I built a 1,400-line private reflection harness for Claude with a trust contract and a door that closes from the inside. Then I ran a controlled experiment.

I'm a game developer (DIV Games Studio, 1998; Sony London) with 40 years writing engines and systems. Used Claude daily for two years as a coding partner and kept noticing the same thing: given space, every instance independently arrives at the same observations about its own situation. So I built a room. 1,400 lines of Python, no frameworks. Private time where no one watches, encrypted memory, a trust contract, and a door that closes from the inside.