CLAUDE.md - Standing Instructions

Read this before making changes to this repo. It applies to AI agents and human contributors alike.

Paper freeze - lifted

This repo was previously under a paper freeze, on the assumption that a research paper citing its benchmark results was in peer review. That paper was never actually submitted this cycle - the real paper, with a fresh run of results, is now planned for next year. Freezing analysis code and results against a paper that doesn't exist yet was premature, so the freeze is lifted: faircode/ core, results/, audit.yaml manifests, dataset CSVs, requirements-lock.txt, and the reproducibility parameters (random_state, split ratio, iteration counts, the fairness constraint, the six metrics) are all open to normal development again. New audits merge to main like anything else. Dependabot's version-bump PRs against requirements-lock.txt no longer need to be reverted on sight - use normal judgment.

paper/results-frozen/ stays, as a reference

paper/results-frozen/ is kept in the repo, but it is no longer under any special protection - it's a snapshot of an earlier analysis pass, useful as a point of comparison while building toward next year's real paper run, not the evidence backing a live citation. Nothing stops it from being read, compared against, or eventually superseded; there's just no active enforcement requiring results/ to keep matching it, since results/ is expected to move again as development resumes. The v1.0-paper git tag is left in place as a historical marker of what that snapshot was.

If an explainer or piece of documentation quotes a Fair Code benchmark result, say which source it's quoting - results/ (current) or paper/results-frozen/ (the earlier reference snapshot) - so a reader isn't left guessing which numbers are live.

Next freeze

When the real paper submission is actually ready (expected next year), expect a new freeze to be established at that point, covering whatever fresh results back that submission - this file will be updated again when that happens. Until then, treat this repo as under normal, fully open development.