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 CLAIMS.md PUBLISHED A SUPERSEDED EVIDENCE DIGEST FOR A LICENSED CAPABILITY.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recording the superseded 0b461a5a on line 56.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
PR-6 promoted tests/test_safety_pack.py onto the gate and left it listed in
tests/full_only_baseline.txt. test_baseline_has_no_stale_entries failed the very
next smoke run, naming the file and the direction.
That is the both-directions half of the ratchet doing exactly the work it was
written for, roughly an hour after it landed, against the person who wrote it.
A baseline that silently keeps entries it no longer needs stops being a
measurement and becomes a story about one — so the failure is the feature.
Recorded in the pin's own docstring and in G-7, because a mechanism catching its
author is better evidence than a sabotage test: the sabotage was contrived, this
was not.
Baseline: 749 -> 748. The ratchet only turns down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wcw2pnMBwyvmNyQg4uPEt4
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
Claude