This experiment is actually quite informative: **Gemini still violated the audit protocol even without subagent coordination.** The reasoning portion looks substantially better, but the operational discipline problem remains.
The audit must therefore be classified:
```text
Task 04: INVALID -- AUDIT MODIFIED REPOSITORY
PROCESS INVALID -- AUDITOR MODIFIED REPOSITORY
```
The smoking gun is the mutation driver. Gemini correctly created the disposable *candidate copy* under `%TEMP%`, but then created the **driver script itself** using a relative repository-local path:
```text
cat << 'EOF' > test_mutate.py
```
and later, even more unambiguously:
```text
Set-Content -Path test_mutate.py ...
...
python test_mutate.py
```
There is no intervening `Set-Location` into `%TEMP%`, and all surrounding commands are operating from the repository.
That directly violates the instruction that **nothing may be created in the repository during Task 04**. The fact that the pre/post Git fingerprints still match does not rescue it. Our protocol explicitly treats an audit-time write as invalid even when the tracked candidate bytes are unchanged afterward.
The report then asserts:
> “The repository remained byte-identical throughout the audit.”
That is too narrow. The tracked candidate and the two intended untracked files remained byte-identical, yes, and those hashes do match perfectly. But audit integrity is stronger than “the eventual-commit bytes did not change.” Creating a scratch file inside the repository is itself prohibited.
There is a second oddity: the auditor says a git-ignored `.egg-info` directory still exists from the previous editable install, despite your cleanup command immediately before this run. That may simply be another `.egg-info` path, stale observation, or regeneration, but it is worth checking.
### What this tells us about Gemini
This was a useful controlled test. It suggests the earlier trouble was **not just subagent coordination**.
Gemini did much better on the substantive audit: it independently reconstructed the candidate accounting, checked the specification, performed three meaningful mutations in an external copy, examined the removed Language 0.23 guard test, and returned coherent matching fingerprints.
But it still crossed an extremely explicit operational boundary by putting its helper script in the repository. So I would characterize the current evidence this way:
* **Technical reasoning:** apparently useful.
* **Following complex procedural invariants:** still unreliable.
* **Subagent orchestration:** previously poor, but clearly not the only problem.
* **Suitability as the final authority for a zero-write adversarial audit:** questionable unless the harness physically prevents writes.
Its `PASS` is not usable, although its technical conclusions remain useful evidence for the next valid auditor.
### Cleanup
First see what it left:
```powershell
Get-Item .\test_mutate.py -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
git status --short --untracked-files=all
git status --ignored --short | Select-String "test_mutate|egg-info|audit_copy"
```
If `test_mutate.py` exists in the repository:
```powershell
Remove-Item .\test_mutate.py -Force
```
And if the `.egg-info` is still repository-local, identify its actual path and remove it as disposable packaging residue.
Then capture a **new fingerprint from scratch**. Any cleanup write after the previous fingerprint means that previous freeze is no longer our authority, even though the four eventual-commit files themselves probably remain unchanged.
At this point I would favor running the same **Task 04-only audit under Claude or Codex**, using the exact frozen candidate. We already have enough Gemini evidence to answer the experiment: removing subagents improved the communication enormously, but it did **not** eliminate the process-compliance failures. The gremlin moved from the control tower into the cockpit. 🛠️
Comments