“Genre signal is plumbed as STATE, not parsed from TEXT. When the structured truth exists upstream — a persona brief, a selected substyle, a rolled palette — the downstream consumer must receive it directly. Re-parsing it from prose is a silent-bypass class-of-bug.”

Surfaced:Build 3280 (Genre Routing WAR ROOM — operator-reported 2026-05-25). User submitted Surprise Mode prompt "A funk rock song inspired by Red Hot Chili Peppers"; system produced "Intimate folk ballad with fingerpicked acoustic guitar, male baritone vocals, 70 BPM in 4/4 time, key of G major" — a complete genre-routing collapse. A 100-expert forensic WAR ROOM with four parallel agents identified four converging failure modes: (1) Surprise Mode at use-surprise-flow.ts:275 dispatched only the composed prompt text, discarding the structured palette.artistBrief that already held funk-rock genre intent. (2) SuperPrompt at superprompt/route.ts:91 INSTRUCTED Sonnet to preserve the artist verbatim in paragraph 1 but had zero programmatic enforcement — Sonnet routinely paraphrased "Red Hot Chili Peppers" into "California funk-rock pioneers", silently scrubbing the INSPIRED_BY regex window. (3) post-forge-pipeline.ts:241 populated the SuperStyle "rawPrompt" field with the already-enhanced text, so SuperStyle's artist-extraction also saw the paraphrased artifact, fell through to Haiku reading the lyrics, and chose folk-ballad to match the lyric mood. (4) genre-profile.ts:335 used substring `.includes("rap")` matching that false-positive-fired on common words like "wrap", "rapper", "therapy" — a third independent detector with a different algorithm than the word-boundary detector at genre-modes.ts:3825.