Experiment 10-1 retained comparison report

Outcome

This is a complete bounded comparison. The campaign retains 30 paired tasks (60 main trajectories), 12 boundary trajectories, 289 raw provider receipts, 31 raw Tavily receipts, and 60 position-swapped blind-judge receipts. Every evidence gate passes (12/12).

• Transfer passed 2/30 complete deterministic task gates; its declared capability sequence completed in 40.0% of runs.
• Skill passed 15/30 complete deterministic task gates. It loaded at least triage in 30/30 runs, and completed the declared sequence in 90.0% of runs.
• Both arms passed 6/6 boundary cases; boundary reliability is reported separately from end-to-end task success.
• The independent Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite judge preferred Skill 32/60 swapped presentations, Transfer 20/60, and called 8/60 ties. The two presentations per pair were retained to control position bias.

Cost and latency

The Skill-minus-Transfer median delta was 6855.0 uncached input tokens, 4.368 seconds, and $0.00044304. Provider-reported cached input was zero throughout, so this run does not establish a model-prefix cache benefit. The Skill document cache recorded per-run misses (and no hits across a run), as expected for the fresh-session cache used by this harness.

Interpretation

For qwen/qwen3.5-flash-02-23 under this bounded OpenRouter campaign, the repaired Skill arm now follows the progressive-disclosure state machine and materially improves deterministic acceptance (50.0% vs 6.7%). The trade-off is higher median uncached input (+6855.0 tokens), latency (+4.368s), and repriced cost (+$0.00044304). This is evidence for the documented architecture trade-off, not a universal model-independent superiority claim.