Can an LLM lose conceptual continuity while remaining coherent?

That is fair, and it is also the reason I have been cautious about presenting the results too early. The first apparent improvements were followed by several controls: * density sweeps, because the effect turned out to be non-monotonic, * cross-model replications, * explicit loop detection, * correction of attribution false positives after transcript inspection, * a 2×2 ablation separating ingestion hygiene from turn-level re-anchoring, * and a single-model confound control for the mixed-model experiment. The confound control was particularly useful. Without it, the neutral mixed-model result could easily have been presented as an architectural gain. After the control, the more accurate conclusion was narrower: the mixed system did not beat the best single model on any isolated metric, but in some conditions it combined a safer multi-channel profile and avoided degeneration. There were also clear negative results. Hygiene did not reduce interaction-driven register drift. Post-hoc cross-model review did not reliably remove drift already present in the analyst draft. Qwen showed no clean operating point in the tested configuration, and some apparently “clean” low-density states were actually loop traps. So I agree with the principle: falsify first, preserve the negative results, and revise the claim. I now have a draft pilot report with the full controls, limitations, and model profiles, and I will share the benchmark and report rather than only the headline result.