[ESCALATE] PENDING-90 — first L2 transfer: checker position in the calibration loop

Five months of microcosm work has produced material for CapableMind's L2 and
transferred none of it. This is the first transfer: a candidate amendment
carrying Constraint 6 into the spec corpus, landing where CapableMind actually
evaluates its own self-adjustment — the trust calibration loop.

Tagged ESCALATE, not PROPOSAL: Change 4 proposes an autonomy ceiling, which is
constitutional, and this file's own rule escalates those unconditionally.
Checked first for a pre-existing authorization covering the L2 transfer —
there is none, so the boundary is real rather than manufactured.

Ledger records the sixth instance of the day's pattern, caught inside the wake
that inherited it: the pulling thread's own checkable claim — "there is no
amendments/ directory in thinking/David/" — was false. There is; 14 files,
last touched 2026-06-13. The honest claim narrows to: L1 material has
transferred through this machinery within the last eight weeks, the chamber
material has not.

Also recorded under "What held": the wake's substrate-check rule fired a second
time, on the thread itself. Provisional answer to the session's own literal
question — the census instrument that failed five times yesterday fired today
when written into a *procedure* rather than banked as a *lesson*. One datum.

Amendment committed separately at CapableMind-AI 5326704.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc

PENDING.md

@@ -696,3 +696,17 @@ Measured against the register itself before acting. Four corrections; the item's
 **Recommendation:** (c). The same shape as the Fool trials and the 2025 archive read: pre-register what counts as a clustered miss *before* reading, or the executor grades its own errors after seeing them. Note the standing hazard — this is the executor measuring whether the executor is checked, which is the contaminated form; the grading criteria must be fixed in advance and the raw classifications left checkable.
 **Files affected:** none yet; a measurement, not a change. Output would be a dated record beside the doctrine package.
 **Awaiting:** Steward direction on (a)/(b)/(c), and on whether the executor is the right party to run a measurement of its own oversight at all — the jurist is no more independent here, so this may be steward-only work.
+
+## PENDING-90 — First L2 transfer: checker position in the calibration loop
+**Date:** 2026-08-02
+**Tag:** [ESCALATE]
+**Summary:** A candidate amendment carrying the differently-biased-checkers doctrine (Constraint 6) into the CapableMind spec corpus is drafted and awaiting steward authorization; it proposes an autonomy-ceiling rule, which is L2-constitutional.
+**Rationale:** Five months of microcosm work has produced material for L2 and transferred none of it — `risk-manager-spec.md`, `personality-traits-spec.md` and `mindset-runtime-spec.md` were last touched 2026-03-08. This is the first transfer. It lands where CapableMind actually evaluates its own self-adjustment: the trust calibration loop. Censused finding — across `risk-manager-spec.md` v0.2 and `adaptation-chain-spec.md` v1.3, no field records who checked a decision or how that checker is positioned relative to the decider (grep terms: reviewer, reviewed_by, checked_by, approver, approved_by, independen*, second_opinion, adversarial; one unrelated hit). The base entry records `initiator` and `authorization` — who made the change and whether an operator granted it — but when `authorization.required` is false, which is the entire self-adjustment case, no checker is in the record at all.
+**Why ESCALATE and not PROPOSAL:** Change 4 proposes that threshold *loosening* driven by a same-formation calibration be recorded but not applied — the system may observe that it judged itself well calibrated, but may not widen its own autonomy on that basis. That is an autonomy ceiling, i.e. constitutional, and per this file's own rule L2 constitutional changes escalate unconditionally. Checked first for an existing authorization covering the L2 transfer; there is none, so the boundary is real rather than manufactured.
+**What was done:** the candidate amendment only, at `CapableMind-AI/docs/thinking/David/amendments/amendment-checker-position-calibration-loop.md`. Nothing under `docs/specs/` was touched. Per that repo's amendment-first discipline, amendments are candidates and the synthesis PR is the gated act.
+**Verification:** all 21 quotations mechanically contained against source (Constraint 6, both specs, ADR-014), 9/9 positive controls absent, instrument verified. Three controls — `readonly accuracy_source`, `readonly calibration_source`, `CheckerPosition` — confirm the proposed fields are genuinely new rather than re-proposals. The census *negative* is grep-established, not containment-established; the instrument cannot verify an absence.
+**Options:** (a) authorize as drafted, executor opens the synthesis PR once the owed Introspection API types are written; (b) authorize the direction but require the jurist design-gate it first, as with the doctrine itself; (c) hold — the doctrine is provisional and it may be premature to encode a provisional doctrine into a build-ready spec; (d) reject the autonomy-ceiling clause specifically and take the recording fields alone, which are non-constitutional.
+**Recommendation:** (b). The doctrine reached Constraint 6 through a jurist design-gate, and this is its first load-bearing application; the same gate should govern the transfer. Note the standing limit the amendment itself carries: the doctrine may never be cited as assurance that anything was caught, so the fields make self-checks *legible* and nothing more. If the steward prefers speed over symmetry, (d) is the safe subset — the recording fields stand on their own and (a)-minus-Change-4 loses little.
+**Open question the reviewer should press first:** who declares the position? If the calibrating party declares its own, that declaration is itself a self-report. The honest answer may be that position is derivable from `initiator` and the facet ID rather than declared — which would make it mechanical. Not settled in the draft.
+**Files affected:** one new candidate file in `thinking/`; on authorization, `adaptation-chain-spec.md` §4.11/§4.12 and `risk-manager-spec.md` §6/§6.1/§9.
+**Awaiting:** Steward authorization, and direction on (a)/(b)/(c)/(d).