The reviewer signed off on the inter-staff slice with one named residual risk:
the 3+-staff cumulative shift cascade was documented and traced correct but had
no fixture behind it -- valid_score_rich's "three staves" are three separate
single-staff regions, so each lands in its own system and the cascade never runs.
three_staff_close_content puts three staves in ONE region with deliberately
asymmetric pressure: the upper pair collides hard (C1 against C7), the lower pair
only gently. That asymmetry is what makes the fixture discriminating. Sizing each
pair independently -- the plausible wrong implementation -- measures the lower
pair against the middle staff's ORIGINAL position, hands the bottom staff only
its own small correction, and drags it back up through the middle staff.
Verified by mutation, not by assertion alone: with the cascade removed the bottom
staff's shift collapses from 34.68 to 4.56 against the middle staff's 15.06, and
both the shift ordering and the staff-line-gap assertions fail. two_staff_close_content
still passes under that same mutation, which is precisely why the new fixture was
needed.
Writing the test also corrected a wrong mental model, now recorded in DECISIONS.md:
a shift INCREMENT generally exceeds the lower pair's own raw correction, because
the upper staff's descent has itself eaten into that pair's gap and must be undone.
The first version of the test asserted the opposite and failed against a correct
solve.
The fixture additionally pins curve attribution against a three-band choice -- the
slur must still find the bottom staff, not merely the nearer of two -- and carries
its own render golden. No existing golden churns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Levi Neuwirth
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