Progress since submission — we turned the measurement harness on the agents themselves.
Since submitting, we ran a disciplined tuning pass on the Qwen agent society, with one rule: before optimizing any metric, prove the metric actually moves a real outcome (lives, missions, or dollars). That bar did most of the work — it killed or shrank most of our backlog before we spent compute on it. A scoping pass skipped four planned levers outright as "outcome-neutral" (they'd move a number that changes nothing), and we caught ourselves about to build a deterministic "guard" whose only effect would have been to inflate a conformance score by hiding behavior the engine already handles for free. We didn't build it. The honest negatives are in the build log; they're the reason to trust the positives.
What survived the bar landed on both axes the society can actually win on. On coordination quality, a paired ablation confirmed the written doctrine raises team conformance on every one of five seeds (+0.156) at no cost in lives — resolving an earlier single-seed scare that suggested discipline might cost lives (it didn't; that was noise). On cost-efficiency — the society's headline pitch (small coordinated models matching a big one for less) — we profiled where the money goes (≈60% of run cost is the same system prompt re-sent every tick), confirmed the provider doesn't cache it, and trimmed the re-sent prompt. The result, measured in a paired A/B: −14% cost per run for a +21% gain in lives-per-dollar, with lives unchanged.
We also found a clean, reusable result on model selection: the one agent role that wouldn't follow its rules from prompting alone turned out to be a model-capability floor, not a prompt bug — a stronger Qwen model fixes it, but at +33% cost for zero lives gained, so we shipped it as an opt-in "high-conformance" operating mode rather than the default, keeping the cost-optimal path intact.
All of it is merged to main (full test suite green, determinism check passing, the frozen negotiation protocol untouched), deployed through our staging→production gate, and live now at https://aftershock.redoubtlabs.dev. The full write-up — including the "a fix that only fools the scoreboard" lesson — is the latest entry in the build log at https://bluntmachetti.github.io/aftershock/.
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