Ruled: fix, don't document. The argument that settled it — a red test on a
serving-path contract left with an explanatory note IS the H-8 failure mode, a
document acknowledging a gap instead of closing it, which becomes the next
assessor's finding.
Two distinct failures, and the second is the serious one.
1. THE CEREMONY PINS WERE STALE AGAINST CORRECT CODE (H-8e's class).
ChainRecord.polarity defaults to AFFIRMATIVE and is DELIBERATELY OMITTED
from affirmative rows (ADR-0264 R1; teaching/ratification.py:119). Both pins
built ChainRecord(**{k: row[k] for k in __slots__}), so they KeyError'd on
every correctly-serialized row. Now built from the row's own keys, letting
absent fields take their dataclass defaults — which RESTORES the guarantee
rather than weakening it. Consequence of the staleness: ratification-corpus
byte compatibility and unreviewed-status refusal were UNVERIFIED since
ADR-0264 R1 landed.
2. CLAIMS.md PUBLISHED A SUPERSEDED EVIDENCE DIGEST FOR A LICENSED CAPABILITY.
f9e9cc0c (2026-07-26, "the deduction lane hashes the prose it serves")
strengthened the lane, rewrote evals/deduction_serve/report.json, and moved
the authoritative pin in scripts/verify_lane_shas.py:60 to c855d55c —
recording the superseded 0b461a5a on line 56. It did NOT regenerate
CLAIMS.md. So for two days the published claim for deduction_serve_v1
pointed at evidence that no longer existed. The claim TEXT never changed;
only the pointer was wrong — which is exactly the failure a digest exists to
prevent. Regenerated; the diff is one line, the digest.
The drift had reached a THIRD artifact: this assessment's own
M3-comprehension-reasoning.md card cited the same stale 0b461a5a as its
would-fail-if-absent evidence. Corrected.
THE MECHANISM IS G-7's, AGAIN. One commit updated the lane, its verifier and
its lane test, and missed one downstream artifact — and the pin that guards
that artifact (tests/test_claims_md_is_current.py) EXISTED AND RAN ON NO GATE.
Nothing surfaced it until this arc ran the full tree once. Both it and
test_ratification_ceremony.py are now registered in TEST_SUITES["smoke"].
The membership ratchet caught the author a second time: promoting
test_claims_md_is_current.py onto the gate without removing its baseline line
failed test_baseline_has_no_stale_entries immediately. Baseline 748 -> 747.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
Squashes the arc's work into one commit; the workflow-file edit it originally
carried is excluded (see the end of this message).
## Lane 1 — Workbench recorded a proved answer as ungrounded
With deduction_serving_enabled ratified ON (ADR-0256), workbench/api.py's live
chat route builds a bare ChatRuntime(), so the deduction composer decides
Workbench turns and stamps grounding_source="deduction" — but
_coerce_grounding_source carried a hand-copied whitelist of the six pre-arc
labels and silently rewrote anything else to "none". The runtime comment
reasoned this was inert because "REPL turns do not flow through Workbench's
CognitivePipelineRecord path". True, and irrelevant: the traffic flows the
other way. Stale since 2026-07-24.
Scope is one field. workbench/api.py:818 prefers TurnEvent.epistemic_state,
which read epistemic_state_needed — honest. So the UNregistered path degraded
honestly while the hand-copied whitelist asserted a falsehood; a second copy of
a closed enum was worse than no copy. Hence registration AND derivation:
GROUNDING_SOURCES exposes the Literal's members, and the coercion reads it.
workbench-ui badges/tokens/snapshot follow; enumCoverage.test.ts forces atomicity.
## Lane 2 — the ratification ceremony
The discovery loop was instrumented but not closed. teaching/ratification.py
turns a reviewed decision into a chain record, a corpus commit, and a receipt.
Its design turns on one observation: _ratified_rows DROPS unadmissible rows
silently — correct when serving, a trap when ratifying, because the file grows,
the commit lands, and the band count does not move. So the ceremony refuses to
call an append a ratification until it has re-read the curriculum through the
real loader and seen the chain arrive; a non-admitted append is rolled back.
Validation is a pre-flight courtesy, admission is the proof.
Arena queue entry and ledger reseal are deliberately NOT performed (bridge rule
1); the receipt names them. Front door: `core proposal-queue ratify`, a sibling
of `review` rather than a flag on it.
## Lane 3 — structural closures
- ADR-0263 gains rule 5: absence policy is DECLARED in CAPABILITY_LEDGERS, not
passed at the call site. An AST-matched test fails if a serving path passes
missing_ok again.
- Deductive suite added WHOLE to the pre-push gate: 285 tests in 29s against
smoke's 216 in 62s, so no coverage trade was needed.
- Smoke/CI parity assertion made bidirectional. It was one-directional, and had
drifted.
- test_prior_surface_deduction_binding.py pins correction binding on the
deduction path. The review's diagnosis did NOT reproduce — hash_surface moves
in lockstep — so it pins what is there. Mutation-checked.
- Domain-keyed ADR index over 312 flat-numbered files, explicitly partial.
- Arc-close brief template, plus this arc's own brief filled in against it.
## Lanes 4 and 5 — two premises falsified by measurement, one of them mine
Math 4.2: baseline reproduced (correct=5 wrong=0 refused=495); all four named
cases traced to one seam with each gap isolated by one-variable probes. Then the
number that changes the recommendation: the gap blocking case 0000 affects 1
case in 500, the 'than' gap blocking 0001 affects 2. ADR-0251's prohibition on
per-case growth now rests on a count. No reader change made.
CGA: versor_condition is 0.22% of a turn, not the "~10x proof latency" I claimed
— that multiplied an isolated microbenchmark by a call count and compared it to
a single verdict's latency. The real cost is geometric_product at 33,986
calls/turn (~73%) via cga_inner in search paths. The obvious closed form is NOT
bit-exact (954/4000 in f32); backend.vault_recall's serial fold IS (3000/3000,
worst-rel 0) and is the correct target. cargo test could not run —
static.crates.io is denied by the sandbox network policy — so the Rust parity
question stays open and the typestate lane is carried forward, not shipped
uncompiled.
## Not landed: three lines owed to .github/workflows/smoke.yml
The CI smoke gate is narrower than the local one —
test_pack_draft_serve_boundary.py (ADR-0253 INV-33) has been local-only, unseen
because the parity pin checked one direction. The edit was authored and rejected
at push for lacking the `workflow` OAuth scope, so it is recorded as a named,
dated PENDING_IN_CI exception rather than dropped: the assertion still fires on
any new divergence, and a second guard fires once the three land.
[Verification]: pre-push gates all green — smoke 236 passed, warmed_session 10
passed, deductive 285 passed. Ratification 14, ADR index 5, CLI suites 10.
Grounding/epistemic sweep 741 passed 1 skipped. workbench-ui 598 passed across
73 files, tsc -b clean. capability index 11 passed, digest unchanged. Math
holdout correct=5 wrong=0 refused=495. Committed chain corpora byte-unchanged
after the tests that write to them.
Environment caveat: the repo pins requires-python ==3.12.13, which uv cannot
fetch for linux-x86_64, so `uv sync --locked` fails. All Python runs used a
scratch venv on 3.12.11 with declared deps — not the locked universe, not the
full ~12k suite. The pin was left untouched. Re-run on a 3.12.13 host before
treating this as merge evidence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FduW6Krm3PPQv3P5iwBYtx
Claude