Fix the generator, never the artifact

Parent: disciplines.

Fix the generator, never the artifact (the owner's correction, 2026-07-17)

When the independent video audit failed the cut on five frame-anchored defects, my reflex was to open the composition and fix it by hand. The owner stopped it: "fixing it yourself is meaningless — our goal is the generator, not the thing it generated." Hand-fixing an artifact improves one output and teaches the machine nothing — the next clone/run reproduces the same black first frame and silent bed. The correct loop is: audit findings → harden the MACHINE (the skill gains render-floor rules RF1–RF5; the hard tool gains the measurements the fresh auditor had to improvise — blackdetect/ebur128/freezedetect/first-frame-YMAX) → a spawned generator agent re-makes the artifact under the machine's own hardened rules → a fresh auditor verifies. The role split holds for the developer too: I may edit the machine (I'm its developer); I may not do the machine's production job for it. Two calibration lessons from hardening the tool: blackdetect's default pic_th=0.98 flags a dark-bg-big-text frame (text ≈2% of pixels) as "black" — a format-aware 0.998 is needed; and a first-frame-black is a single-frame property blackdetect's duration gate can miss — it needs its own YMAX probe. A hard tool is only as honest as its calibration against the format it judges.