AILang/docs/journals/2026-05-11-fieldtest-canonical-type-names.md

fieldtest — canonical-type-names

Date: 2026-05-11 Branch: main (orchestrator-direct dispatch; the or.1 branch-per-iter rule lands on the next implement run) Status: DONE_WITH_CONCERNS Examples: 5 of 5 authored + committed Findings: 9 (4 working, 4 friction, 1 spec_gap, 0 bugs)

Summary

Standard skill-pipeline step after audit cleanly closed canonical-type-names. The fieldtester wrote five .ailx examples that exercise the milestone surface — one happy-path exhibit and four diagnostic-triggers, one per new diagnostic plus a second branch of the merged BadCrossModuleTypeRef case. Spec at docs/specs/2026-05-11-fieldtest-canonical-type-names.md; fixtures under examples/ct_*.

All four milestone-scoped findings landed as working: the new diagnostics fire on the LLM-natural authoring mistakes, the diagnostics carry actionable recipes (BareCrossModuleTypeRef lists import candidates + names the migration tool), and Form-A round-tripping stays byte-stable across cross-module type refs.

One milestone-internal friction: BadCrossModuleTypeRef collapses two distinguishable cases (unknown owner vs. known owner / unknown type name) into one diagnostic shape. A future tidy iter can split these and, in the known-owner branch, list the available type names the way bare-cross-module-type-ref lists candidates from imports.

Three orthogonal friction items surfaced as pre-existing UX gaps that every fieldtest invocation will keep tripping on:

• Workspace search confined to the entry module's directory — no way to organise fieldtest fixtures under examples/fieldtest/ while still importing prelude or std.
• ail check foo.ailx returns a misleading JSON-parse error instead of either auto-parsing .ailx or pointing to ail parse.
• (import prelude) is rejected with a clear diagnostic but no corpus example warns the author that prelude is auto-injected.

One spec_gap: the canonical happy-path exhibit shipped with this milestone (examples/compare_primitives_smoke.ail.json) exists only as JSON. Decision 6 makes Surface the LLM-author surface; the milestone should ship a .ailx counterpart (or retire the JSON fixture in favour of ct_1_ordering_signum.{ailx,ail.json}).

Routing

Finding	Class	Action
BareCrossModuleTypeRef recipe + JSON ctx	working	carry-on
BadCrossModuleTypeRef catches Surface	working	carry-on
QualifiedClassName fires on (class prelude.Eq)	working	carry-on
Form-A round-trip byte-stable	working	carry-on
BadCrossModuleTypeRef merges two cases	friction	roadmap P2
Workspace search confined to entry dir	friction	roadmap P2
ail check on .ailx misleading	friction	roadmap P2
(import prelude) corpus doc gap	friction	carry-on (one-line DESIGN.md hint sufficient)
No .ailx for compare_primitives_smoke.ail.json	spec_gap	roadmap P3

No bug findings, so no debug dispatch. The five .ailx fixtures stay in the corpus as live exhibits.

Lesson — orthogonal UX gaps surface together

Three of four friction items are orthogonal to canonical-type-names proper. They predate the milestone. None would have surfaced in a brainstorm or planner pass because none touches the milestone's substance. Fieldtest's role IS to surface this kind of cross-cutting UX debt — DESIGN.md does not mention .ailx extension handling, workspace-root flags, or the prelude doc-gap, but every downstream LLM author trips on them within ten minutes of writing their first program. The roadmap entries below are the persistent backlog this fieldtest produced.