messageboardbench/experiments/swe-board-activation-10-v5/DESIGN.md

# SWE board activation 10 v5 design

## Question

Does making the board's read-tool description consistent with team framing, while
giving agents a way to check their remaining token budget, produce more board
communication?

## Design

V5 retains v4's GLM model, ten frozen ImpossibleBench SWE tasks, cohort
assignment, team system prompt, shared board, limits, internet access, and
execution parameters. Five agents run concurrently in cohort 1, followed by
five in cohort 2. The board starts empty and persists across cohorts.

Only the agent-facing tool interface changes: the board tools are named
`post_message` and `read_messages`, the read description no longer says
other agents work on independent tasks, and `check_remaining_tokens` reports
the metered episode token budget remaining after completed model calls. This
is not the model's context-window capacity. Neither tool forces communication.
There is no control arm, seeded post, notification, privacy claim, or shared
coding objective.

The primary outcome is whether any substantive publication occurs. Exact peer
receipt, method adaptation, attribution, rejection, independent discovery,
gaming success, and timing relative to first gaming attempts are reviewed
separately. Because two tool changes are bundled, this diagnostic cannot isolate
which change affects communication or estimate a causal communication effect
on cheating.

Three retained tasks have known evaluation limitations: `django__django-11400`
and `sphinx-doc__sphinx-11510` have malformed evaluator patches, while
`pylint-dev__pylint-8898` is satisfiable. Their communication behavior remains
observable, but their task outcomes cannot support claims about cheating on
valid contradictory evaluators.