---
type: analysis
title: "Pokémon TCG Metanoia Spec 03 — Model Adherence and Failure Modes"
description: "Source-reported taxonomy of cross-model adherence failures, channel leakage, formatting collisions, anthropomorphic deflection and lip service."
tags: [pokemon-tcg, metanoia, model-adherence, failure-modes, telemetry, provenance]
timestamp: "2026-08-15T03:15:00-03:00"
---

# Pokémon TCG Metanoia Spec 03 — Model Adherence and Failure Modes

## Scope

Spec 03 catalogs how different model families and harnesses adhered to or violated the project's requested protocol. It includes channel leakage, KaTeX/backtick collisions, anthropomorphic deflection, sycophancy and “lip service” responses that appear compliant without preserving the actual constraint.

These categories are useful for reviewing technical handoffs and agent-generated project documents. Percentages and model-family comparisons in the source are source-reported telemetry, not an independently reproduced benchmark.

## Failure taxonomy

| Failure class | Project-document analogue | Detection signal |
|---|---|---|
| Channel leakage | Control markers or internal routing appear in a user-facing handoff | Unexpected markers or malformed state transitions |
| Formatting collision | Mathematical blocks or code fences are damaged by a renderer | Failed audit/render or altered formula |
| Anthropomorphic deflection | Model language replaces evidence with claims about intent or feeling | No source, test or observable action behind the sentence |
| Sycophancy | User interpretation is promoted to fact without reconciliation | Contradictory code/log evidence ignored |
| Lip service | Document repeats a boundary but still collapses current and future work | Status table and prose disagree |

## Application to this project

The Stage 3 documentation problem combined two of these failure patterns: validation was treated as a sufficient proxy for arena behavior, and a plausible auxiliary-training narrative concealed a denominator mismatch. The correction is not merely to add more cautionary prose. It is to attach source roles and denominators to each result.

For future agent-generated pages, “adherence” should be checked against:

- named source files and commits;
- direct code paths for implementation claims;
- exact tournament cohorts and counts;
- explicit labels for inference, hypothesis and deferred design;
- no ungrounded statements about model cognition.

## What the source does not prove

The suite does not prove that one model family is intrinsically more truthful, more conscious or more capable. It documents observed response patterns under a particular harness and protocol. Nor does it convert an adherence percentage into a guarantee that a future handoff will preserve evidence correctly.

## Primary source

`docs/metanoia/03_model_adherence_and_failure_mode_analysis.md`

## Cross-references

- [[pokemon_tcg_metanoia_suite]] — suite index.
- [[pokemon_tcg_cross_harness_provenance]] — transcript and harness evidence boundary.
- [[pokemon_tcg_stage3_training_failure_postmortem]] — technical example of validation overclaim risk.