"Principal ethics architect" is correct, and co-author besides — so the
preferences carried the right text and ~/CLAUDE.md L27 is the stale record. The
executor does not edit that file (Constitutional Constraint #1); the replacement
line went to the steward with its line number.
Worth recording which way this fell: the conflict resolved in favour of the
document with NO instrument watching it. governance-drift-check.py covers
CLAUDE.md and nothing covers the preferences, and the uninstrumented document was
the accurate one. Continuous maintenance buys currency, not authority — the
memory-layer rule, confirmed against a case that could have embarrassed it.
Divorce signed 30 March 2026, closed. Recorded as a completed past event rather
than a pending one: a date on a finished act is inheritable, where a date after
"awaiting" decays into a false present.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
Both in files, not in a transcript. An hour ago the resumption point pointed at
Cowork edits "drafted verbatim in PENDING-81" that existed only in a discarded
transcript; this is that lesson applied rather than restated.
Preferences: drafted from the live text the steward pasted, so this repairs rather
than rewrites. Doctrine and identity sections preserved verbatim — PENDING-81
established they do not drift, and no census licensing their deletion was run.
Every repair sits in §Standing Context, now tiered three ways because its parts
fail three ways: Projects (generated, dated, replaced wholesale), Live questions
(hand-held but phrased as questions, since "what has to be true of L1 first?"
survives time where "L2 blocked pending L1 stability" went quietly false), and
Personal (steward-held, excluded from the generator by design).
Two divergences flagged rather than decided: "principal ethics architect" vs
CLAUDE.md's "principal architect", and the divorce entry's four-month-past date
whose operative instruction was preserved exactly.
REVIEWED drafts: three, not two. The closure rule matches PENDING-<n> to
REVIEWED-<n> by number, so PENDING-78 closed only in REVIEWED-81's prose would be
listed as open at every wake forever. REVIEWED-78 is a stub that makes a real
closure legible to the instrument.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
