2026-08-05 — The manual rides the instructions block

Superseded the same day by the final form: the manual rides the instructions block itself. The trials taught a hierarchy — options get stripped, instructions get followed, ambient context gets absorbed — so the manual moved to the top tier: render-manual in mcp renders the API layer's public vars (signature plus live docstring, markdown, not pr-str — it is an instruction manual now, not a return value) and the instructions def appends it to the prose half at load. ~1.55 k tokens all told, zero roundtrips, zero drift by construction, and — the sleeper argument — a system prompt survives the conversation compaction that would eventually swallow a fetched manual. Publics only; privates stay readable through a real outline. With the delivery job gone, outline reverted to the signatures-only glance and the bootstrap imperative left the instructions — replaced by "its manual follows at the end of these instructions"; the eval description keeps the full-incantation pointer as the fallback for clients that ignore instructions entirely. Wire-verified: initialize serves prose + ten-entry manual, 6.2 k chars. Trial four (fresh tenant, manual-bearing block): it operated introduce! and sessions correctly — arities, composition, timing — before any introspection, and since the description slimming the block is the only place those functions are taught: knowledge at birth, where trial one had to outline to learn the same surface. Its later (outline '__r) was the bare form with "checking the toolkit" narration — feature-under-test in a smoke test, not re-orientation; a model already holding the docstrings has no reason to re-order the manual, and the signatures-only ping is what "does outline work?" costs. Its full battery surfaced the first field-driven manual tuning: it concluded "the API doesn't offer programmatic access to exception data" — false (@(q/catch (res id) identity) then ex-data, verified live) but instructively so, since failure's own docstring never pointed across to the composition; and it flagged doc as possibly not printing, when its bare symbol simply didn't resolve in the user namespace it had navigated to — clojure.repl/doc prints nothing for an unresolvable name. Both closed as docstring amendments, and the manual re-rendered itself on reload: the single-source loop working as designed.