# Benchmark harness

This directory holds the benchmark harness that measures gitea-axi's central claim — that it is an agent-ergonomic, low-token interface to Gitea — against the `tea` CLI, the official `gitea-mcp` server, and raw Gitea REST calls.

It is **not part of the published npm package**.
The package's `files` allow-list ships only `dist` and `skills`; `bench/` is excluded, and the packaging tier asserts it stays out of the tarball.

The design lives in [`.claude/spec/benchmark-harness.md`](../.claude/spec/benchmark-harness.md) and the `.claude/adr/0014`–`0016` decision records.
This README is the harness's own working documentation; it deliberately keeps the benchmark's vocabulary here rather than in the tool's domain glossary ([`.claude/CONTEXT.md`](../.claude/CONTEXT.md)), which describes gitea-axi's own language.

## Vocabulary

**arm** — one of the four tool conditions under comparison: `gitea-axi`, `tea`, `gitea-mcp`, `raw-api`.
The comparison measures the tool, so the agent in each arm is given exactly one arm's tool.

**cell** — one `(arm, task)` pair.
A cell's trials accumulate as samples within it; deepening a cell's sample size adds samples rather than overwriting prior runs.

**trial** — one run of a cell.
Each cell defaults to five trials with a reporting floor of three.

**tier** — the task category a task belongs to: `read`, `single-mutation`, `find-then-act`, `multi-step`.
Views group by tier to show where an arm wins or loses.

**cost-equivalent tokens** — the headline metric: the four token components weighted by Anthropic's published API pricing ratios (see ADR 0014).
The raw component breakdown is retained on every sample so the data can be re-weighted without re-running.

**seed** — the deterministic, idempotent starting state scripted into each throwaway repository before a trial, against which correctness is scored.

**checker** — the deterministic scorer that diffs post-run repository state (mutation tasks) or matches required facts in the agent's report (read tasks) against the seeded ground truth.

## Layout

- `result.ts` — the immutable result-record shape and its tags (arm, task, tier, trial, timestamp).
- `store.ts` — the append-only, per-cell sample store that accumulates result records.
- `guard.ts` — the authoritative tool-isolation guard plus the curated per-arm bin directory that backs it.
- `scoring-spec.ts` — the scoring-spec contract: a task's expected end state (mutation) or required answer facts (read), consumed by the checker and produced by the runner and task suite.
- `checker.ts` — the deterministic scorer: the full-state diff for mutation tasks and the answer-match for read tasks, plus the `score` entry point that dispatches on task kind.
- `seed-plan.ts` — the deterministic ground truth every throwaway repository is seeded to: the fixed labels, the open/closed issue spread across the discriminating dimensions, and the pull requests, as pure data plus `groundTruth(user)`, which realizes it into the `RepoState` the checker scores against.
- `seed.ts` — the idempotent seeding scripted over the live Gitea API: `resolveBenchAccess` (which reuses gitea-axi's own tea-login credential discovery), `provisionRepo`, and `seedRepo`, reconciling each label, issue, pull request, comment, and review by its natural key so a re-run never duplicates the ground truth.

Later slices add the arm scaffolding, the single-cell runner, the task suite, the run-loop CLI, and the aggregator.

## Tests

The harness's deterministic seams are unit-tested in this directory, colocated with their source, and run via:

```
npm run test:bench
```

They are kept out of the main fast tier so harness code never counts against the `src/` coverage thresholds.

Seed provisioning is the one boundary validated live rather than by mocks, since its value is the real Gitea API interaction.
Its smoke run is a separate tier that talks to a real host — the maintainer's own, discovered through the tea-login credential path — and skips cleanly when no host is configured:

```
GITEA_AXI_BENCH_LOGIN=<tea-login-name> npm run test:bench:smoke
```

With `GITEA_AXI_BENCH_LOGIN` unset the smoke tier skips (a pass), matching the end-to-end tier's behavior when no live instance is configured.