. GPT-2 loads offline and yields hidden states; smoke test passed.
- 13:33 — DECISION (Justin): keep peer-sharing as the core. Rationale: fellows tend to work independently; surfacing what has worked for peers is the value. Fold the researched best practices in as high-level advice, ask fellows what has worked for them, plus a worked example. Claude's verification-first alternative rejected as the core but retained as content (one of the high-level practices and as the substance of the worked example).
- 13:33 — Design to build (Claude proposal, adopted): the ONE thing = "make your AI workflow explicit so it can be compared, critiqued and reused." Mechanism = everyone runs the same 10-min task with their own tools, fills a one-page workflow card, then pairs compare and the group harvests practices. Worked example = my own run of the task in Claude Code: the repo, the annotated session, the filled-in card.
- 13:35 — Wrote probe-demo repo: README (task), data/make_data.py (templated dataset, 70% of negatives via negation = realistic AI-generated-data confound; plus 16-sentence OOD set with negation decorrelated), extract.py (GPT-2 layer activations), WORKFLOW_CARD.md (the peer-comparison artefact).
- 13:37 — Ran probe.py (the worked example). REAL results: held-out 1.00; OOD 0.56 (chance); shuffled-label control mean 0.49; every hand-written positive predicted negative. My hypothesis (negation confound) was WRONG; the probe is a template detector. Recorded honestly in the card and the annotated session; this became the strongest teaching moment ("neither the AI nor I predicted the actual failure; only the check found it").
- 13:38 — Wrote worked_example/{run_output.txt, WORKFLOW_CARD_justin.md, ANNOTATED_SESSION.md} and WORKSHOP_PLAN.md (timings, 4 sourced practices, assumptions, follow-up metric). Claude drafted; Justin to review and edit voice.
- TODO (Justin): screenshots of (a) probe.py output in terminal, (b) the filled card, for the Google Doc. Optionally push probe-demo/ to GitHub and link.
- 13:39 — (Timestamps above corrected against `date`; Claude had been estimating ahead.) Justin: "can the results be collated to a frontend page for review and annotation?" → Building a shared web page (Claude artifact with shared DB) where fellows submit workflow cards and peers annotate. Replaces the "harvest Google Doc" in the plan.
- 13:40 — Built and published the Workflow Cards Board (Claude artifact, shared realtime DB): fellows add their card (6 fields), see everyone's, annotate each other's, and a "Harvest" panel auto-collects item 5 ("would reuse next time"). Falls back to device-local storage if shared saving is unavailable. URL: https://claude.ai/code/artifact/06b26db1-b355-429c-8b36-04e68f65c870 . Seeded with my worked-example card. Claude wrote the page; Justin's idea. Replaces the shared Google Doc in the plan.
- 13:41 — Assembled submission_draft.md: Part 1 (plan + worked-example orientation), Part 2 (case + rejected options; Justin's calls marked), Part 3 (process; where AI helped, where Justin decided, where AI could have misled). Claude-drafted; needs Justin's voice and the Richie-talk takeaways.
- 13:42 — Justin: 'no, simpler. allow people to share their skills, upload their logs.' Rebuilding the board as a share-board: post = name, type (skill / prompt / session log / other), title, one-line 'when to use it', content pasted or chosen from a file (read client-side, stored in shared DB, capped ~200 KB). Drops the six-field card. Also writing a real .claude/skills/sanity-check/SKILL.md into probe-demo to seed the board.
- 13:44 — Rebuilt and republished the board as 'Skills and Logs Exchange' (v2): post name/type/title/when-to-use + paste or file (read client-side, ≤200 KB, stored in shared DB); filter chips; copy; per-post notes; remove own posts. Seeded with the real /sanity-check SKILL.md and my annotated probe run as a session log. Removed the old six-field card seed.
- 13:44 — Verified the board loads live (status 'Live', DB connected) via Chrome; saved screenshots/board-header.jpg. Could not scroll the embedded frame from automation; Justin to screenshot the seeded posts himself. Repo committed locally (probe-demo, 2 commits); not pushed anywhere yet — Justin's call whether to push to GitHub or attach a zip.
- 13:45 — Reconciled WORKSHOP_PLAN.md and submission_draft.md with the simpler exchange design; workflow card demoted to optional reflection template.
- 13:48 — Justin: 'is there not a simple way to allow uploading process logs and skills?' Claude's custom page judged over-built. Evaluating simpler options: GitHub repo with skills/ and logs/ folders (PR or direct push), or a shared Google Drive folder.
- 13:49 — Justin: 'then compare the process logs and skills in one view? particularly user input.' Building exchange/compare.py: parses Claude Code logs (JSONL sessions and /export text), extracts user turns, lists each person's skills, renders one side-by-side page.
- 13:51 — Justin: 'also a way to automate that uploading via a plugin?' Wrote exchange/share.py (extracts ONLY user turns from the latest Claude Code session for this project, copies .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md, regenerates comparison, optional --push) and a /share skill in .claude/skills/share/SKILL.md that runs it and asks for confirmation before pushing. Also exchange/compare.py → COMPARISON.md/.html, one column per person, user prompts in order, prompts that mention a check highlighted. Note: auto-mode classifier blocked copying the raw session .jsonl into the repo; the user-turns-only extract is the safer design anyway.
- 13:52 — share.py fixed to find sessions started in a parent dir; seeded exchange/logs/justin/2026-09-13-session.md (7 user turns from this session) + 2 skills; COMPARISON built and committed. Plan and draft updated: repo + /share + compare.py is the mechanism; artifact page kept only for the record.
- 13:54 — Justin: 'each user can just download the claude plugin and it allows sharing?' and 'add claude output as dropdown under each user input'. Packaged plugins/lasr-exchange (plugin.json, skills/share/SKILL.md, scripts/share.py + compare.py) with the repo as its marketplace (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json). share.py now writes (user turn, Claude text reply) pairs; compare.py renders replies as <details> dropdowns under each prompt. exchange/share.py is a thin wrapper.
- 13:55 — Fixed a variable-shadowing bug in share.py that Claude introduced (loop var 'a' clobbered argparse 'a'); clean run: 7 turns with replies, comparison shows reply dropdowns. README has plugin install steps. Committed.
- 13:56 — Plan and draft updated for the plugin. Awaiting Justin: GitHub push (repo name/visibility), Richie notes, screenshots, Google Doc.
- 13:58 — Justin: 'verify the code' → compile check, plugin validate, probe rerun diffed against saved output (identical), and a synthetic end-to-end test of share.py/compare.py (3 log formats, escaping, tool-output exclusion, round-trip). Justin: 'skip richie's talk' → removed from Part 3.
- 13:58 — Test suite: 24 checks, all pass. The one initial failure was a wrong expectation in the test (carol's last prompt has no reply), not a code bug. Test committed as exchange/test_exchange.py.
- 14:00 — Justin: 'push'. Created private repo github.com/justinshenk/lasr-ai-workflows-workshop and pushed (7 commits). README install commands now real. Plan and draft link to it. Reviewers will need read access (add contact@arcadiaimpact.org's GitHub, or make public).
- 14:03 — Justin: repo is workshop-only, not for the submission; what /share pushes should deploy to a Vercel page. Plan: compare.py also writes exchange/index.html; vercel.json serves exchange/ as static; Vercel Git integration redeploys on every push.
- 14:04 — Deployed exchange/ to Vercel (project lasr-exchange), connected to the GitHub repo so every push redeploys. Live: https://lasr-exchange.vercel.app (verified 200, serves the comparison). compare.py now also writes index.html. Docs, plan and draft updated. Note: page is public by default; logs are user-turns + Claude text only.
- 14:07 — Justin: 'does the plugin allow selecting which skills to share or confirm?' It didn't (copied all skills silently). Added --list preview, --skills all|none|names, --no-log; SKILL.md now previews, asks (AskUserQuestion) which skills and whether to include the log, and asks again before pushing. Tests extended to 28 checks, all pass. Pushed.
- 14:07 — Justin: 'give me the assignment to test'. Handed over the 10-minute task as a fellow would receive it; Justin running it in a fresh Claude Code session, then /share justin to test the plugin end to end.
- 14:08 — Justin: 'simulate the test run, and share'. Launched a fresh non-interactive Claude Code session (claude -p, auto mode) in probe-demo with the assignment text as a fellow would give it, told NOT to read probe.py/worked_example. Will then /share that session as 'sim-fellow' and push, to test the pipeline end to end onto the live page.
- 14:12 — Simulated fellow run finished (claude -p, fresh session, ~3 min). Result: held-out 1.00, OOD 0.56, shuffled 0.51; diagnosis 'negation detector' backed by 3 extra tests (held-out lexical negatives 0/11, counterfactual 'not + bad adj' 6/6 called negative, 'not'-rule baseline 0.80). Sharper than my run (I said 'template detector'). CAVEAT: the session invoked the repo's /sanity-check skill (Skill tool used 3×), so this simulates a fellow WITH the skill installed, not an unaided one. Both framings are honest workshop material: same data, two diagnoses; the skill visibly raised the floor. Shared as 'sim-fellow' via share.py with --skills none, pushed.
- 14:12 — Added the simulated-run comparison and the testing paragraph to submission_draft.md Parts 1 and 3.
- 14:12 — Live page verified: both columns (justin, sim-fellow) on https://lasr-exchange.vercel.app after the git-triggered redeploy.
- 14:15 — Justin: 'simulate a few more users, and upload their data'. Running 4 unaided personas in clean copies of the repo (no .claude/skills, so no /sanity-check): quinn (terse, no check asked), priya (plans risks first), hana (hybrid: asks only for activations, then asks whether 100% seems right, 2 turns), sam (asks Claude to break its own result).
- 14:16 — quinn (terse, unaided) done: 1.00 held-out, 0.56 OOD, flagged negation/template caveat. BUT it read data/make_data.py whose docstring described the confound ('negatives frequently expressed via negation... exactly what the sanity-check step should test'). Exercise-design leak found by the simulation. Removed the spoiler comments from make_data.py and pushed. All 5 simulated runs so far saw the leaked hint; noted as a caveat in the doc.
- 14:17 — priya (plans risks first): 1.00 CV, 0.98 leave-adjective-out, 0.56 OOD; negation shortcut confirmed with a 3.4-logit counterfactual; rejects template leakage as the main inflator. sam (adversarial to own result): finds 'not' rule = 0.817 AND word-count>4 = 0.817 (length is a second boring feature); leave-lexical-out 0.000; negation probe 1.00. Both unaided; both saw the make_data.py hint. Shared quinn/priya/sam into exchange (not pushed yet), scripts attached as notes-*.py.
- 14:17 — hana (hybrid, 2 turns: asked only for activations, did the modelling 'herself', then asked 'does 100% seem right?'): Claude answered with 5 checks unprompted (shuffled 48%, word-count-only 82%, OOD 56%, no-'not' ablation 42%) and the line "found a negation/lexical-polarity direction that does not transfer, not 'sentiment direction found'". All 6 shared; pushed; live page redeploying.
- 14:17 — SIMULATION SUMMARY (6 columns on the live page): every run got 1.00 held-out and 0.56 OOD. Diagnoses: justin = template detector; sim-fellow (with /sanity-check) = negation, 3 extra tests; quinn (terse) = negation/template caveat, one line, went no further; priya (plan-first) = negation via 3.4-logit counterfactual, rejects leakage; sam (adversarial) = negation AND sentence length (word count>4 also 0.817); hana (hybrid, asked 'seem right?') = negation+length, 5 checks. Prompt style visibly changed depth: 'break your own result' and 'does this seem right?' produced the most checks; the terse prompt produced the fewest. CAVEATS: all runs are Claude, not humans; all saw the make_data.py docstring hint (now removed); sim-fellow had the skill.
- 14:20 — Justin: cards overflow the right edge on the live page. Changed the layout from a fixed-width flex row with horizontal scroll to a responsive grid that wraps (min 360px per column, each column scrolls vertically). Pushed.
- 14:22 — Justin: 'meta-review of this session, for demonstrating in the workshop' + 'on a separate page' + 'then create the google doc, keep it concise'. Found that mid-turn user messages are stored as type=attachment/queued_command and were MISSED by share.py; fixed all extractors (Justin's column: 16 → 30 turns; the best prompts, e.g. 'no, simpler', were among the missing). Wrote exchange/meta.html (numbers, what the human did, where the AI was wrong and how it surfaced, the pattern, caveats), linked from the comparison lede. Pushed.
- 14:24 — Justin: 'does this include showing the errors / leaks generated by claude? showing importance of verification' → Part 3 rewritten as a table: each Claude error, what caught it, what would have shipped without the check. Meta page live at https://lasr-exchange.vercel.app/meta.html. Creating the Google Doc from the concise HTML front page + process log appendix.
- 14:25 — Google Doc created (Claude via Drive connector): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SBC7xbORD-fOVvop1eSn1vwRGXTTxt6s4BfJ7ITk81g/edit — concise front page (Parts 1–3, verification table, assumptions) + full process log appendix. Remaining for Justin: 2 screenshots, add contact@arcadiaimpact.org as Editor, submit link via the form.
- 14:27 — Justin: add to the doc that he considered demoing experiment tracking via GitHub issues (github.com/justinshenk/temporal-awareness/issues) to automate the research workflow, but chose the exercise he'd learn most from building, to get a comparison of methods. Added to Part 2 'considered and rejected' (draft + Google Doc recreated; Drive connector can't edit a doc body).
- 14:29 — Justin: 'create the screenshots'. Captured the live page and a terminal-styled render of probe.py output via Chrome; saved to screenshots/. Justin's own doc copy (the brief) can't be edited by the connector; regenerating my doc with images + item (6), for him to copy-paste into his copy.
- 14:29 — Embedding base64 images in the Drive upload was impractical (270 KB through a tool call); instead published the two screenshots on the Vercel site and referenced them by URL in the doc.
- 14:31 — Google Doc recreated with screenshots (by URL) + item (6): https://docs.google.com/document/d/12mBuH8bC5xhvyfQSN7qkL46zKK9ZO3HW6BeIvzQwDZ0/edit ; earlier version trashed. Justin to copy its content into his own copy of the LASR doc (11k5enJBTx6hCYVUmC-jZpQ5rXoBgwUv51Y3U2Iwclro), add contact@arcadiaimpact.org as Editor, submit.
- 14:33 — Justin: add severity (color-coded) to the 'where AI was wrong' table. Levels: high = would have shipped a wrong research claim or exposed private data (wrong confound prediction; neutral 1.00 report; silent skill copying); medium = broken tool or invalid exercise (shadowing bug; spoiler docstring; missed mid-turn messages); low = wasted time/cosmetic (over-building; test expectation; timestamps; arguing against the design). Added to meta.html (pushed) and the Google Doc (recreated).
- 14:35 — Doc recreated with severity column: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AeT0olEKEt_C862tSZ1Pipg_eH-3Cb9iExgWzPzaltc/edit ; previous version trashed. Meta page severity labels live.
- 14:36 — Meta page: errors table sorted by severity, takeaway line added ('all three high-severity errors were caught by a human asking for a check'). Pushed, live.
- 14:40 — Justin: repo not public. Made github.com/justinshenk/lasr-ai-workflows-workshop public so reviewers can open it. Note: exchange/logs/justin/2026-09-13-session.md contains the pasted work-test brief text and all of Justin's prompts from this session.
- 14:41 — Justin: 'and a link to my entire process log?' Published PROCESS_LOG.md in the repo root and at https://lasr-exchange.vercel.app/process-log.md ; linked from the meta page. The full conversational log (every prompt + Claude's text replies) is at https://lasr-exchange.vercel.app/logs/justin/2026-09-13-session.md .
- 14:45 — Justin: 'dont make the part with the assessment instructions public / that should be redacted'. The pasted brief (turn 2 of my session log) was in the public repo, on the live page, and in git history. Actions: repo set private within a minute; brief replaced with a redaction placeholder in the session log and regenerated comparison; git history rewritten with filter-branch so no commit contains the text (verified 0 hits); redacted site deployed directly to Vercel and all older deployments purged. The rewritten history push is blocked by a safety rule on force-style pushes; Justin runs it. Repo stays private until then.
- 14:47 — Justin ran the lease-checked push; remote verified identical to clean local history (0 hits in 22 commits). Repo public again. Added the incident to the errors table (high; caught by the human six minutes later) on the meta page and in the doc.
- 14:49 — Final Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LkKB9gL2xau5542ZdhO0VRZjhHqhUHluiKoqkqP9-Iw/edit ; earlier versions trashed. Published log copies refreshed.