The three-party model asks Claude.app to rule on items it cannot read. Steward
confirmed 2026-07-28 that local MCP servers are exposed to the app's *chat*
surface — and always have been, predating Cowork by about a year. My earlier
framing ("chat, not only Cowork") had the relationship backwards: it is "chat,
always; Cowork, only while its loop still runs locally," and local Cowork is the
mode being phased out as default. The jurist chat is therefore the sturdy target.
Five read-only tools. The one a pasted cache can never provide is
governance_item(id): the verbatim body of any item or ruling, across PENDING.md,
PENDING-archive.md and REVIEWED.md. Four refusals are designed in, each with a
control proving the refusal is detectable — no writes (AST-audited), no path
arguments (keys from a fixed enum, so there is no traversal to defend), no second
parser (item_spans is imported, not reimplemented), and not an agent (tools
return data; an agent would return testimony about the substrate instead).
[FIX] to the shared definition while here: item_spans() is now fence-aware. A
'## ' header inside a fenced block is neither an item nor a boundary. Zero such
headers exist today — 17 open items before and after — but governance drafts are
written as fenced markdown carrying '## REVIEWED-N' headers, which is the
steward's own practice, so the next draft would have created a phantom item and
truncated the item containing it. PENDING-82's own fenced JSON block confirms the
fix within the hour.
Not installed. The mcpServers key edits the steward's desktop-app config; the
snippet is in PENDING-82 and the server is inert until someone loads it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
Rewrote the ledger whole rather than patching three bad appends of my own
(returns misfiled under Authorization moves; a duplicate `## Open horizons`;
a mid-file duplicate of the closing two headings). Logged that fumble as a
return rather than quietly tidying it — appending by anchor without the
document's structure in view is the same locality error as editing a section
without reading the file.
Also supersedes two horizons explicitly rather than deleting them: the
PENDING-77 "reported executed / substrate disagrees" exchange (drift later
reached 0), and "skills paraphrase doctrine" (PENDING-80 landed the ids —
7 defined, 0 dead citations).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
8abfe88's message read "PENDING.md split 1848→430 + archive", but the archive was
never staged: that commit deleted 1,532 lines from PENDING.md and pushed the
deletion without its destination. The 74 closed governance items survived on disk
and in history only — recoverable, but absent from the record the remote carries.
The commit claimed an integrity it had not enacted.
Verified before committing, not after: every line of
PENDING.md.bak-2026-07-28-pre-split is accounted for in
(PENDING.md UNION PENDING-archive.md) at line granularity — no regex, no parser
notion of "item" — with a same-run positive control (a sentinel absent from the
union must be reported missing) per the Q2 epistemic standard. Three baseline
lines are absent by intent, all in the file header: the stale `Repo: bmf` and
`Branch: fix/replay-durability-contracts` pointers (that branch merged as
c9746ae; HEAD is main — the staleness was flagged in PENDING-78), and the
`Protocol:` line, reflowed. That header rewrite rode along inside 8abfe88
unmentioned; it is logged here rather than left silent.
Second fix, same class: the header asserted "the next item is PENDING-80" while
79, 80, and 81 all exist. Replaced the stated number with the rule that computes
it — a number goes stale, a rule does not.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WuMjg3ipEVa3n8CoSzoyvc
