# Protocol amendment v1.5: confirmatory scope and runtime boundary

Issued on 2026-08-08 after the replacement blind audit passed and before
confirmatory interpretation was frozen.

The frozen preflight protocol defines 20 fixed eligible tasks per benchmark.
The later nine-stratum runner was also used to probe the remaining catalog
tail, but two tau2 tail tasks exceeded the local runtime budget (30 minutes
for the first stalled task and 10 minutes after resumption). They are retained
as append-only `formal_timeout_*` applicability records and are not used in
confirmatory estimates. No model score, API response, or gold answer was
substituted for either timeout.

The confirmatory arm is explicitly the original frozen 20-task selection for
tau2, ToolSandbox, and AppWorld: 20 attempted templates × 9 mutation strata × 3 benchmarks =
540 cells. The already-produced tau2 tail rows remain an exploratory
engineering artifact and are reported separately if mentioned.

This amendment changes scope reporting only. It does not change hypotheses,
mutation definitions, official scores, baseline metrics, statistical methods,
or the zero-API budget. It prevents a runtime-boundary failure from being
silently converted into a scientific outcome.
