The 2026-05-16 jurist settlement deferred TEI-native authoring "until
Cluster A's MD-with-sidecar form is operational". Cluster A became
operational, the condition was met, and nobody looked — it surfaced months
later by accident, while reading an unrelated document for another purpose.
The steward's stated reason for settling it today was not the format question
at all: "I abhor deferring so many things and then forgetting them."
A deferral is a claim — "not yet". When its trigger fires the substrate
contradicts that claim, which is exactly what this instrument detects, so
check 8 belongs here rather than in a new register. A deferred decision now
declares a machine-checkable trigger in a comment block:
<!-- DEFERRED-DECISION: <slug>
since: YYYY-MM-DD
owner: steward | jurist | executor
trigger: glob <pat> | path-exists <p> | date <YYYY-MM-DD> | manual
discriminator: <where the deciding evidence is written down> -->
`manual` never auto-fires and is listed rather than checked — an honest way
to record a deferral whose condition cannot be mechanised, instead of
inventing a proxy. Proxies are the failure being fixed: the old trigger stood
in for "behavioural evidence on high-fidelity sources" and came true without
producing any, because neither named test case was ever manifested.
Scans */docs/**/*.md under ~/_Dev and ~/dotfiles; glob and path-exists
resolve against the containing repo's root. First and only entry today is
D-5 (tei-native), correctly reported as not due — no protocol spec exists yet.
Controls, five, per the standing epistemic standard. The load-bearing one is
the discriminating half: the evaluator must NOT fire on an unmet condition,
because a checker that fires on everything reports nothing. Red-witnessed
end-to-end by temporarily pointing D-5's trigger at a path that does exist:
reported COME DUE with slug, owner, deferral date, trigger and file; restored
after, and the spec's working tree verified clean.
Also fixed in passing: this file's own report block was briefly duplicated
and misplaced by a `str.replace` without a count, which substituted both
`sys.exit(0)` occurrences including the early-exit branch. Caught by reading
the output — the deferred-decisions line printed twice.
Wake-up §2.c updated to describe all three of the script's reports, and to
require that a COME DUE item be surfaced in the briefing under "What's
unresolved". That is a change to the wake protocol, not only to a
description: a mechanism nobody reads is not a mechanism.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NEWjLBP4quXbDPDL2byEzZ
REVIEWED-87's original entry (PENDING-99, the fidelity_equivalence@3
design-gate ruling of 2026-08-05) was replaced this afternoon by the
PENDING-111 amendment block placed at the same heading. The amendment's own
"**Amends:** REVIEWED-87" line then pointed at a record no longer in the
file, and the register could no longer answer what was ruled under 87 — the
register's whole job.
Recoverable, and recovered: the entry was intact in git HEAD and the
underlying jurist ruling is separately filed at
studium-engine/docs/quoted-tier-acceptance-JURIST-RULING-2026-08-05.md. But
the register entry uniquely held Q2's reframing (the route to PENDING-100),
Q3 REJECTED and its strengthened basis, Q5 CONCUR D-1, and the finding that
"the decisive sentence was one the executor had read and not surfaced, which
a verbatim-containment check passes every time."
CAUSE, and it is the executor's. The handoff draft was headed
"## REVIEWED-87 — AMENDMENT 2026-08-07" and described as "the block to
place", with no instruction that it join rather than replace. That reads as a
replacement heading, and the steward's reading of it was reasonable. The
copy-paste-clean discipline exists so a placement cannot be ambiguous, and
this draft was ambiguous.
NOTHING DETECTED IT. It surfaced because a diff was read by hand and the tell
was a deletion count on what should have been a pure append. This is
`removing-a-claim-is-not-removing-the-reliance` at the governance layer: the
amendment's dependency on the original survived the original's removal and
became invisible.
Check 7 added to governance-drift-check.py, which already runs at every wake:
every `## REVIEWED-N — AMENDMENT` requires an un-amended `## REVIEWED-N`
entry, and every `**Amends:** REVIEWED-N` must resolve. Reported separately
from the CLAUDE.md findings so that report's own claim stays true.
Controls per the standing epistemic standard, and the third is the lesson of
the day — a check that has never fired on a known-bad input is unestablished,
so the instrument is run against a synthetic reproduction of the actual
failure. Red-witnessed on a copy of the live file with the deletion replayed:
fires both findings. 11/11 controls pass.
Detection only. REVIEWED.md is [ESCALATE], the steward's hand
(Constitutional Constraint #1); the restoration above was placed by the
steward, not by the executor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NEWjLBP4quXbDPDL2byEzZ
PENDING-76 remanded by jurist — required count returned 0 of 11 (the package's own
IV.2 refinement proved its target category empty); executor recommends withdrawal.
PENDING-77 (5 structural defects) and PENDING-78 (.app preferences) released by the
ruling from needing it. Drift check reports contradicted state claims at every wake
and corrects nothing — detection needs no authorization, correction does.
MEMORY.md compacted 20.5KB -> 17.1KB (budget hook); prior Active Session demoted to
MEMORY-reference.md. CLAUDE.md and REVIEWED.md untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Xefg5EXwcpd9RMAr63dWrD
