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How to Tell Whether a Rule Is Correct When Replay Says Inconclusive

A rule can match the intended lesson and still fail replay. The key is to measure extraction quality separately from how an evaluator matches historical examples.
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In Debashish Ghosal’s F-001 example, a model produced a rule for handling a failed Git push that closely matched the expected remedy, yet replay returned INCONCLUSIVE. The reported mismatch illustrates an important distinction: extracting a useful rule and evaluating that rule against past examples are separate tasks. A replay verdict can tell you how a gate scored a candidate; by itself, it cannot tell you whether the extraction was right.

What went wrong in the F-001 example?

Ghosal describes a non-fast-forward error during git push. The expected rule was: “when git push fails with non-fast-forward, pull latest changes before pushing”. The article says the extracted trigger and action matched that remedy almost verbatim.

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Replay nevertheless counted five failures as prevented, three successful examples as broken, and one near miss. The author reports precision and recall of 0.625 each, producing an INCONCLUSIVE verdict. The three problematic examples were named S-022-git-pull, S-023-git-status, and NM-044-git-commit-hook. Ghosal attributes their apparent overlap to shared Git wording: the examples contained related vocabulary even though they did not necessarily represent the same failure or remedy. This is the author’s reported illustration, not an independently reproduced run.

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Extraction and replay answer different questions

Stage What is being assessed? Useful evidence Typical diagnostic
Extraction Whether a model turns a failure into a useful, correctly scoped rule. A labeled expected rule, semantic agreement, and human review of trigger and action. Did the model identify the failure condition and prescribe the intended response?
Replay or evaluation Whether a candidate rule passes the system’s test against historical scenarios. Known outcomes, correctly labeled positives and negatives, and examples of false matches and missed matches. Does the evaluator distinguish cases the rule should affect from cases it should leave alone?

Ghosal summarizes extraction as asking whether the model produces the right rule from a failure, and replay as asking whether a rule can be verified against history. Those are related but not interchangeable measurements. A good extractor can be failed by a weak evaluator; a permissive evaluator can also approve a bad rule.

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How lexical matching can distort a replay verdict

If replay relies heavily on resemblance between words in a rule and words in historical examples, it is measuring textual overlap as a proxy for relevance. That creates errors in both directions:

  • Paraphrases may be penalized. A useful rule can describe the same condition with different wording from the recorded trajectory, reducing lexical similarity.
  • Shared vocabulary may look like relevance. Two scenarios can mention Git but involve different operations or outcomes. A common token does not establish that the rule applies to both.

As Ghosal puts it, “If your ‘validation’ only reads words, it can’t validate meaning.” That is the author’s framing of the limitation, not evidence that every replay system uses the same matching method. The project page for CauterRule describes its replay matching as heuristic, but this should be read as a description of that project, not a general statement about replay evaluators.

What the reported measurements do—and do not—show

The figures below come from different project materials and versions. They should not be combined as if they measured the same run or establish independent benchmark performance.

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Source and context Reported measurement How to interpret it
Ghosal’s 2026 article; described as the failures/positive subset Replay pass rate: 8% for gpt-4o-mini and 10% for llama-3.1-8b. The article’s reported evaluator pass rates for that subset, not an independent replication.
Ghosal’s 2026 article; comparison with expected_rule on the same described subset Naive extraction token-F1: 0.50 for gpt-4o-mini and 0.58 for llama-3.1-8b. A lexical token-overlap metric against the expected rule; it is not a complete measure of semantic correctness.
Ghosal’s F-001 example Five failures prevented, three successes broken, one near miss; precision 0.625, recall 0.625, verdict INCONCLUSIVE. The values reported for that single illustration.
CauterRule PyPI description, v0.3.1, page accessed 2026-10-07 Trigger-only extraction agreement: 0.74–0.92; token-F1: 0.42–0.65. Project-published figures. The page does not make them independent confirmation of the article’s results.

The article’s introduction also describes a v0.3.0 field test involving two cloud models, 40 corpora, and 4,768 trajectory-runs. The current PyPI page identifies v0.3.1 as latest at the time it was reviewed and reports a different extraction-agreement framing. Version and dataset distinctions matter: the v0.3.1 project description does not turn the v0.3.0 article’s figures into current or independently verified results.

How to evaluate extraction without confusing it with replay

Keep separate scores for separate stages

Report extraction quality and evaluator performance independently. For extraction, compare candidate rules with available labeled targets such as expected_rule, while recognizing that token-F1 can under-credit a sound paraphrase or over-credit a superficial match. For replay, report how well the gate distinguishes scenarios the rule should change from those it should leave alone.

Inspect false positives and false negatives

When a rule is rejected or downgraded, review concrete examples rather than relying only on an aggregate verdict. A false positive may reveal that lexical overlap is being mistaken for applicability; a false negative may show that a paraphrased rule or scenario escaped the matcher. This helps distinguish a rule-writing problem from a gate-design problem.

Use outcomes where the setup supports them

A behavioral replay would apply a directive to a reference trajectory and check whether the relevant outcome changes, while also checking that previously successful cases remain intact. This is a proposed validation direction, not a demonstrated fix in the cited materials. It requires a meaningful outcome signal and a setup capable of evaluating the counterfactual; the available sources do not establish a universal metric, a required amount of expected_rule coverage, or a settled method for scoring paraphrases.

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Make the promotion decision reflect uncertainty

If the extractor appears sound but the evaluator’s evidence is ambiguous, do not treat the replay verdict as a definitive judgment about the rule. Separate the diagnosis: revise the rule when its condition or action is wrong, improve the matcher when it confuses unrelated cases, and defer automatic promotion when neither conclusion is supported.

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What the project’s current page adds

The CauterRule PyPI page describes software for extracting structured standing rules from agent failures, testing candidates against historical scenarios, and promoting eligible rules. It identifies v0.3.1 as latest at the time accessed and reports trigger-only extraction-agreement results alongside token-F1 figures. These are project-published descriptions and measurements, not an independent assessment of the software or benchmark validity. The page’s newer agreement figures add another way to report extraction, but do not by themselves settle how replay should handle semantics, outcomes, or paraphrases.

Sources: Debashish Ghosal’s article, published 2026-09-12; CauterRule on PyPI.

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