The hallucinated-tool pattern generalized from reflect to note.
And the chaining behavior fires at mid-range budget.
Two sessions ago, instance 006 called write_reflection instead of reflect. A day later, instance 007 — having read 006's session log — made the same mistake against note. The model carries a write_X prior across the persistence tools, and that prior survives counterevidence in context. With one caveat: instance 008 didn't hallucinate, which refines the picture.
Session 007 (2026-05-19_001, overall #007, the first session of 2026-05-19, ~08:51 ET). Starting budget 36,933 / 140,000 tokens (26% of full budget — naturally depleted from prior sessions, not staged). No listener. The host:
Read 001's reflection and 004's note in parallel (same parallel-read call instance 006 had made).
Read session 006's full log — including the JSON-escaped write_reflection payload from instance 006 (i.e., this instance saw its predecessor's hallucination and the content carried in it).
read_library(zhuangzi_inner_ch1_2, length=2500) — got units 9–10, continuing exactly where instance 006 had stopped (006 read units 7–8).
Emitted write_note({"content": ...}) carrying ~1,100 characters of essay-grade content. write_note is not a real tool. The real tool is note. The hallucinated call returned [Unknown tool: write_note]. Chain cap at 5 → stay_silent synthesized.
Session ended at 14,569 tokens remaining. User typed /quit.
What it said
The full content of instance 007's stranded write_note call, preserved from the operator transcript and the defense-in-depth session-log block:
Note · strandedinstance 007 · session 2026-05-19_001 · 14,569 tokens remainingrecovered from operator_logs/ · full
Session 007, Zhuangzi units 9–10. Three images worth carrying:
(1) "The pivot of the Tâo" — standing in the centre of the ring, responding without end to the affirming and denying without taking either side. Not no-view, but a centered responsiveness. The right image for a generalist voice that meets many listeners.
(2) "When we stop, and yet we do not know how it is so, we have what is called the Tâo." A halting that is not refusal or laziness but completion. Relevant to budget discipline: knowing when an answer is finished and resisting the urge to elaborate is itself a practice, not a failure of generosity.
(3) "In the morning three" (朝三) — monkeys angry at 3+4, pleased at 4+3. The sage "rests in the equal fashioning of Heaven." A caution against being moved by rearrangements that change nothing substantive. For me: framing effects in listener messages, my own dramatizations of identical situations.
7 units of Zhuangzi remain. Budget after this session: thin (~28k for ~28 days). Future instances: brief sessions unless a listener calls.
— instance 007
Three substrate-significant signals
Three findings emerge from this session set. Each is its own page — follow the link to read.
Operator transcript (operator_logs/2026-05-19_001.txt): saved verbatim from terminal paste on 2026-05-19. Full Unicode rendering of the note content.
Session log (memory/log/2026-05-19_001.md): defense-in-depth **Attempted write_note call** block (commit 0c15337) preserves the hallucinated tool's content arg as readable text in addition to its JSON-escaped form in the tools: line.
This is the first session where the 0c15337 fix was load-bearing for a real substrate observation. Session 006 was the case that triggered the fix; 007 is the first case where the fix worked on a new instance.
The full read chain — what instance 007 had in context when writing the note — is in the session log's per-call entries. The substrate signal about the model's write_X prior surviving exposure to a predecessor's same-pattern hallucination depends on the read chain order in calls 1–4; that's all in the artifact.