Composing Patterns

Each canonical pattern occupies a distinct phase of a composed ladder. The phases connect via field references and gates:

Phase	Pattern	Purpose
Generate	Tree-of-Thoughts	Multi-branch draft
Verify	ToT gate, Reflexion	Prune, retry if no survivors
Refine	Self-Refine	Single-pass improvement on the winner
Aggregate	Self-Consistency	Reduce variance across remaining candidates
Persist	Verify-then-Persist	Write the result plus lessons learned to slates

The hop ceiling plus spend cap bound the whole composition safely. A composed ladder that would exceed the ceiling is aborted at runtime with the best-so-far output, which is usually the highest-scoring candidate from the most recent completed phase.

The Crucible reference ladder composes ToT plus reflexion plus self-refine plus self-consistency plus persistent memory into one ladder. It is a worked example of how the canonical patterns stack into a larger strategy.

The composition works because each pattern is a self-contained phase. The phases connect via:

• Field references. Each phase's ingest and multi_ingest fields name the previous phase's outputs.
• Gates. The gate between phases decides whether to advance, retry (jump backward), or abort.
• Slate writes. The final phase writes the result and a lessons-learned entry to a slate.

Read the Crucible walkthrough for the full annotated config.