[judge panel] Pin the lens-assigned role into the lens-verdict spawn so writeLensVerdict's role matches the lens→role binding

[jackmcintyre]

Summary

A lens judge wrote role planner into judge-structure.json while the judge panel had spawned role architect for the structure lens. The judge spawn does not pin the lens-assigned role strongly enough into writeLensVerdict's role field, so the judge self-identified as its hired persona instead of the lens binding. This triggered a missing-cited-source friction event and risks a hard LensVerdictFileMalformedError.

Tool area

judge-panel lens-verdict spawn seam — resolveLensRoles / buildPersonaSpawnPrompt / writeLensVerdict (the role contract between the panel and the per-lens judge)

What happens

1. resolveLensRoles binds each of the five lenses to a distinct hired role via bipartite matching (e.g. structure → architect).
2. The panel spawns one judge per lens, passing the lens + the bound role into the spawn prompt (buildPersonaSpawnPrompt).
3. The judge writes its verdict with writeLensVerdict({ lens, role, pass, missed }).
4. The bug: the bound role is not pinned strongly enough. The judge echoes its hired persona name (planner) into the role field instead of the lens-bound role (architect).
5. The on-disk verdict file (judge-structure.json) now disagrees with the panel's lens→role binding. Downstream, aggregateJudgePanel either mis-binds the verdict or throws LensVerdictFileMalformedError (lens/role mismatch).

Observed symptom

• A missing-cited-source friction event fired (the generic compensating signal), masking the real cause (a role-identity drift, not a missing source).
• One step away from a hard LensVerdictFileMalformedError that would have stalled the panel.

Why this is fragile

• The seam relies on the judge inferring and echoing the correct role from prose in its spawn prompt. With multiple hired personas and overlapping domains, that inference is unreliable.
• The failure currently surfaces as a generic friction kind (missing-cited-source), which makes the seam hard to diagnose — the symptom (friction) does not point at the cause (role pinning).

Impact

• Risks stalling the gate-1 judge panel mid-grade (hard error) on otherwise-correct verdicts.
• Pollutes the friction telemetry with mis-categorised events, hiding the real seam.

Suggested direction

1. Pin the role (preferred): Enforce the lens-assigned role in the judge spawn prompt so writeLensVerdict's role field always matches the panel's lens→role binding. Pass the bound role as an explicit required field the judge must echo verbatim (not infer from persona identity).
2. Make mismatches diagnosable: At minimum, surface a role mismatch as a distinct friction kind (e.g. lens-role-mismatch) rather than the generic missing-cited-source, so the seam is visible in telemetry and the retro.

The property we want: the role recorded in judge-<lens>.json is always the lens-bound role, by construction — never the judge's self-identified persona.

Context

• Trigger: retro-analyst / cycle-end retro
• Raised: 2026-06-28 (finding id 01KW605XA3M8AAACQGJV5NATNC)
• Observed at: Epic 1 cycle-end retro (structure lens, architect vs planner)