emergent-time: published state and follow-up work (crate v2.2.4, PR #561)

Summary

emergent-time is published to crates.io (v2.2.4) and is on branch claude/emergent-time-quantum-db4z51 (PR #561). This issue tracks its current state and remaining work.

• Crate: https://crates.io/crates/emergent-time
• Gist (overview): https://gist.github.com/ruvnet/fc70bf37c590a2db541967fe2cb59f45
• Design record: docs/adr/ADR-251-agentic-time.md

Current state

• 72 tests pass; dependency-free; clippy clean.
• Physics: Page–Wootters and thermal time faithful (independent recomputation); Wheeler–DeWitt and entropic time have discriminating tests added.
• Performance: Page–Wootters evolution ~53× faster via cached eigenbasis, physics values unchanged.
• Agentic Time: diagnostic layer (per-channel attribution, ATI, 7-state classifier) implemented and tested.

Measured benchmark result

On the two available real agent traces, with pre-registered thresholds and the agentic clock blinded to the predicted error signal:

The agentic clock does not lead the fair baseline. The ADR baseline-dominance gate is marked unmet.

Follow-up work

1. Larger real-trace corpus. The early-warning evaluation has n=2. A larger, pre-registered, instrumented corpus of real agent failures is the only path to establishing (or ruling out) an early-warning lead. The harness exists (examples/real_trace_eval.rs); the gap is data.

2. Channel instrumentation. The current channel mappings are heuristic proxies extracted from session transcripts. A direct instrumentation of an agent runtime (emitting belief/memory/retrieval/goal/contradiction/plan deltas natively) would remove proxy noise.

3. Provenance hash. The witness chain uses FNV-1a, which is an integrity/corruption check, not adversarial tamper-resistance. If the provenance is to resist a motivated tamperer, replace with a keyed cryptographic hash (e.g. BLAKE3 keyed mode, as in rvm-witness). The current docstring states this limitation; the README wording "tamper-evident" should be narrowed to "integrity/provenance."

4. Wheeler–DeWitt non-trivial kernel. The discriminating test confirms a generic clock yields an empty kernel. A stronger demonstration would construct a kernel that arises from a genuine (non-energy-matched) resonance rather than by construction.

5. Scale regime. Performance and recall numbers are at small n (≤32). The numerical core's behavior at larger n (eigensolver convergence, exponentiation cost) is untested.

Non-goals

• The crate does not claim an early-warning lead over fair baselines; that is unproven on real data.
• The physics modules are finite-dimensional toy realizations of the formalisms, not claims of new physics.

Start with docs/adr/ADR-251-agentic-time.md and the existing examples/real_trace_eval.rs harness to understand the baseline and evaluation gap. The issue lists several independent follow-ups, from collecting real traces to changing provenance hashing and extending Wheeler–DeWitt tests, but does not define one bounded change or a single completion criterion.