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).


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


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


Urb oracle nondeterminism: urb-fitness.pl output varies run-to-run from Perl hash-order randomisation — .fails line ORDER shuffles (compare sorted, use oracle.Score.fail_lines) and the score float can flip by ~1 ULP (compare with math.isclose rel_tol=1e-12, never ==). Not a batching artifact; affects single runs too. Matters for the Phase 3 native-fitness parity gate (homemaker-py-uxz).


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.


warm_x0 initialization bug pattern: when a topology operator explicitly sets division ratios on a newly-created node (e.g. compound_fix sets node.division=[0.25,0.25] for t3), parent.ratios has no entry for that node (it was a leaf). warm_x0 defaults it to 0.5, corrupting the inner loop's starting point and making the operator invisible to lex comparison. Fix: only propagate child ratios for nodes where the parent node was NOT already divided; stale hidden nodes revealed by structural mutations (swap flipping b.below) must NOT contribute their pre-writeback values. See driver.py lines 259-267 (fixed 2026-06-14).


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.