Proportion-aware constructive seeding (leu.2/§12.2): sizing seed cuts from target AREAS only regresses (thin slivers wreck aspect); you must ALSO pick each cut's rotation for child squareness. It is a convergence ACCELERATOR via a deeper local optimum around the constructed topology: wins where that topology is roughly right and budget is scarce (harbor -13%, maple -10% at 20k evals) but DELAYS small programmes where the seed must be restructured by undivide (programme-house regresses at fixed budget, yet reaches the floor given budget - speed, not asymptote). Default-on. Also: n_storeys must honour storey_minimum, not just level: keys (programme-house storey_minimum:2, all rooms level:0 - was seeded 1 storey short; cq1).


Adjacency in binary slicing tree is structural, not geometric: the inner-loop NM cannot fix topological adjacency failures. Two paths exist: (1) tree-sibling adjacency — a node is adjacent to its sibling in the tree; (2) cross-zone geometric adjacency — leaves from different subtrees that happen to share a boundary. Staircase/adjacency fails require a topology mutation that changes which nodes are siblings or which zones touch. This was proved empirically on programme-house: staircase fail from rot=0 layout could not be fixed by NM but was fixed by level_retype creating a two-C topology (2026-06-14/15).


CORRECTION to urb-fitness-bug memory (Bruno, 2026-06-12): 'C' is NOT a 'covered' type — Is_Covered is a geometric predicate (indoor space above). Urb's generic types are canonically UPPERCASE: C=circulation, O=outside, S=sahn (get_space_types qw/C O S/; corpus is 100% uppercase, never 'c'/'o' leaves). The mixed-case designs that fired the latent ratio_type first-match bug were created by homemaker's own operator type pool emitting lowercase 'c'/'o' — fixed: driver/operators now emit uppercase generics only, and class checks use t[0].lower() in 'cos'. The Urb class-sum patch stays as defensive hardening (zero impact on canonical designs). Native port (3y7/gnw): treat type classes case-insensitively, generics canonically uppercase.


Never use corpus filenames (candidate-001.dom, candidate-002.dom, generated.dom, init.dom, etc.) as --output targets when running experiments. These are test fixtures. Always write experimental outputs to scratch/ or a timestamped path. Lesson from 2026-06-14: warm-start runs overwrote candidate-001/002.dom and broke graph tests.


Programme-house optimisation result (2026-06-14/15): best achievable is 1 fail (l1 wrong level, score ~0.005). 0 fails is geometrically impossible: l1 (min 27m²) must occupy ll (~23m²) at level 0, which eliminates the t3-adj-C provider; dividing ll into lll(l1)+llr(C) gives llr proportion ~6:1 (fails). Python memetic optimizer achieves 1 fail in 50k evals vs Perl optimiser's 2-3 fails. Winning topology: TWO C nodes at level 0 — ll(C) for t3-adj-C via geometric contact, rl(C) for staircase via tree-sibling adjacency to rrr(O). Best .dom: scratch/from-warmstart-fixed.dom and scratch/from-compound3-fixed.dom.


Run-to-run reproducibility in homemaker-layout: serial search (workers=1) is byte-for-byte deterministic; parallel (workers>1) is now deterministic too AFTER fixing driver._run_batch to admit futures in submission order (was as_completed/completion order, bug xcy). Reproducibility holds only for a FIXED worker count — serial vs parallel differ because children-per-iteration is 1 vs n_workers (different batch granularity), which is expected, not a bug. The constructive seeder was NEVER nondeterministic: _assign_adjacency_aware has unique idx tiebreaks; comparing topologies with Python builtin hash() of the signature STRING is invalid (PYTHONHASHSEED salts str hashing per process) — use a stable hash (sha1) or genome.signature equality.


Urb fitness bug found+fixed 2026-06-12 (patch in /home/bruno/src/urb, uncommitted): ProgrammeDriven.pm ratio_o/ratio_type grepped case-insensitively over the ratios hash and took the FIRST key — nondeterministic (x4.5 score swings) for designs with mixed-case type classes (both 'c' circulation and 'C' covered). Fixed to SUM the class (matches Is_Circulation//Is_Outside semantics); 35/35 corpus scores unchanged. CRITICAL for homemaker-py-3y7/gnw: the native port must implement class-SUM ratios. Building.pm has the same unpatched pattern (site-driven path, not used by our oracle). Also: the memetic search reward-hacked this bug before the fix — search results predating it are noise artifacts.


User preference (Bruno): this is a Fedora system — NEVER install Python packages via pip without asking first; always ask whether to install the rpm via dnf (e.g. python3-cma) before considering pip. Applies to any dependency additions.


CLI tool style: prefer python -m homemaker.module --parameters pattern, installable via pip install -e . with pyproject.toml entry_points. Not standalone bin/ scripts.


Deceptive valleys in topology search: when every single-step mutation from a target state passes through a high-fail intermediary (e.g. level_fix displaces a room into 5+ new fails), a compound operator that atomically applies two coordinated changes can escape. Design compound operators to land on the low-fail state directly, bypassing the deceptive gradient. Programme-house example: level_compound_fix atomically moves the level-constrained room AND re-inserts the displaced room adjacent to C in one step (operators.py, 2026-06-14).


homemaker-layout PYTHONPATH: package installed as 'homemaker-layout' via pip install -e . so 'import homemaker_layout' works from anywhere without PYTHONPATH. For running tests use 'python -m pytest' from project root /home/bruno/src/homemaker-layout (pyproject.toml adds src/ automatically). Never try pip show homemaker — that's the old homemaker-addon conflict.


Multi-storey staircase consistency: when dividing or retyping a circulation (C) leaf at one level, the same structural change should be propagated to the matching leaf on ALL other storeys so the stair core path is maintained. The optimizer cannot fix staircase disruptions through trial-and-error geometry alone — it requires a synchronized multi-level operator that applies the same topology change to every storey simultaneously.


Strategy decision 2026-06-12 (Bruno): occlusion/daylight is ORTHOGONAL to building a scalable optimiser. Disable it in Urb (env flag, homemaker-py-gp2) rather than port it; native fitness uses simple crinkliness (illumination factor = 1); rebuild occlusion in Python only after optimisation is fully native (homemaker-py-2g5, now P4). Consequence: all scores change when the flag flips — re-baseline corpus/.score, DESIGN \$4.5 gains, gate bars at one clean boundary AFTER homemaker-py-1p0 closes; Phase-2 urb-evolve benchmark must run with the same flag.