One register, enforced by a gate; closed work compressed into siblings (R-376..R-378)

Records and process only. No machine contacted.

ONE REGISTER (operator ruling). 17 roadmap rows moved into OPEN-ITEMS.md keeping their
identifiers, evidence and original filing dates - the oldest R-10, filed 2026-07-15, 38 days.
15 ideas stay in ROADMAP.md, which is their home; the gate exempts them by their own state
word. 59 already-closed rows stay as history. Sorting rule recorded in the roadmap header:
does the item assert something about the shipped product a reader could check and find false?

scripts/one_register_gate.py, wired as the 11th gate. Control run: baseline passes, a planted
open roadmap-only row is convicted by name, removing it passes with the file byte-identical,
and a planted `idea` row is correctly exempt. Its four residual holes are in its docstring.

The gate earned its keep immediately: it caught R-103, a READY finding my hand-sort mis-read as
done because my regex matched the whole row where the body contains "shipped" - the gate matches
the state cell. It also caught R-203 and R-163, recorded closed in the register and still open in
the roadmap; the roadmap copies are marked SUPERSEDED with the register's verdict.

HOUSEKEEPING. OPEN-ITEMS 672,376 -> 327,109 bytes (-51%); ROADMAP 239,306 -> 78,110 (-67%).
Closed work compressed to 17% into CLOSED-ITEMS.md and ROADMAP-HISTORY.md; every entry names the
commit whose git show returns the full original text. Rule-sentences are kept verbatim under
"Reasoning kept" rather than judged entry by entry - 25 carry one.

CONTEXT.md deliberately NOT compressed and the disagreement is argued in the report: 86% of it is
standing rulings still in force, this prompt's own 3.4 says the log is never edited, and it has no
per-ruling delimiter. Filed as R-377 - the problem is navigational, not volumetric.

The hot/bulk placement decision was NEVER recorded as a decision anywhere - established, not
assumed. Now marked [DESIGN] with a pointer honest about having no original date, given a
decision-log entry that records what was rejected, and the [DESIGN]/[FACT] legend carried from 1
of 8 architecture documents to 8 of 8. Existing statements deliberately left unmarked (R-376).

PROMPT-TEMPLATE gains N.7: compress what you closed, rehome live reasoning before it goes, state
the register's size before and after.

Ceiling R-375 -> R-378.

documentation/PROMPT-TEMPLATE.md

@@ -398,6 +398,26 @@ an owner — a row nobody owns is how items got lost in the first place.
 
 ### N.6 Website version bump (if controller/hub version is shown on the site).
 
+### N.7 Housekeeping — before the report, not after (2026-08-22 ruling)
+
+**Nothing was ever pruned and the numbers got bad:** the register reached 672 KB across 286 entries,
+over half of it finished work, one entry at 16 KB. **A file that cannot be read is a file that cannot
+be checked**, and this project has paid for that twice — a record nobody could find because it sat
+inside an entry about something else, and a finding rediscovered because nobody could see it.
+
+1. **Compress what this session closed.** A closed row keeps its title, the version it shipped in, its
+   evidence paths, and any sentence stating a rule. Everything else goes, and it moves to
+   `backlog/CLOSED-ITEMS.md`. **Nothing is deleted:** the compressed entry names the commit whose
+   `git show` returns the full original text. **Open rows are not touched — their detail is doing a job.**
+2. **Rehome live reasoning before compressing it away.** If a closed entry carries the reason a rule
+   exists or a fence sits where it does, that reasoning moves — to `CONTEXT.md` if it is a decision,
+   to the owning `architecture/*.md` if it is a shape. **Where it is a decision, mark the resulting
+   shape `[DESIGN]` in the architecture document and point it at the log entry** (§4's map).
+   **Losing a reason is how a deliberate design becomes a bug in someone's eyes** — that cost four
+   mis-filed defect reports in August 2026 (R-370, R-376).
+3. **State the register's size in the report, before and after.** A number every session is what makes
+   growth visible; prose about tidiness is not a mechanism.
+
 ---
 
 ## 11. Tests