N-9 is the finding, and it PREVENTS work rather than re-scoping it.
WHAT THE PLAN GOT WRONG. N-3 concluded the 23-vs-13 smoke delta was unintended
drift, on two in-repo comments asserting parity, and called that "the strongest
evidence available that the drift was never intended". H-12 repeated it; R-14
built three options on it recommending "raise CI, +46s measured"; PR-4
specified a bidirectional parity pin as deliverable one.
A third artifact answers all of it, and none of them read it.
tests/test_cli_test_suites.py::test_cli_smoke_suite_covers_ci_smoke_gate has
pinned smoke.yml SUBSET-OF TEST_SUITES["smoke"] since before this assessment —
which is why every measurement finds CI-only == 0; a pin, not luck — beneath a
comment headed "DELIBERATELY ONE-DIRECTIONAL — do not 'complete' this by also
asserting local_paths <= ci_paths". Its history is 50fa287d (2026-07-25):
"revert(tests): drop the local-to-CI smoke parity assertion — CI is not a
gate." An earlier agent read the same comment, drew the same inference, made
the assertion symmetric, and reverted it hours later: "That was wrong, and
AGENTS.md says so in a line I had already read."
AGENTS.md:280 — GitHub is "a mirror only; its Actions are billing-locked and
produce dead signals — never chase them." §277 — the workflows are "secondary
observability only." So the local suite is the SOURCE and is deliberately
broader; the delta is the design.
- PR-4 pin 1: WITHDRAWN. It exists, in the direction that protects something.
- R-14: premise corrected in the packet. Option A spends 46s on a workflow
that does not gate; option B would delete real protection for a fiction;
option C's live half is a two-line comment fix, done here.
- N-3's exposure claim was too GENEROUS to CI: for a push that skipped the
local gate there is no automatic check at all. Larger than stated, and not
closable by editing smoke.yml.
WHAT LANDED. Measured: 749 of 877 test files are in no curated suite. The
plan's mechanism ("assign every orphan, or 749 exclusion reasons") is hollow at
that scale — glob topic-suites ("adr": tests/test_adr_*.py absorbs 172) satisfy
the assertion while changing nothing about what executes, which is precisely the
Third-Door objection the plan levels at G-7's own first formulation. All four
demonstrated incidents (#113, #136, negation-survives-articulation,
speculative-subject-lifecycle) were caused by a NEWLY LANDED orphan; none by a
legacy one.
So: a ratchet. tests/test_suite_membership.py + tests/full_only_baseline.txt.
New orphans fail. The baseline is enforced in BOTH directions — a promoted or
deleted file must leave it, so the list can only shrink — and its count is
pinned so bulk movement is a reviewed decision, in the discipline
test_volume_honesty.py uses.
Also: the gate-guarding pin now runs on the gate. test_cli_test_suites.py lived
in `fast`; the pre-push gate runs smoke + deductive. The pin guarding the gate
did not run on the gate.
Three sabotages, each OBSERVED RED: a new unregistered test file, a stale
baseline entry, the parity pin demoted out of smoke.
Note on the delta: now 12 (local 27, CI 15) because this session added three
pins locally. Under the corrected reading that is the design, not widening
drift — the invariant is CI-only == 0, and that is pinned. The registers now
say so; "ten files" was a measurement, never a target.
Process note: `git checkout --` during sabotage cleanup destroyed uncommitted
edits to core/cli_test.py, which were redone. Backups, not checkout, on files
with unstaged work.
Registers: G-7 CLOSED, H-12 amended, R-14 dissolved in the packet, PR-4
re-specified, N-9 added to plan §0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
Two external first-principles assessments of CORE were verified against code
line-by-line at 8f0ccfe3. What survived is entered; what failed is recorded in
the audit's negative space with the refuting file named, per the register's own
discipline.
Entered:
H-13 — the speculative-marker cache over-evicts shared tokens: promoting one
proposal to COHERENT pops tokens regardless of owner (pipeline.py:736-739,
:1045-1055), so a sibling proposal's still-SPECULATIVE material is served
without its marker. Honesty regression, served direction. Remedy: refcounted
cache, failing test first. (The source assessment described this seam with
the direction inverted — under-eviction; the code over-evicts. The check
that caught the inversion is what confirmed the bug.)
H-14 — _run_turn is 759 lines (pipeline.py:189-947) under a thin-wrapper
docstring, with finalize_turn_trace_hash x2 / finalize_turn_surface x1
back-stamps as the measured symptom. H-4's sibling: refactor ADR, PR-10's
byte-identical-trace bar, and the learn stage named stateful.
H-8e — inductive_closure.py's docstring claims a path-based cycle skip the
code does not perform (:106 vs :189-193) — and the code is the right side:
the monotone fixed point needs no path check, and adding one would refuse
sound derivations. path records only (a,b,c) for longer chains (:198), so
trace provenance is incomplete. Docstring fix is mechanical; extending path
changes operator_invocation bytes -> trace_hash, held to the trace-change bar.
PR-9 widened — the logos-authority bare except (pipeline.py:555) and the
three OOV-probe swallows (:605-657) join the count-the-swallow scope; same
remedy shape (record repr(e), keep the backstop), explicitly not the
narrow-catch alternative.
R-4 packet addition — first collapse candidate: composed_surface +
transitive_surface + transitive_max_depth -> chain_depth:int, justified by
ADR-0083's own docstring ladder; ruled in-lineage, not ad-hoc.
R-12a note — lived_life.json staleness recorded as a question; the proposed
PID-attestation fix rejected (refuses every reboot resume; PID reuse).
Cleared, with the refuting file named: EpistemicState compression
(vault/store.py, policy.py's ADR-0206 partition), the EpistemicState x
NormativeClearance product type (erases refusal evidence — H-3 rebuilt as a
type), PID attestation, path-based cycle skipping, the depth-enrichment cache
(pack_resolver.py:19 already lru_caches the cost), and the unified reasoning
engine as-refactor (trace_hash change + capability widening + discards the
ROBDD engine one merge after ADR-0265 ratified denial).
Register ranges updated to G-1..G-21 / H-1..H-14. Docs only; no runtime
behavior, no flag, no test changed.
[Verification]: uv run pytest tests/test_adr_index.py
tests/test_adr_status_governance.py tests/test_adr_0252_s5_blindness.py -q —
327 passed at this tree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
scripts/hooks/pre-push — the automation of the AGENTS.md local-first protocol
— opens by describing its own step 1 as "the smoke suite — exact CI-gate
parity". It runs 23 files; the CI gate runs 13. That is the second in-repo
assertion of a parity that does not hold, the first being core/cli_test.py's
audio block, and it is the strongest evidence available that the drift was
never intended rather than a deliberate narrowing.
Phase 6 of the holistic assessment: what follows from it, and what it needs
ruled before anything else can be sequenced.
`50-execution-plan.md` — five waves (scrub/rule → delete → simplify/enforce →
accelerate evidence loops → automate last) plus five frontier tracks, covering
every G-1…G-20 and H-1…H-12 entry, with four hard dependency gates and nine
risks stated before they are incurred.
`50-rulings.md` — R-1…R-14. One decision per section: the evidence verified at
ed06dd64, the options enumerated, a recommendation with its reasoning, and the
exact diff that follows from each choice, so ruling costs one word. Nothing in
it recommends reversing a ratified decision; R-12 amends two ADRs' records
without touching either decision.
§0 of the plan carries SEVEN corrections to the assessment, all found by
reading code, workflows and ADR supersession banners — none by re-reading
documents. Four change planned work:
- N-3 (new) the local smoke suite (23 files) and smoke.yml (13) have diverged
by 10 files. Severity is LOWER than this plan's first draft stated: AGENTS.md
makes the in-worktree run the merge gate and CI secondary observability, and
the local gate is the superset — so nothing is unguarded. What is real is one
in-code comment claiming an equality that does not hold, and the push that
skipped the local gate, for which CI is the only automatic check.
- N-4 the L10 soak HAS been run — 5000 beats, reboot at 2500, all four gates
pass (contract.md, landed aed273b1). G-5's "never produced an artifact" is
wrong. The debt is the ceremony: no committed report, no pinned
deterministic_digest (the contract's own unmet closing instruction), no
cadence. Prose with no pinned digest is testimony, not evidence.
- N-5 G-10's blocker does not exist. ADR-0264 §4.1 carries a self-supersession
banner: R5 removed the 16-premise cap on 2026-07-26, and four bands would
earn SERVE the moment a ledger is sealed. PR-13 is WITHDRAWN and the whole
throughput frontier reduces to one ruling (R-8).
- N-7 the flag count is 28 of 32 RuntimeConfig booleans, not seventeen.
Plus N-1 (the orphan scan artifact: TEST_SUITES["full"] is a directory),
N-2 (the L10 pins run twice a day, post-merge and nightly), and N-6 (H-8 has a
fourth instance inside the code — two flag docstrings assert a production
profile the production profile does not have, which moves R-3 decisively
toward "incomplete flag set").
Docs only. No runtime behavior, no flag, no test changed.
Claude