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@@ -4300,3 +4300,55 @@ Refresh-driving was adopted because a hook-gated tick cannot fire when the stewa
 **Three-way, and it should be decided as three rather than discovered as two:** what the proportions are of · what counts as content · whether idle presence is reachable at all. **The first two jointly determine the third**, and the filed ≈2.3/day was computed under none of the combinations — it needs re-deriving once they are fixed, as the jurist says.
 
 **Awaiting:** nothing. After the beacon; nothing here blocks Tuesday.
+
+### AMENDMENT 5 — 2026-08-22 — the three decisions collapse to one; a fourth option; and it moves in §4's order
+
+#### (a) The collapse — jurist's argument, adopted
+
+**Reading 1 does not survive contact with the output.** If content is events-only and a draw comes up *notable* on an empty window, the fool has nothing to say. It either stays silent — **which is reading 2 with different bookkeeping** — or it speaks from something other than events, which is already the standing-state answer. **Reading 1 with events-only content is incoherent at the point of utterance, not merely dilutive.**
+
+**And if standing state counts as content, no window is ever empty** — there are always thirty-odd open items. The empty-window case disappears, readings 1 and 2 become the same thing, and ≈2.3/day means what it claims.
+
+**So it is one decision with a dependent, not three.** *What counts as content* determines whether *what the proportions are of* has any behavioural consequence at all. AMENDMENT 4's three-way framing is superseded.
+
+#### (b) Standing state fails §2, and my defence of it was wrong
+
+I argued that remarking on standing state is not content-keyed *judgement* — §8 forbids assessing whether a thing is any good, not noticing that it exists.
+
+⚠ **That defence does not hold.** *"PENDING-4 has been open since April"* is a **factual claim about the docket**, checkable against `PENDING.md`, and the fool would be right or wrong about it. **§2 says gradeable means the design has failed** — and it does not distinguish evaluative claims from factual ones. Existence and duration claims are checkable, which is the whole of what §2 bars.
+
+It also **duplicates `governance-drift-check.py`**, which is where the PROCEDURE axis was sent for precisely this reason (REVIEWED-125 §5a).
+
+**A cleaner test than §2 currently states, offered for the doctrine:** not *"is it a judgement?"* but **"could someone check it and find it wrong?"** Standing-state utterances fail it. Character utterances cannot fail it, because they make no claim about the world.
+
+#### (c) OPTION 4 — the window supplies a TYPE, never material
+
+*The jurist's, and it is what the reference implementation actually did:* the buddy's reactions were canned strings keyed to **event type** — success, error, large diff — never to content. **It never analysed anything. Its utterances came from its character.**
+
+Applied here: the window supplies at most *something happened · nothing happened · something failed*. **The utterance comes from the soul.**
+
+| property | under option 4 |
+|---|---|
+| empty windows | none, in the relevant sense |
+| idle presence | reachable |
+| proportions | mean what they say |
+| gradeability | nothing produced is checkable |
+| drift toward checking | impossible — it never had material to check |
+
+**It is also the tradition's fool** — Lear's Fool needs no docket; he riffs, sings, quotes proverbs. **And it is the steward's own Oblique Strategies deck arriving from the other side: a fixed deck has no content window at all, and the deck was the original object.**
+
+**The cost, stated as cost:** a fool speaking from character lands less reliably than one speaking from material. Against which — *the capybara had no governance corpus and pointed the steward right repeatedly*, and that is the only working precedent any party here has.
+
+#### ⚠ (d) EXECUTOR ADDITION — option 4 concentrates all risk into one irreversible act, and that moves it in §4's order
+
+**Under options 1–3 the soul supplies register. Under option 4 the soul supplies the ENTIRE utterance.**
+
+§7: generated **once** from the bones, stored permanently, **never hand-edited and never regenerated for taste**. §10: **being frequently wrong is not grounds for retirement** — *"those are the specification."*
+
+**So under option 4 a soul that produces poor utterances cannot be fixed and cannot be retired for it.** All of the fool's value routes through a single irreversible generation. That is not an argument against option 4 — it is the same no-reroll discipline the bones carry, applied where it now matters far more — but the steward should choose it knowing the weight has moved.
+
+**Consequence for the order, and it is actionable:** §4 lists *5. bones derived · 6. soul generated*. **No interval is specified between them.** If the content decision determines how much the soul must carry, it should be settled **between step 5 and step 6** — after Tuesday's draw, before the soul exists. Generating the soul first and deciding afterwards would fix the fool's entire voice before knowing whether that voice is the whole instrument or only its register.
+
+**This touches nothing pre-registered.** The axes are ratified, the seed rule is filed, the draw is well-defined under every option. Only the placement of a later decision changes.
+
+**Awaiting:** steward, on the content question — four options, after the beacon. **Not before the soul.**