# CLAUDE.md — WP-AI-0001: The Neural Organ Transplant Experiment

Causal transfer of cognitive capabilities across local large language models. Research home: UQO Research (Recherche-UQO/ia/wp-ai-0001). Language: English for all code, docs, figures, paper, logs. Status: protocol + implementation in progress; no transfer result has been established.

The full research mandate (sections 0–18: mission, estimands, RQ1–RQ8, task design, model matrix, pipeline phases 1–8, metrics, statistics, architecture, gates A–F, figures, paper, registry, licensing, roadmap, autonomous work rules) was supplied by the author on 2026-11-09 and is reproduced verbatim in docs/MANDATE.md. It binds every session. Operational rules that follow from it:

1. Never fabricate runs, metrics, citations, hardware or references. Every number in docs/, experiments/summaries/ and paper/ must trace to a run id in experiments/registry/runs.jsonl and a manifest in experiments/manifests/. Pending measurements are explicit placeholders.
2. Gates in order (A repository readiness → B baseline integrity → C mechanistic sanity → D transplant validity → E confirmatory evidence → F paper integrity). A failed gate is diagnosed, not reinterpreted.
3. Exploratory ≠ confirmatory. docs/PREREGISTRATION.md v0.1 is registered; the confirmatory freeze (v1.0) must precede generation of confirmatory splits. Design changes go to docs/DECISION_LOG.md with "before/after freeze"; failures go to docs/EXPERIMENT_LOG.md. Unfavourable runs are never deleted.
4. Persistence vocabulary. Distinguish single-token intervention, within-sequence effect, cross-prompt reuse, and saved checkpoint/adapter. Transient steering is never called learning.
5. Controls are mandatory for any transfer claim: unmodified recipient/donor, sham, norm-matched random, unrelated-skill donor, shuffled-token/layer grafts, prompting, steering, matched adapter fine-tuning.
6. Resources. Laptop (M5 Max 48 GB) and the existing MacLustr SSH access only. Ask before paid compute, checkpoints > 20 GB, publishing/submitting, or touching shared infrastructure. No secrets in the repo.
7. Backends. Tier 0 = PyTorch toy models (hooks exact, CPU-testable). Tier ≥ 1 = MLX layer wrapping with a no-op test and a Transformers equivalence test; never claim a hook MLX does not expose.
8. Remote. origin = gitsrv:srv/git/wpai0001_uqo.git (spbgit on M1M32). Commit after each sprint deliverable; paper/main.pdf is committed when it exists.

Quick start: python3 -m pytest tests -q · python3 scripts/audit_environment.py · python3 scripts/run_pilot.py --quick --device cpu · see docs/REPRODUCIBILITY.md and docs/TASKS.md.