Steward deferral to 2026-08-20; PENDING-147: the ladder trial's counter is a rolling window

The steward deferred the fence work (MOVE 2 / answer key / MOVE 1) to the
morning of 2026-08-20, because two other pieces of work come first and may
reshape it. Recorded in MEMORY.md's Active Session block and in the ledger,
with the dependency flagged as stated-in-kind but not yet named.

Filed while re-measuring N-now under REVIEWED-123 cond. 2 rather than
relaying last night's figure: the count is 47, not 61. The trigger globs
*.jsonl in a directory the harness prunes at 30 days, so it is a rolling
window, not a cumulative count. transcripts 84 is very likely unsatisfiable
at ~1 session/day, and the trial's evidence is expiring — 13 post-intervention
transcripts survive, the 2026-08-07 cohort deleted 2026-09-06.

The gate's own positive controls pass and see none of it: they establish that
threshold comparison works, not that the count means sessions-since-intervention.
Eighth instance of the wrong-subject family (OWED-1), first inside a governance gate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

PENDING.md

@@ -3464,3 +3464,43 @@ The third is the sharpest: **both halves are in the same document**, so this is
 **Awaiting:** Steward. ⚠ **Independently of any ruling: Move 1 and Move 2 await direction and have been unable to say so since 2026-08-13; the parent, ADDENDUM 1 and ADDENDUM 2 have been unable to say so since 2026-08-10.**
 
 ---
+
+## PENDING-147 — The ladder trial's counter is a 30-day ROLLING WINDOW, so `transcripts 84` can never fire and the trial's own evidence is being deleted
+**Date:** 2026-08-19
+**Tag:** [HARDENING]
+**Summary:** REVIEWED-123 condition 2 obliges an N-now report at every wake, and REVIEWED-95's falsifier grades automatically at `transcripts 84`. Both count `*.jsonl` files **currently on disk** in a directory the harness prunes on a 30-day retention policy. The count is therefore **not monotonic**: it read 60 on 08-17, 61 on 08-18 and **47 on 08-19**. Every "N remaining" report ever made, mine included, was a countdown against a number that can go down.
+
+**Measured, not inferred** (2026-08-19 ~11:15 CEST):
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| trigger, verified in code | `governance-drift-check.py:trigger_fired()` → `len(TRANSCRIPTS.glob("*.jsonl")) >= 84` |
+| `TRANSCRIPTS` | `~/.claude/projects/-Users-davidglidden` |
+| count 08-17 / 08-18 / 08-19 | **60 / 61 / 47** |
+| oldest file on disk | Jul 20 08:51 — **exactly 30 days**, matching `cleanupPeriodDays` default 30 |
+| observed recent rate | 1 session/day (Aug 12, 13, 17, 18, 19) |
+| post-intervention transcripts surviving | **13** |
+
+**The two defects, and the second is the serious one.**
+
+**(1) The trigger is very likely unsatisfiable.** A 30-day window at ~1 session/day converges to ~30 files, not 84. The count reached 61 only because July carried bursts (6 on Jul 24, 4 on Aug 6 and Aug 8). Reaching 84 requires ~2.8 sessions/day sustained for a month. **The ladder freeze — ruled as a bounded hold pending grading — is in practice an indefinite freeze wearing the appearance of a bounded one.** That is not what REVIEWED-123 decided; it is what its trigger does.
+
+**(2) ⚠ THE TRIAL'S EVIDENCE IS PERISHABLE AND EXPIRING.** REVIEWED-95 Q6 pre-registered a **20-session** falsifier following the 2026-08-07 intervention. Only **13** post-intervention transcripts still exist, and the earliest cohort (3 files, 2026-08-07) is deleted on **2026-09-06**. The baseline itself was measured *"across the 64 transcripts on disk"* — the same rolling window, so the 14% baseline was already a window measurement rather than a corpus one. **By the time 20 post-intervention sessions have run, the first of them will be gone.** The trial cannot be graded as pre-registered unless the transcripts are preserved, and nothing preserves them.
+
+**⚠ THE POSITIVE CONTROL PASSES AND SEES NONE OF THIS — eighth instance of the wrong-subject family.** `governance-drift-check.py` carries two same-run controls for this very trigger: `transcripts 1` fires, `transcripts 999999` stays silent. Both pass. They establish that **threshold comparison works**; the claim they are cited for is that **the count means sessions-since-intervention**. Subject adjacent to claim — the shape named in REVIEWED-122 condition 9 and queued as OWED-1, here sitting inside a governance gate rather than a census.
+
+**What this does NOT claim.** Not that REVIEWED-123's hold was wrongly decided — its reasoning ((a) is correct under both branches) is untouched by this. Not that the ladder should be unfrozen; that is the steward's and the jurist's. Not that retention is misconfigured — 30 days is the harness default and no one chose it. Only that **the instrument the ruling leans on does not measure what the ruling needs**, and that the evidence is on a deletion clock nobody set.
+
+**Options:**
+- **(i) Preserve first, decide after.** Copy the post-2026-08-07 transcripts out of the pruned directory to a git-tracked location today; re-express the trigger over the preserved set. Cheapest, reversible, and it stops the clock — the only option whose cost rises every day it waits.
+- **(ii) Re-express the trigger as a cumulative counter** — a monotonic session count maintained by the wake/wrap, independent of retention. Correct long-term; does not recover what is already deleted.
+- **(iii) Re-grade the trial at the population that actually exists** (n=13, not 20), stating the reduced n and the retention confound in the write-up. Honest, weaker, and available now.
+- **(iv) Declare the trial ungradeable as pre-registered** and rule the ladder freeze on other grounds.
+
+**Recommendation: (i) immediately and on its own — it is the only leg that expires — then (ii), with (iii) or (iv) as the grading decision once the population is known.** (i) needs no ruling: copying files preserves evidence and changes no instrument, no doctrine and no ladder. ⚠ It is deliberately severed from the rest so that a decision on grading does not delay a preservation whose window is closing.
+
+**⚠ A DISCLOSURE ABOUT THE FINDER.** This was found by re-running N-now rather than quoting yesterday's figure — an obligation the executor already carried under REVIEWED-123 cond. 2 and had discharged the previous evening by reporting 60. Had it been relayed rather than re-measured, the drop would have been invisible. It bears on the literal question logged for this session (who finds defects in the executor's own instruments): this one is *executor re-checking under a standing obligation* — which is to say the obligation found it, not the vigilance.
+
+**Files affected:** `~/dotfiles/scripts/governance-drift-check.py` (trigger); preservation location TBD; `MEMORY.md` N-now line corrected at this filing.
+**Awaiting:** Steward direction on (i)–(iv). ⚠ **(i) is time-critical: the 2026-08-07 cohort is deleted 2026-09-06.**
+
+---