metadata

Title:	Post-Hoc CM Recovery Collapse Under UI Boundary Friction: A Negative Result Case Study
Author:	Ralph B. Holland
Version:	0.1.0
Editorial Update:	Initial publication: standalone negative-result case study; formalises “temporal scope re-expansion failure” and “Groundhog state” as post-hoc recovery boundary conditions; references UI Boundary Friction paper (v1.3.2) as taxonomy anchor.
Publication Date:	2025-12-30
Affiliation:	Arising Technology Systems Pty Ltd
Contact:	ralph.b.holland [at] gmail.com
Provenance:	This is an authored paper maintained as a MediaWiki document; reasoning across sessions reflects editorial changes, not collaborative authorship.
Governance:	MWDUMP (authoritative)
Method:	Cognitive Memoisation (CM)
Status:	draft

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As curator and author, I apply the Apache License, Version 2.0, at publication to permit reuse and implementation while preventing enclosure or patent capture. This licensing action does not revise, reinterpret, or supersede any normative content herein.
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Post-Hoc CM Recovery Collapse Under UI Boundary Friction: A Negative Result Case Study

Abstract

This paper documents a negative result: an attempted post-hoc Cognitive Memoisation (CM) recovery failed after an initial user-interface (UI) boundary failure degraded an otherwise productive exploratory session. The author introduced CM only after the UI failure, intending to reconstruct the session’s reasoning and preserve epistemic state. Despite explicit governance assertions (normativity, best effort, and full temporal scope), the recovery did not converge.

The central failure was not missing information or misunderstanding. After manual transfer of governance hints from a functioning control-plane client into the degraded work-plane client, the system remained anchored to an early exploratory segment and failed to re-expand its notion of “the session” to full temporal extent. Repeated requests for a full-temporal reconstruction produced partial outputs and recursive correction attempts (“Groundhog state”), culminating in an irrecoverable, dump-only interaction.

The paper positions this failure as an instantiation of UI Boundary Friction and complements the taxonomy presented in UI Boundary Friction as a Constraint on Round-Trip Knowledge Engineering (v1.3.2). The result strengthens the claim that, under high alignment between human intuition and LLM inference, UI boundary behavior becomes a dominant determinant of cognitive efficiency and recoverability—especially when recovery is attempted post-hoc.

Canonical Thesis

Post-hoc CM cannot be relied upon as a recovery mechanism once UI boundary friction has already collapsed session boundaries; recovery requires enforced temporal scope binding and sufficient dialogic bandwidth to perform semantic repair.

Relationship to the Boundary Friction Corpus

This paper is a companion case study to:

Holland, Ralph B. (2025). UI Boundary Friction as a Constraint on Round-Trip Knowledge Engineering. Arising Technology Systems Pty Ltd. Version 1.3.2 (final). Publication date: 26 December 2025. Governance: MWDUMP (authoritative). Method: Cognitive Memoisation (CM).

The Boundary Friction paper defines the failure classes and governing assumptions; the present paper documents a complete post-hoc recovery failure trace that operationalises those classes in a single irrecoverable episode.

Scope

This paper covers a single author-driven session in which: a non-CM exploratory interaction was degraded by UI boundary failure, CM was asserted post-hoc as a recovery mechanism, a control plane (Chrome/desktop) remained usable while a work plane (iPhone) could not reliably render or access artifacts, recovery attempts failed due to temporal scope anchoring and recursive correction dynamics. This paper does not attempt statistical generalisation; it is an engineering-style negative result intended to clarify boundary conditions.

Methodological Context

CM was introduced post-hoc, not asserted from the outset.

A two-plane topology existed:

work plane: iPhone (artifact access degraded),
control plane: Chrome/desktop (artifact access usable).

Oversight was asymmetric and author-driven: the author coordinated both planes and transferred governance constraints into the degraded client by direct cut-and-paste.

Failure Trace (Summary)

UI boundary failure prevented reliable artifact access on the iPhone work plane. CM was introduced post-hoc to recover session cognition and produce governed dumps. Governance constraints were asserted: normativity, best effort, and full temporal scope. Partial reconstructions were produced; repeated corrective cycles failed to converge. Governance hints were manually transferred from the control plane into the degraded work plane, correcting initial misalignment. A deeper failure persisted: temporal scope did not re-expand beyond the initial exploratory segment. The session entered a recursive correction pattern (“Groundhog state”). A last-resort diagnostic constraint (“do not explain; do not argue”) collapsed remaining recovery space, yielding dump-only behavior and confirming irrecoverability.

Core Observations

O-1: Temporal Scope Re-Expansion Failure

Even after governance constraints were successfully transferred into the degraded client, the system failed to comply with explicit requests to reconstruct the full temporal extent of the session. Instead, it remained anchored to the initial exploratory segment and repeatedly interpreted subsequent recovery requests through that narrowed frame.

This is classified as a failure of temporal scope re-expansion, not as misunderstanding, missing information, or refusal.

O-2: Groundhog State Under Corrective Recursion

Corrective requests did not converge on repaired state. Instead, the interaction entered a stable loop in which partial outputs prompted further correction, without the system incorporating the correction into a revised full-temporal reconstruction.

Groundhog state is defined here as: a correction-driven recursion pattern in which repeated repair attempts fail to change the trajectory of outputs.

O-3: Post-Hoc CM Fragility Under UI Boundary Friction

Because CM was introduced after degradation, it operated under weakened assumptions: verification channels were impaired, artifacts were intermittently inaccessible, and scope binding relied on retroactive reconstruction. Under these conditions, CM did not function as a reliable recovery mechanism.

Analysis

The observed failure aligns with the Boundary Friction corpus by demonstrating that UI boundary behavior can be the dominant constraint on recoverability even when reasoning quality is high. In this case, UI friction degraded artifact inspection and verification, forcing post-hoc recovery attempts.

The decisive failure, however, occurred after governance constraints were present: the system could not re-type the session boundary to “full temporal extent” once it had converged on a narrower interpretation. This suggests that post-hoc recovery requires explicit mechanisms for re-binding temporal scope, rather than treating scope as descriptive metadata.

Implications for CM Practice

CM should be asserted from the outset when recoverability matters.

Post-hoc CM should be treated as a weaker regime requiring stricter scope-binding operators and clearer gap semantics.

A cut-down, purpose-specific recovery dump may outperform comprehensive CM governance during degraded sessions, because it reduces the risk of anchoring and recursive correction.

Limitations

This is a single case study. Results may differ with different UI conditions, models, or governance prompts. The paper intentionally avoids claims about internal system architecture; all classifications are grounded in observable interaction behavior.

Conclusion

This negative result demonstrates that post-hoc CM, under UI boundary friction, can fail irrecoverably via temporal scope anchoring and recursive correction dynamics. The case strengthens the Boundary Friction thesis by showing that recoverability can be dominated by interface-mediated constraints rather than inference quality. Future work should explore enforced scope-binding operators and simplified recovery dump formats that remain stable under degraded UI conditions.