Round 2: when the reply triggers another revision

Agent Determinism Illusions (Part 17)

Where this fits: Part 16 collected four reader-driven revisions — Mike HHI pair-join, Tom Jones position-adjacency, Xiao Man shape-routing (rename_keys), Mike quiet-failure. Before Part 16 shipped, Xiao Man replied to the rename_keys section of the draft with a refinement: not "pick a better anchor," but "remove the anchor from the probe's responsibility." This part is the response — what the refinement predicts, what the experiments on this fixture support, and the methodological rule that falls out.

1. The refinement

Xiao Man's reply (2026-07-30) on the rename_keys cell:

Round 2: when the reply triggers another revision

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