1\section{Limitations}2\label{sec:limits}34The limitations were written down during the analysis and before this section; the full list is in the replication package. The ones that bear on how the results should be read are these.56\paragraph{Data.} The CrisisDB outcome is crisis-selected (150 of 626 polities), so the Seshat test concerns the severity of recorded crises, not their occurrence. Only 6\% of Polaris facts are dated, so pre-crisis capacity is in practice whole-polity capacity and temporal precedence is weak; a dated-only test was not estimable. Seshat capacity items record the existence of institutions, not their reach, quality or cost, and the demand side is scale only because the databank has no usable indicator of division of labour or dispersion. Institutional codes and crisis codes come from the same project and overlapping historiography, which permits circularity that the inferred-code and late-crisis sensitivities can only partly address. Seshat polity boundaries are periodization decisions, so polity duration is not an instability outcome. In the modern panel, the six capacity items correlate 0.75 with electoral democracy and are rated by experts who know what came later; population begins in 1820 for most countries and there is no dispersion measure; 39 V-Dem entities without Maddison population drop out. The Ethnographic Atlas is a cross-section with coarse ordinal community sizes and no outcome.78\paragraph{Design.} Nothing is identified causally. The negative control shows that the modern mismatch is associated with past instability as strongly as with future instability; the Oster adjustment crosses zero and the robustness value is 0.07. The Seshat binary outcome was underpowered in advance. There are 42 regions and ten macro-regions, so cluster-robust inference is anti-conservative and alternative clusterings are reported. The verdict on H2 rests on a pre-registered out-of-sample rule against baselines, which is the right test of ``beyond conventional baselines'' but is also a demanding one at $n=127$; we report the fold-level results so that readers who prefer a different rule can apply it. The Equinox-2020 replication listed in the pre-registration was not executed and is recorded as a blocked task in the audit.910\paragraph{Theory.} The theorems describe an idealized communication system in which capacity is exogenous; historically it is built in response to demand. The conjectures that link the framework to the proxies are exactly what the measurement results call into question: with scale and capacity correlated 0.84, the proxy $P$ retains 17\% of their joint variance, and a residual of that kind cannot be assumed to track utilization.1112\paragraph{Simulation.} Regimes are imposed; the model says nothing about emergence. Bit and message accounting is stylized, and only within-simulation comparisons are meaningful. Decoding success does not depend on the plan drawn, so distribution shocks affect cost but not success by construction. The saturation of hierarchies follows from a free parameter swept across its range; it is confirmed, not discovered. Shannon rather than Huffman codes are used so that the stale-code penalty is comparable to the theorem.1314\paragraph{Process.} The study was executed autonomously by a language-model agent under a human mandate in a single session: the pre-registration, code, analyses and text were produced by the agent, with the mandate's prohibitions on fabrication, imputation of missing data as zero and unapproved spending enforced by the execution log and the replication package. The principal investigator has not yet reviewed the code or the text at the time of writing; three adversarial reviews commissioned from independent reviewer personas and the responses to them are included in the package. Reference verification relied on Crossref metadata and primary-source abstracts; the chapter contents of \citet{johnson1982} and the published tables of \citet{sng2014} were not read.15