core/docs/assessment/30-gap-register.md

The Gap Register

Assessor: Fable 5 (Phase 4) · Verified at: 8927c563 (2026-07-27) Standing: This is CORE's first live gap register since docs/gaps.md closed its 26th entry. Proposal (for ruling): this register supersedes docs/gaps.md, which is marked historical; two dead registers plus a live one is worse than one live one. Discipline: A gap is an absence the telos requires filled with no explicit deferral ruling. Deferred-with-ruling is not a gap (scripture content is the model). Every entry carries evidence, its deciding authority, and a leverage rank. The register decides nothing. Amended: 2026-07-27 at ed06dd64 (Opus 5, Phase 6) · re-verified 2026-07-28 at 797ebad5 — every amended claim below was re-measured against code at the current tip before landing, and all held (suite sizes 23/13 with the same ten-file delta and no CI-only file; full = ("tests/",); 32 RuntimeConfig booleans, 28 off; the daemon flag set unchanged; ADR-0264 §4.1's supersession banner in place; 18 resolve_promotable_* organs). Four entries carried claims that code, workflows, and an ADR's own supersession banner falsify. Each amendment is marked [AMENDED N-x] inline and derived in 50-execution-plan.md §0: G-5 (the soak ran and passed; the pins run twice a day), G-7 (the orphan scan was an artifact; the mechanism is respecified), G-8 (28 flags, not 17), G-10 (the engineering blocker was discharged 2026-07-26). G-19 gains a note: its exposure is already pinned in-repo.

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Tier A — Frontier-blocking (each blocks a ratified commitment or the telos itself)

G-1 · The ADR-0252 §5 experiment — run to a NO-GO on 2026-07-28; awaiting ratification [AMENDED N-8]

Layer: M3 · Leverage: 1 (highest in the assessment) The ratified governing paradigm's single load-bearing empirical claim — can Cl(4,1) geometry carry relational structure the SME way — was authorized (§8.4), scaffolded, and is now answered: docs/research/sme-experiment-verdict-797ebad5.md records NO-GO against a criterion pre-registered at 299c92be before the run, with a committed report artifact and a pinned deterministic_digest. A well-controlled NO-GO is defined by the ADR as full credit. The refutation is scoped: it holds for embeddings that encode role-structure as point positions and align them with conformal Procrustes under similarity, because the similarity quotient that would deliver attribute-invariance is the same quotient that annihilates structural contrast — measured, not argued (an add-vs-subtract minimal pair aligns at residual exactly 0.0, the two configurations being related by a proper rotation). Across a sweep of attribute weights, every regime where the SME property survives is a regime where attributes contribute nothing.

This entry's original claim — "has never returned a verdict" — was wrong (N-8). The experiment had been run twice, on rnd/structure-mapping-experiment @ fc9d0c14 and rnd/sme-experiment-v2 @ 96e5f468, returning GO both times. Attempt 1 leaked the label into the embedding (disowned by its own successor); attempt 2 was blind and then harvested its separability from except ValueError: res = 1000.0 — a solver exception counted as a distance — on a corpus that was 46/51 outside holdout_dev/v1 with nothing marked, carried duplicate graphs and colliding ids, and whose extractor was never committed. Two GO verdicts sat unmerged and unratified for nine days while the register recorded the item as unrun. Evidence: docs/research/sme-experiment-verdict-797ebad5.md; docs/research/sme-experiment-preregistration-2026-07-28.md; evals/structure_mapping/adr0252_s5/; tests/test_adr_0252_s5_blindness.py. · Authority: Shay's ratification of the verdict, and the §6 build-authorization ruling it unblocks.

G-2 · The #138 fabrications — measured & pinned, fix held for ADR + ratification

Layer: M3 (locus: generate/meaning_graph/reader.py) → blast radius M4 · Leverage: 2 every dog is a mammal → member(every_dog, mammal); Given: furthermore; p implies q; p. → asserted(furthermore) recited back as a served premise. The reader fabricates on 22 constructions beyond its 19-wide verified inventory. The fixes are known — two of the 13 mutations — and are deliberately held because they change what CORE comprehends from user input: serving-path truth behavior, ADR + ratification territory. Entered here pre-labeled per standing instruction; never re-discovered, never fixed by this assessment. Evidence: PR #138 @ c69f9948; realize-phase card (incl. the defensive-gate option: refuse to hold a reading outside the verified inventory). · Authority: the fabrication ADR + Shay's ratification.

G-3 · Reader inventory: 19 constructions against a 1739-construction writer, overlap 6

Layer: M3 · Leverage: 3 The comprehension frontier itself, measured. Standing ruling: close fabrications (G-2) before widening. The widening program after that is the largest single capability gap between CORE and its telos — and its shape depends on G-1's verdict (structure-mapping vs more constructions). Evidence: #138 inventory measurement; M3 card capacity block. · Authority: sequenced rulings (G-2 → G-1 → widening plan).

G-4 · CR-2 — the continuous life has no chooser

Layer: M6 / Candidate Register · Leverage: 4 Confirmed at component depth: drive objects exist (DriveGradientMap — constructed, never read; ExertionMeter — telemetry only); idle mechanisms exist (consolidation, proposal review, contemplation — each flag-gated, each doing one thing); nothing ranks what matters next. The daemon heartbeat advances idle_tick and nothing more ambitious. This is the AGI-grade conceptual absence: everything CORE does is chosen by the operator. Design work, not a flag flip. Evidence: attention-allocation + always-on-process cards; 02-layer-taxonomy.md CR-2. · Authority: design + ruling (does the L10 process own an agenda, governed by what).

G-5 · L10 proof debt — the soak ran and passed; what is owed is the artifact, the pinned digest, and a cadence [AMENDED N-1/N-2/N-4]

Layer: M6 / MV · Leverage: 5 The always-on process is built; the falsifiable harness (H1–H4, holds/bites pairs, vacuity-guarded) is built; and it was run. evals/l10_always_on/contract.md §"The measured result" records a 5000-beat soak with a reboot at beat 2500 (landed 2026-07-19 in aed273b1) in which all four predicates pass: versor_condition flat at 1.389e-07 across all 5000 beats, vault bounded at 6 entries, convergence at beat 1 with the 4999-beat tail at rest, reboot resuming the same life with derived learning intact.

What remains owed is the ceremony, and it is this assessment's own §8 maintenance contract operating on this assessment's own frontier:

• the result is prose in a contract file — no committed machine-readable report, no run SHA, no rerun path;
• deterministic_digest is computed by report.py and pinned nowhere, though the contract's closing line says "Pin it once the lane is trusted so a regression flips it";
• no cadence rules the lane, and the local-first/Mac-runner doctrine makes "nightly" itself a ruling rather than a cron line.

A recorded prose result with no pinned digest is testimony, not evidence — the same failure mode as the map, the ratchet, and the blueprint.

Absorbed 2026-07-28 (R-7, PR-3) — the substrate-liveness ratchet's seven OPEN items. The ratchet is now historical; every one of its open entries was L10-chained, which is this entry, so they live here rather than in a stale instrument:

Item	What it is	Chain
W-003	VaultPromotionPolicy dormant	audit-dependency on L10
W-005	E0/E2 readback modulation absent	W-004 → W-005
W-007	DerivedRecognizer not integrated into the live turn loop	W-003 → recognizer-storage ADR → W-007
W-008	Runtime model (L10) scope adoption	scope landed (#236); spike/ADR pending
W-009	HITL async queue surface	W-008 → W-009
W-017	Automated T1/T2 → T3 promotion absent	W-009 → W-017
W-018	ADR-0080 contemplation not autonomous	W-008 → W-018

Their dependency reasoning is still sound and is the ratchet's lasting contribution; its status column was not, which is why the instrument is retired and its content is not.

Two prior claims in this entry were wrong and are withdrawn. (a) "No suite contains any l10/always_on test" was a scan artifact: TEST_SUITES["full"] = ("tests/",) is a directory, so every test file is trivially in a suite. The true statement is that the five tests/test_l10_*.py files are in no curated suite tuple — reachable only through full. (b) "nothing runs its pins" is false: CI never invokes core test --suite, it runs raw pytest with marker filters, and no L10 file carries quarantine or slow — so the pins execute twice a day, in full-pytest.yml (post-merge) and nightly-full-pytest.yml (cron 0 2 * * *). The correct statement is that nothing runs them on any pre-merge gate. Evidence: M6 + always-on-process cards; evals/l10_always_on/contract.md; core/cli_test.py:13; .github/workflows/{smoke,full-pytest,nightly-full-pytest}.yml. · Authority: execution + the R-9 evidence-standard and cadence ruling.

G-6 · F-6 — the lived learning loop is half-gated

Layer: M6/M5 · Leverage: 6 The daemon forces consolidate_determinations but not accrue_realized_knowledge; the only turn-path writer of realized facts sits behind the unforced flag. As coded, the continuous life may consolidate an empty set. Incomplete flag set, or intended dormancy — neither is documented, and a prior verification doc asserts the opposite of the code (C-5). Evidence: CONTINUOUS_LIFE_CONFIG_FLAGS (chat/always_on_daemon.py:45-49); determine-phase card gating table. · Authority: ruling (one flag + one sentence, or a documented dormancy rationale).

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Tier B — Enforcement & instrument debt (capability exists; the guarantee doesn't)

G-7 · No gate-parity pin and no curated-suite membership check [AMENDED N-1/N-3]

Layer: MV · Leverage: 7 — the highest-leverage single mechanical change in the repository Suite tuples are hand-curated; a test file in zero curated suites is indistinguishable from one that runs everywhere.

The mechanism this entry originally proposed would not have worked. "Every tests/**/*.py belongs to ≥1 suite or an explicit exclusion list" is already satisfied, because TEST_SUITES["full"] = ("tests/",) is a directory — the pin would ship green and prove nothing. A hollow gate by the Third-Door criterion, in the entry proposing to abolish hollow gates.

The correct mechanism is two pins:

1. Gate parity — smoke.yml's path set must equal TEST_SUITES["smoke"], parsed from the workflow file, failing on drift in either direction.
2. Curated-suite membership — every tests/**/test_*.py is in ≥1 suite excluding full, or in a registered exclusion list with a one-line reason.

Pin 1 exists because the two gates have already drifted (see H-12): the local suite is 23 files, smoke.yml is 13, and the 10-file delta includes ADR-0265's denial pin, both ADR-governance pins, volume honesty, and curriculum polarity. Measured parity cost: 429 tests in 46s on the Act runner's own hardware.

CLOSED 2026-07-28 — and pin 1 was withdrawn rather than built (N-9).

Pin 1 was already in the repository, in the only direction that protects anything. test_cli_smoke_suite_covers_ci_smoke_gate has pinned smoke.yml ⊆ TEST_SUITES["smoke"] throughout (which is why every measurement above finds CI-only = 0 — a pin, not luck), under a comment reading "DELIBERATELY ONE-DIRECTIONAL." The symmetric version was written and reverted the same day in 50fa287d (2026-07-25), because AGENTS.md:280 makes GitHub Actions "billing-locked … dead signals" and §277 makes the workflows "secondary observability only." This entry's "the two gates have already drifted" is therefore a misreading of a design decision, and the delta is not a defect to close.

Pin 2 shipped, re-specified — and it caught its author within the hour: PR-6 promoted tests/test_safety_pack.py onto the gate and left it in the baseline; the both-directions half failed the very next smoke run, and the count went 749 → 748. Pin 2 shipped, re-specified. Measured 749 of 877 test files in no curated suite. The mechanism this entry proposes — assign every orphan, or list it with a reason — is hollow at that scale for the same reason the entry itself identifies: glob topic-suites satisfy the assertion while changing nothing about what runs. All four demonstrated incidents were caused by a newly landed orphan, never a legacy one, so what shipped is a ratchet: tests/test_suite_membership.py + tests/full_only_baseline.txt, blocking new orphans, enforced in both directions, count pinned. Three sabotages observed red.

REOPENED, PARTLY — 2026-07-28, by the arc's own full-tree run. The ratchet closes membership. It does not close execution, and the difference is not academic: the first full-tree run of this arc found tests/test_ratification_ceremony.py red on main, in a curated suite (teaching), and run by no gate — the pre-push gate invokes smoke + the warmed_session lane + deductive, and nothing invokes teaching. That is exactly the hollow-gate failure this entry's own re-specification warned about — "a curated suite nobody runs is the same non-guarantee as full, wearing a different name" — demonstrated live, on a pin guarding ratification-corpus byte compatibility.

PIN 3 LANDED 2026-07-28 — tests/test_suite_reachability.py, on the gate. What PR-4 owed was a third pin: reachability. Every curated suite must be reachable from a gate tier (scripts/hooks/pre-push / local-ci.sh), or be declared post-merge-only with a stated reason. teaching, packs, algebra, sensorium, cognition, runtime and the rest are currently in the unreachable set — they have members, and no gate calls them. Membership was never the guarantee; execution is.

Shipped as baseline + ratchet, sized to the measurement rather than to the rule: 21 curated suites, 2 gate-reachable (smoke, deductive). Demanding 19 post-merge-only justifications in one sitting is the ceremony failure already rejected for the 749-file membership baseline. So the pin freezes the 19-suite gap, fails on growth, enforces both directions (a promoted suite must leave the baseline), verifies its declared gate set against the shell so it cannot go vacuous, and pins the count. Two sabotages observed red — a new curated suite with no gate caller, and a GATE_SUITES value drifting from pre-push/local-ci.sh.

What pin 3 deliberately does not do — and what is now Shay's to decide: which of the 19 belong on the gate. That costs gate time and is a real decision. teaching is the obvious first candidate: it just shipped a red ratification pin that no gate ran. Recorded as the open half of this entry.

The gap is 15, not 19, and the open half is now a scheduled plan item. PR-3b (Wave 1, per R-7) deleted four aliases with zero --suite references anywhere — refusal, margin, rotor, inner-loop — taking the curated set 21 → 17 and the unreachable set 19 → 15, by deletion, which costs no gate time at all. That is the ratchet turning the way it is meant to. The remaining fifteen are each named in AGENTS.md, CLI help, a README or an ADR, so deletion is not available for them and promotion is the only way the number falls further. The decision was a parenthetical in this entry and in PR-4 — which is precisely how fifteen suites came to be unreachable without anyone choosing it — so it is now PR-4b in 50-execution-plan.md §4, sized, recommended (teaching alone, first), and prepared so ruling costs one word.

One real gap the entry was circling, now fixed: the parity pin lived in fast, which the pre-push gate does not run — the pin guarding the gate did not run on the gate. It is now in smoke. Evidence: tests/test_suite_membership.py; tests/full_only_baseline.txt; tests/test_cli_test_suites.py:49; 50fa287d; AGENTS.md:275-280. · Authority: discharged mechanically; no R-14 ruling is owed for any of it.

G-8 · No flag-default register [AMENDED N-7]

Layer: cross-cut · Leverage: 8 RuntimeConfig is a single frozen dataclass with 32 boolean fields: 28 default False, 4 default True (allow_cross_language_recall, use_salience, discourse_planner, deduction_serving_enabled — the last ratified ON by ADR-0256). Three are daemon-forced (persist_session_state, consolidate_determinations, strict_identity_continuity). No document states the set, which defaults are deliberate posture vs accumulated hesitancy, or what evidence would flip each. The largest lever in the system, unregistered. The register format already exists in-repo: the ratified-ledger pattern (declare absence policy in the table, not the call site — ADR-0263 Rule 5).

(This entry originally said "seventeen." The verified count is 28 default-off. That two counts of the same set differ by eleven is itself the finding: nothing in the repository distinguishes a capability flag from a policy or deployment flag, which is exactly the classification the register must make.) Evidence: core/config.py at ed06dd64 (32 bool fields, 28 = False, 4 = True); daemon trio (Phase 3). · Authority: documentation PR + per-flag evidence bars set by ruling (R-4).

G-9 · Enforcement pins unverified for three doctrine-level prohibitions

Layer: M1 / MG · Leverage: 9 (a) No verified failing pin for the no-approximate-recall law (would a cosine ranker actually fail a test?); (b) no pin that fails when a layer bypasses governance entirely (as distinct from governance working when called); (c) safety-pack non-swappability not verified as mechanically enforced. All three are law in AGENTS.md; law-enforced-by-review is weaker than law-enforced-by-test. CLOSED 2026-07-28 — PR-6. The verification pass found the three in different states, and the differences are the finding.

(a) Exact recall — was the real gap, and worse than stated. The question "would a cosine ranker actually fail a test?" had the answer no, almost anywhere. One import ban existed, over exactly one file (core/physics/wave_manifold.py, in test_third_door_cohesion.py — itself in no curated suite). Meanwhile generate/realize/recall.py, which is the recall path, states the prohibition in its module docstring — "an exact, deterministic equality scan (no cosine / HNSW / ANN)" — with nothing behind it. Law asserted where it executes, enforced nowhere: the H-8 failure mode applied to a prohibition. Now scanned across vault/, generate/realize/, generate/meaning_graph/, field/, recognition/ for banned ANN libraries and for hand-rolled cosine* definitions — because an import ban only stops the convenient version, and ten lines of numpy is the realistic way a well-meaning contributor violates this.

(b) Governance bypass — the pin now exists and is exact. INV-07 proves governance works when called; nothing proved it could not be skipped. The mechanism: every function in chat/runtime.py that constructs a TurnVerdicts must also invoke safety_check.check, and every such call must pass self.safety_pack (a bypass need not skip the call — it can substitute the pack). Measured at close: two verdict-constructing functions, both governed.

(c) Safety-pack non-swappability — was already well pinned; its gap was reach, not coverage. tests/test_safety_pack.py pins unratified-pack-refused-in-production, missing-companion-report-refused, seal-failure-refused, path-traversal-rejected, missing-pack-fails-closed. It ran in no curated suite — a fail-closed safety contract verified only after merge. Promoted onto the gate; the new pin guards that placement rather than duplicating the substance.

Verification: four sabotages, each observed red and each caught by its own pin — a banned library imported on a recall path, a hand-rolled cosine ranker, a serving path assembling verdicts without governing, and the safety pack demoted off the gate. Evidence: tests/test_doctrine_prohibitions.py; tests/test_safety_pack.py; AGENTS.md §"Exact recall"; generate/realize/recall.py. · Authority: discharged mechanically; no ruling was owed.

G-10 · Curriculum SERVE is blocked by one ruling, and its ledger doesn't exist [AMENDED N-5]

Layer: M5 · Leverage: 10 The engineering blocker this entry named does not exist. ADR-0264 §4.1 carries a banner directly beneath its own heading: "SELF-SUPERSEDED by this ADR's own R5, discharged 2026-07-26. The heading is no longer true of the running system. … R5 removed that: compilation is query-scoped, so a family of any size answers. With the cap gone, four bands would earn SERVE the moment a ledger is sealed — physics·causal, systems_software·causal, and philosophy_theology·{modal,contrast}." Query-scoping already landed; this entry quoted a superseded heading past its own correction.

What survives, and is now the whole of the blockage: reliability is commitment precision and a correct UNKNOWN is a commitment, so a band clears θ_SERVE on non-commitments alone (conservative_floor(660,660) = 0.990046). The licensable evidence is 99.0–99.98% non-entailed and max entailed volume in any band is 9. chat/data/curriculum_serve_ledger.json is deliberately absent (the one honest missing_ok=True in production) and core proposal-queue reseal refuses a license without --allow-new-licenses, so nothing is licensed while the outcome-mix ruling is unmade. A committed ledger is necessarily an earning one. Evidence: M5 card; ADR-0264 §4.1 supersession banner + §5 (open); docs/research/curriculum-practice-producer-2026-07-26.md §1; chat/curriculum_serve_license.py:40-52. · Authority: the outcome-mix ruling (R-8) alone — no engineering prerequisite remains.

G-11 · Identity enforcement has no stated authorization bar

Layer: MG · Leverage: 11 identity_wave_gate is off and "not authorized" — a deliberate posture. What's missing is the criterion: no document states what evidence would authorize live refusal. Scoring-without-blocking is an honest state only while the path to blocking is defined. Evidence: MG card; runtime_contracts.md identity contract. · Authority: ruling (set the bar).

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Tier C — One-line rulings (cheap to close; expensive only if left silent)

G-12 · CR-3 efferent action — deferred, or out of telos?

No system-level statement exists either way; the only adjacent text is one bench's v1 prohibition. The alignment posture is arguably stronger with action explicitly deferred — the ruling costs one line. Authority: ruling.

G-13 · CR-4 temporal self-location — a stance before the L10 spike

Determinism bans clocks; continuity implies lived time; the 24h+ no-drift requirement cannot be stated precisely without a stance on "now." The spike (G-5) should not be designed with an accidental answer. Authority: ruling (can be a paragraph in the soak's contract).

G-14 · CR-1 attention governance — the one-page ADR

Own use_salience, the two underived constants, the self-narrowing budget feedback, and the InhibitionMask disposition. Mechanism verified live and sound; only the governance is absent. Authority: ADR (one page — the card is its draft evidence base).

G-15 · The daemon's ratifying ADR — CLOSED 2026-07-28 (R-12a)

chat/always_on_daemon.py was unowned while ADR-0146 explicitly rejected the daemon shape it implements. Whatever the right answer, the record contradicted the code (see H-8a). Authority: ADR amendment or a new short ADR.

Closed by amendment, not by a new ADR — and the choice mattered. ADR-0146 now carries an addendum owning the daemon: the Shape-A rejection stands as reasoning (a daemon does require supervision infrastructure Shape B does not), and the infrastructure was subsequently built. The three items its "What is NOT in Scope" excluded are each mapped to where they are implemented — fcntl.flock single-instance lock acquired before any signal or runtime setup, SIGINT/SIGTERM graceful stop, and the load-time strict-identity guard that makes a daemon restart the same life or nothing. Shape B remains the persistence model and the CLI default; the daemon is an additional process shape layered on it. A new ADR for a shape shipped six weeks earlier would have added a document without adding a decision.

The stale bullet carries an inline pointer, not just a note at the end. H-8's mechanism is that an authoritative-looking line converts "I should check" into "I already checked" — a reader who stops at the excluded-scope list is exactly the reader this gap is about, and they never reach a trailing addendum.

Evidence: docs/adr/ADR-0146-…md §"What is NOT in Scope" + Addendum; chat/always_on_daemon.py:48,82,145; introduced 18e25580 (2026-06-14, the same commit adding both the lock and the signals — established only after deepening a shallow 168-commit clone to 2340, since the shallow boundary was reporting a false date).

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Tier D — Latent & carried-forward (recorded so nothing silently drops)

• G-16 · ADR-0265's defect class survives in _inflect_predicate's aspect arms (generate/templates.py:79) — 10,530/16,146 template points, not reachable today. Latent, recorded from the prior arc; becomes live if aspect arms become reachable. Authority: the widening program (G-3) must clear it first.

• G-17 · Non-text ingest — 59 sensorium modules, no serving path, no entry criterion; projection heads do not exist. Position paper is honest about this. Needs either an entry criterion or an explicit deferral ruling (the falsification bench is the standard the track should be held to when it moves). Authority: ruling.

• G-18 · Identity-divergence curriculum may still bypass formation's gates — known gap since 2026-05-17 (teaching_order.md); unverified at this SHA. Authority: Phase-3-style verification pass, then a routing PR.

• G-19 · Wilson/replay evidence shortfall — 21/25 ratified bands short if replays were counted as independent trials (see H-1 for the mechanism). Recorded here as evidence debt on existing licenses; the counting fix is the hindrance entry. Note (Phase 6): the exposure is already pinned in-repo — tests/test_volume_honesty.py (ADR-0264 R9, in the local smoke gate) pins the 21-of-25 shortfall "in BOTH directions" and calls its inventory "an EXPOSURE INVENTORY, not an approved baseline." So the open work is applying the demotions, not discovering them, and that pin moves in the same PR. Authority: ADR amendment + re-count, authorized by R-13.

• G-22 · Three tests are red on main, and were red before this arc (new, 2026-07-28) — found by the arc's first full-tree run (3 failed, 13403 passed), and reproduced identically at 797ebad5, so not arc-caused. tests/test_ratification_ceremony.py::{test_row_is_byte_compatible_with_the_committed_corpus, test_unreviewed_status_is_refused} and tests/test_claims_md_is_current.py::test_claims_md_matches_generator_output. Diagnosis: the code is correct and the pins are stale. ChainRecord.__slots__ gained polarity (ADR-0264 R1), and the serializer deliberately omits it for affirmative rows (teaching/ratification.py:119) — so a test that builds ChainRecord(**{k: row[k] for k in __slots__}) KeyErrors on a correctly-serialized row. Same class as H-8e: ratified design right, pin not updated. Consequence: the ratification-corpus byte-compatibility guarantee and the unreviewed-status refusal have been unverified since ADR-0264 R1 landed. test_ratification_ceremony.py is curated (teaching) but ungated; test_claims_md_is_current.py is an orphan. RULED 2026-07-28 (Shay): 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. FIXED, and the CLAIMS.md half turned out to be the more serious of the two:

• The two ceremony pins were stale against correct code (H-8e's class). polarity defaults to AFFIRMATIVE and is deliberately omitted from affirmative rows; the pins iterated __slots__ and indexed the row, so they broke on every correctly-serialized row. Now built from the row's own keys, letting absent fields take their defaults — which restores the guarantee rather than weakening it. Ratification-corpus byte compatibility and unreviewed-status refusal had been unverified since ADR-0264 R1 landed.

• CLAIMS.md was publishing a superseded evidence digest for a licensed capability. Commit f9e9cc0c (2026-07-26, "the deduction lane hashes the prose it serves") strengthened the lane, rewrote evals/deduction_serve/report.json, and updated the authoritative pin in scripts/verify_lane_shas.py:60 to c855d55c… — recording the old 0b461a5a… as superseded on line 56. It did not regenerate CLAIMS.md. So for two days the published capability claim for deduction_serve_v1 pointed at evidence that no longer existed. The claim text never changed; only the pointer was wrong — but a claim whose evidence digest does not match its evidence is exactly the failure the digest exists to prevent.

• The drift had propagated to a third artifact — this directory. 10-layer-cards/M3-comprehension-reasoning.md cited the same stale 0b461a5a… as its would-fail-if-absent evidence. Corrected.

The mechanism, and why it is G-7's story again: one commit updated the lane, its verifier and its test, and missed one downstream artifact. The pin that guards that artifact — tests/test_claims_md_is_current.py — exists and is an orphan in no curated suite, so nothing surfaced it until this arc ran the full tree once. Registered on the gate as part of the fix.

• G-21 · The math reader decides 1.0% of holdout_dev/v1 (new, 2026-07-28) — measured while building the §5 corpus: parse_and_solve returns a selected graph for 5 of 500 held-out cases, all carrying the same relational skeleton (compare_multiplicative); on the public lane, 24/150. This is a sharper measurement of the comprehension frontier than G-3's construction count, on the corpus the project already treats as its held-out standard, and it is why ADR-0252 §5.1's four-structure corpus is not extractable today. Distinct from G-3 (which counts constructions the general reader admits); this counts cases decided on a standing eval corpus. Authority: the widening program (G-3) + a ruling on whether holdout decision-rate becomes a tracked lane metric.

• G-20 · The refusal_reason materialisation — typed refusal evidence exists and is discarded at the public str boundary; the plumbing for materialisation already landed. Cross-listed as H-3. Authority: small ADR (anticipated by the ADR-0024 chain).

• G-23 · The domain↔pack binding is stated twice and checked in one direction (new, 2026-07-28; pinned the same day) — core/capability/domains.py's DOMAIN_PACKS declares domain→pack membership for the capability ledger; each packs/data/<pack>/manifest.json independently declares domain_id. domain_contract_predicates.py P3 validates domain_id → a known ledger domain and is the only binding check that existed. Nothing validated the reverse, and P3 passes vacuously on a manifest with no domain_id at all — the same shape as its own test_pack_without_contract_reports_absent. Measured: 7 of 9 bound, 0 contradictory, 2 absent — en_core_cognition_v1 and en_core_meta_v1, both placed in philosophy_theology, which is one of the four bands queued to earn a SERVE license behind R-8. The domain whose license is next to be earned is the one whose binding exists in only one place.

  Why nothing caught it: tests/test_domain_contract_predicates.py exercises P1–P9 entirely against synthetic tmp_path manifests — never against the real nine — and is itself in no curated suite. A predicate proven correct on fabricated input and never run on the real input is this arc's defect class stated precisely: its success state and "it never ran here" are indistinguishable.

  How it was found, recorded because the method matters: an external assessment proposed collapsing the pack/domain machinery, reasoning explicitly from a directory listing. Every specific it gave was falsified by opening the files (see the 2026-07-28 triage in 31-hindrance-audit.md) — but the seam it pointed at was real. Bad method, useful direction; both halves are worth recording.

  Pinned, not fixed — tests/test_domain_pack_binding.py, on the gate. Freezes the 2-pack gap, fails on contradiction always and on absence unless baselined, enforces both directions, pins the reverse direction (a pack may not self-assign a ledger domain — clean across all 30 packs today), and guards its own parse against vacuity. Four sabotages observed red. The fix is deliberately not here: whether en_core_cognition_v1 is a philosophy_theology domain pack or merely grouped under that domain for ledger accounting is a ratification-adjacent content question. Authority: R-8 / PR-14, where that band's license is decided.

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What is not in this register, and why

• Scripture/theology content — deferred by explicit ruling (2026-07-26); the model case for deferred-is-not-missing.
• Benchmark wins — excluded by the completeness criterion itself (taxonomy §6): architectural distinctiveness is the target; benchmarks are downstream validation.
• Sociality, affect, full embodiment — considered and not registered, with reasons, in the taxonomy's Candidate Register; importing them would violate Pillar II.
• Rust-backend default — an open question with a stated blocker (crates.io unreachable under sandbox), not a gap; the measured case for urgency dissolved (0.22%).