Executing REVIEWED-123 conditions 2 and 3 surfaced a defect in the instrument
that was supposed to carry them.
PENDING.md had grown to 546,944 bytes, past the scanner's 400 KB guard, so EVERY
structured DEFERRED-DECISION block in the governance register was skipped —
silently — by the checker built to stop deferred conditions from being silently
missed. The 30-day review point placed under condition 2 was inert on arrival.
Worse than silent. The prose-deferral loop has no size guard, so PENDING.md's
prose count (70) still appeared in the report, making the file look examined
while its structured blocks were never read. Found only by placing a block and
noticing the tracked count did not move.
Both halves fixed:
- The two named governance files are exempt from the guard. The guard exists to
bound the unbounded **/*.md globs; it was never meant for the files the scan
reaches outside docs/ specifically to include.
- A size-skip is now REPORTED, not swallowed: "NOT SCANNED for structured blocks",
named, with byte counts, and stated as "could not assess" rather than "nothing
there" — REVIEWED-104's third outcome, applied to the instrument whose entire
subject is conditions nobody is watching. Two legitimate skips now visible
(Carruthers 1.6 MB, Yates 1.0 MB — scholarly texts, correctly out of scope).
Three controls added, derived from the PROPERTY rather than the guard's own
vocabulary: is the register actually scanned; is a real block in it parsed (the
live instance, not a fixture); and does the guard still apply to non-governance
files, so the exemption cannot quietly become "scan everything". A control asking
"does the guard work" would have passed throughout.
Result: 32/32 controls (was 29/29); deferred decisions 3 tracked (was 2), all
checkable. The ladder-freeze-30day-review trigger is live at date 2026-09-16.
Also under REVIEWED-123: N-now recorded (60 transcripts of 84, 24 remaining);
freeze scope stated as GENERAL per condition 1 and ladder file verified untouched;
owed-entries list ratified with each row naming its authorizing ruling per
condition 3 — OWED-1 under REVIEWED-122 cond. 9, OWED-2 explicitly NONE, queued
but not authorized and needing its own ruling before it joins the ladder.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013Y6t6qx7cpaCu5xGdD36u4
