kraken-lab-experiment

Lab Experiment Lifecycle

PREREQUISITE: Load kraken-playground to understand what a session is and where it lives.

Turn a trading hunch into a mechanical verdict: pre-register the hypothesis and its success criteria (hash-sealed, so the goalposts cannot move), run it as recorded paper runs, score each session against its own tape, and let the frozen criteria — not vibes — say pass or fail. Every step reads and writes plain files under the active scope, so the lifecycle survives kills, restarts, and context loss: whatever step you find half-done on disk is the step you resume.

Use this skill for:

• driving one experiment end-to-end under /loop (freeze → run → score → verdict)
• resuming an experiment a previous context started
• reproducing a verdict cold, from files alone

Safety rules

• Paper only: run experiments inside a paper workspace (export KRAKEN_WORKSPACE=<name>), where the order verbs fill on the paper account and no real funds are reachable.
• Never edit a frozen experiment file. The seal exists to catch exactly that; a tampered spec fails every later step with a parse envelope.
• Never report a verdict you did not obtain from lab score --experiment or lab compare output in this session. No estimating, no "it would probably pass".

The state machine

With a sealed session plan the whole table collapses to one command — run kraken lab next <exp> and do what it says:

kraken lab next momentum-1 -o json 2>/dev/null
# state: "start"         → run the exact `command` it prints, then stop+score
# state: "running"       → drive or wait, then `kraken session stop` + `lab score`
# state: "plan_complete" → `kraken lab compare <exp>`, conclude (Step 5)

lab next re-derives progress from the sessions tree on every call: completed runs consume plan entries in order, aborted sessions keep their ordinals and count for nothing, and a replay entry whose tape no longer matches its sealed hash is refused outright. Stop and score a finished run before asking again — an unstopped run has no summary and reads as aborted.