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
