Communication Preflight F# Prototype v0.1

Status: Research-only executable prototype Date: 2026-09-20

Purpose

Move the stable, deterministic portion of Communication Engineering preflight out of prompt context and into typed code.

This prototype is motivated by two findings:

1. Brief-construction Experiments 04-05 showed a replicated same-model gain when communication state was incomplete.
2. Independent-model Experiments 07-08 were invalidated because adding Communication Engineering context changed Copilot's auto-selected model.

The design goal is therefore:

Use models only for the unresolved judgment. Compute the stable preflight mechanics in code.

Scope

This prototype accepts an already-classified communication-state assessment.

It computes:

• known fields;
• materially missing fields;
• optional unknowns;
• not-applicable fields;
• grouped clarification needs;
• activation decision;
• bounded-progress permission;
• verification requirement.

It validates:

• duplicate field identifiers;
• known values with missing provenance.

It deliberately does not

• parse natural-language requests;
• infer audience or authority;
• infer accessibility needs;
• decide cultural permission;
• generate prose;
• score communication quality;
• call an AI provider;
• depend on Ordo or ROS at runtime.

Compute / Decide / Deliberate boundary

Compute — implemented here

• preserve typed state;
• validate provenance;
• find missing required fields;
• group clarifications deterministically;
• apply explicit stop/continue rules;
• derive activation decision.

Decide — outside this prototype

• dominant purpose;
• whether an unknown field is materially required now;
• whether a proposed inference is safe;
• whether a bounded default is legitimate.

Deliberate — outside this prototype

• conflicting purposes;
• unfamiliar authority/cultural questions;
• novel high-consequence communication architecture.

Layout

• src/CommunicationPreflight.fsproj
• src/Domain.fs
• src/Preflight.fs
• tests/CommunicationPreflight.Tests.fsproj
• tests/Program.fs

The test project is a console executable with no external test framework dependency.

Run

dotnet build research/prototypes/communication-preflight-fsharp-v0.1/src/CommunicationPreflight.fsproj
dotnet run --project research/prototypes/communication-preflight-fsharp-v0.1/tests/CommunicationPreflight.Tests.fsproj

Promotion boundary

Passing these tests proves only the deterministic semantics of this prototype.

It does not prove that a model/human will classify communication state correctly or that downstream readers perform better.