Progress update, 17 Aug 2026

Updates are bullet-point summaries generated with AI from my commits and build notes, then checked by me. Project articles and learning notes are written by me.

Built the originality gate in three deliberate stages: record the draft on every outcome, then measure and enforce nothing for three batches, then arm it. Shipping a threshold before there were numbers to set it from would have repeated the dead-knob bug from the 12th.
The measurement could not have been taken at all. The run log only stored prose on rejection, so the batch where the 26B published 20 of 20 left twenty-one records containing no article text whatsoever. The one batch that most needed examining had thrown away its evidence.
Three models, 60 drafts, the same 20 sections. Gemma 4 26B copies steadily: median 29% five-gram share, worst case 72%, and that worst case is a straight reflow of a bulleted list into paragraphs that both reviewers passed, because every claim in it is perfectly supported. Gemma 3 4B is bimodal: best median at 15%, and two runs that echoed the source almost whole, 95% and 99%, one with a 577-word unbroken verbatim run.
Those two catastrophic runs were caught only because a long source pushed them over the word limit. A shorter section would have produced a verbatim copy inside the cap and both reviewers would have passed it. The only thing between total transcription and publication was a rule that happened to correlate.
The plan predicted the small model would be unpublishable, and it inverted. Gemma 4 E4B, the only one of the three that fits an 8 GB Pi, copies less than the 26B, has no catastrophic tail at all, and runs three times faster. Copying is closer to what a capable model does when told to stay faithful to a source than to what a weak one does.
Armed at a 30-word verbatim run and a 45% five-gram share, plus a separate fatal rule at 90% that skips rather than revising. Overlap fired in 3 of 20 runs and revision cleared it 3 for 3. The live risk was a fourth rule the model could never satisfy, and that is now retired with evidence rather than hope.