Kill Condition Guide

Purpose

A kill condition is the evidence that would cause a hypothesis to be revised, suspended, or retired.

Kill conditions should be defined before new evidence runs.

Kill conditions prevent belief accumulation without correction.

Guidance

• State what outcome would materially weaken the hypothesis.
• Prefer observable failure states over vague dissatisfaction.
• Tie kill conditions to actual measurements where possible.

Examples

• Agreement collapses across diversified artifacts.
• AST extraction forces the same structure onto static and procedural artifacts.
• Constraint extraction fails to outperform lower-level comparison.
• Schema compliance breaks often enough that output is no longer comparable.