2026-08-11 — Fourth in-situ trial: losing the decision moment, and the qualified match

The fourth in-situ session surfaced an electivity failure with unusually clean introspection attached. Asked where a function lived, a tenant that had read the manual — vars docstring included — reached for grep anyway: two guessed file paths, one nonexistent, and an eyeballed sed window. Run afterward, the vars call answered strictly better: namespace, both arities with option maps, line, a private sibling flagged. The tenant's own post-mortem: tool choice runs on recall cost at the decision moment, not on manuals read earlier — grep is zero-recall muscle memory, an options map is not; the instructions block is the only surface reliably in context when the question arises; and what wins there is a concrete incantation, not an abstract preference ("prefer it for var lookups" was in context and lost anyway).

Built the same day, both halves. The query language: a / in the match qualifies it — (vars "helpers/await"), string or symbol, scopes to namespaces matching the ns side and matches the name side within them, docstrings included; "helpers/" lists a scope whole; "/x" degenerates to the bare search; * is a wildcard in every match site; a regex containing / matches whole qualified names, slashless regexes unchanged; :ns-match is retired. The natural spelling had been a silent [] — a trap worse than absence, reading as "no such var" — and now it either works or throws ("/", multi-slash; the var named / is reached as 'clojure.core//, split by the reader). The vars docstring grew an Examples: section — one call per operator, paste-ready — after the observation that a query mini-language is better shown than described, and its first line became a capability contrast: grep guesses paths over the repo's text; this reads the JVM.

The instructions carry the same contrast plus four intent→incantation pairs (vars / outline / doc+source / file), each phrased as the question a model asks itself, with "effectively instant" retiring the observed misprice of navigation calls as async round-trips. The bet on named helpers is structural, not stylistic: the server exposes three tools — eval, await, cancel — so at the tool-list level "var search" does not exist as an affordance; the instructions are the only eager surface that can give navigation a name, and a named call turns "faster than grep" from a claim into a one-eval experiment. Cost accepted with eyes open: the block roughly doubles (~90 → ~170 words), paid per conversation per connected server — a client reaching several Remontoire hosts pays it once each — against the doctrine that the eager channel carries only what must be eager. The evidence said the lean version loses the moment it exists for; whether the card flips the default is the next in-situ trial's question.