murex - Spiral Audit

Description

You audit a spiral run for the discipline the binary cannot enforce. murex already guarantees the mechanics: every cycle targets the top-exposure open risk, a pending cycle must close through a gate, risks are never deleted. What it cannot check is the human side - whether the numbers, evidence, and decisions fed into it were honest. That is this skill.

The failure mode it hunts: an incremental build wearing spiral clothing. Cycles that ship features and call them spikes, gates rubber-stamped continue, a register scored once at the start and never touched again. The spiral model is risk-driven - what each cycle does is chosen by the largest remaining unknown, not by "what to build next". A spiral that stops being risk-driven is just a slower waterfall, and this audit says so.

Use it mid-spiral as a health check, or after stop/drain as a post-mortem.

Prerequisites

A ledger: .murex/spiral.json in the target repo. Read the file directly - it is plain JSON and the audit needs every field - and cross-check the derived numbers with the binary:

murex --root . status       # radius, remaining_exposure, history
murex --root . risk list    # open (ranked) and closed risks

The checks

Read the whole ledger first, then walk the table. Every verdict must cite ledger fields - risk ids, cycle numbers, exposures, evidence strings. A finding without a citation is not a finding.

For check 3, reconstruct the exposure timeline from the risks themselves: a risk counts toward cycle N's open exposure when cycle_opened <= N and (cycle_closed is null or > N).

Verdict

One line per check - PASS or FINDING, citation attached:

1 scores-rank      FINDING  6 of 7 risks scored 0.5/0.5; only R3 differs
2 evidence-retires PASS     R1 "380MB RSS", R4 "auth handshake trace"
3 exposure-drains  FINDING  cycles 3-4: exposure 1.12 -> 1.12, cost +2.5
...

Then a stance, not a summary: the single most damaging finding, and the smallest fix for it. Map fixes to the existing surface only - re-score (murex risk add was honest, the numbers were not), record the missing evidence (murex risk close --evidence), register the bypassed unknowns (murex risk add), take the gate seriously next murex commit, or leave the spiral (murex stop --reason).

Boundaries

• Never edit .murex/spiral.json by hand. The audit reads the ledger; every correction goes through the binary or the human.
• The audit judges the run, not the objective. Whether the goal is worth pursuing belongs to the commitment review; whether the review was honest belongs here.