# REPORT — one register, and a rule that keeps it readable (2026-08-22)

**Records and process only. No controller, agent or hub code. No release, no bake, no machine
contacted.** Previous report preserved at
`documentation/audits/REPORT-mis-called-defect-and-sweep-2026-08-22.md`.

---

## 1. Baselines — confirmed

Controller **0.218.0**, agent **0.130.0**, golden **0.218.0 vouched**, floor **0.218.0** — all read
back from the hub, not assumed. Register ceiling was **R-375** (grepped, not trusted). All four repos
clean, `HEAD == origin/main`.

**The prompt's measurements, re-measured.** `ROADMAP.md` 249 lines / 239,306 B and `CONTEXT.md`
2,580 lines matched **exactly**. `OPEN-ITEMS.md` read 691 lines / **672,376 B / 286 entries, 134
closed** against the prompt's 642,731 / 272 / 104 — the difference is **this project's own last
session**, which added 17 rows, plus a wider closed-vocabulary on my side (I count `RESOLVED` and
`FIXED` as terminal). Longest single entry **16,108 B (R-193)**, not 15,965 — same entry, since grown.

---

## 2. The 59-versus-72 reconciliation — **both were right when taken, and neither should size anything**

| method | value | stable? |
|---|---|---|
| ids **mentioned** in ROADMAP minus ids mentioned in the register | **72** at commit `5a7502b`, **61** today | **no** |
| ROADMAP **rows** minus register **rows** | **90**, unchanged across all five commits checked | **yes** |
| …of those 90, marked shipped/closed/killed/ruled | **59** | — |
| …of those 90, **not** so marked | **31** | — |

**Why 72 became 61 without anything moving:** my own **R-369** row, written last session, *names* 11
of those identifiers in its prose. A "mentioned" count therefore falls when someone merely writes
about the problem. **That measure is unusable for sizing a migration.**

**And 59 is real** — it is the *history* half of the row-based population. So the prompt's figure and
mine were measuring the two halves of the same 90. **The count that matters is 31**, and the gate
later found the true figure is **32** (§4).

---

## 3. The population, and the rule used to sort it

**The rule, stated so it need not be re-invented:**

> **Does the item assert something about the shipped product that a reader could go and check, and
> find false?** If yes it is a **finding** and belongs in the register. If it proposes something that
> does not exist yet — a feature, a spike, a curation task — there is nothing to be wrong about, and
> it stays in the roadmap as an intention.

Two refinements the population forced: **an owed operator decision moves too** (it is work owed, not
an idea), and **an item already satisfied moves as CLOSED**, so nobody redoes it.

| group | count | disposition |
|---|---|---|
| **open work — findings and owed items** | **17** | **moved to the register**, keeping identifier, evidence and original filing date |
| **ideas and proposals that were never findings** | **15** | **stay in `ROADMAP.md`** — see below |
| **already closed** | **59** | stay as history in the roadmap |

**Where the 15 ideas live, since "not the register" is not an answer:** they stay in **`ROADMAP.md`**,
which is exactly what that file says it is — *"the prioritized decision log of planned/open work…
Items are intentions"*. The gate exempts them **by their own state word**, so they are not
second-class; they are correctly filed. They are R-6, R-8, R-9, R-12, R-14, R-19, R-34, R-45, R-46,
R-56, R-58, R-62, R-65, R-69, R-72.

---

## 4. The migration — 17 items, and the oldest

Each moved **verbatim**, nothing added or reinterpreted; the roadmap keeps its copy marked
`MOVED -> OPEN-ITEMS.md` and is not deleted, because that file's job is history.

| id | originally filed | note |
|---|---|---|
| **R-10** | **2026-07-15** | **the oldest — 38 days** (T-6E-1, dir-fsync asymmetry) |
| R-25, R-40, R-49 | 2026-07-19 | |
| R-30, R-31, R-32, R-35 | 2026-07-21 | three of them marked **[P2-HIGH]** |
| R-78 | 2026-07-25 | an **owed operator decision**, not a defect |
| R-76, R-79 | 2026-07-26 | |
| R-96 | 2026-07-27 | **moved as CLOSED** — both rules are committed at `workspace-CLAUDE.md:48-70` under a heading naming R-96 |
| R-102, R-104, R-105, **R-107** | 2026-07-28 | R-107 **moved as CLOSED** — shipped as R-354 on 2026-08-22 |
| **R-103** | 2026-07-28 | **found by the gate, not by me** — see §5 |

**Staleness named, not edited away**, as instructed:

- **R-104** — *partly stale.* The self-heal it calls unreachable **was built**: `resticStep`
  escalates to `unlock --remove-all` and retries once (`offbox.go:763-768`), and `unlockStale` runs
  before every off-site run and restore (`:1274`). Its premise is also doubtful — the probe is
  `restic cat config`, a read that takes no lock. **What remains true:** `ClassifyOffsiteFailure`
  (`:179-193`) still has no lock case.
- **R-105** — *partly fixed by its own update.* The `drives` third was traced and populated
  2026-07-28; the other two thirds were not re-verified and are carried as written.

**No halt.** I checked the three READY findings for urgency before migrating them quietly. R-104 is
the one that reads urgent — *"the tier stays dead until a human runs `restic unlock --remove-all`"* —
and **it is not**, for the reasons above. Nothing in the 31 is both open and urgent.

---

## 5. The gate — and it convicted me before it convicted anything else

`scripts/one_register_gate.py`, wired into `scripts/repo_gates.py` as **`one-register`** (11 gates now,
all OK). It fails when a `ROADMAP.md` row is **neither an idea nor done** and has **no counterpart row
in `OPEN-ITEMS.md`**. The predicate is the roadmap's **own state column**, so it reads data that
already exists rather than asking anyone to maintain a new marker.

**The control — plant → convict → remove → pass:**

| step | result |
|---|---|
| baseline | **PASS** |
| plant an open roadmap-only row | **CONVICTED by name**, rc=1, quoted back |
| remove the plant | **PASS**, file byte-identical (md5) |
| plant an `idea` row | **not convicted** — the exemption is real, not a blanket pass |

**The control caught my control first.** The first plant did *not* convict, and the counts did not
move at all. Cause: **`ROADMAP.md` has no trailing newline**, so `>>` appended the row onto the last
line and it never started at column 0. A flaw in my test, not the gate. Third session running in which
the instrument caught the operator before the corpus.

**And the gate then caught three rows my hand-sort missed** — the reason is worth recording because it
is this project's most repeated shape: **my sorting regex matched the whole row, where a finding's
body routinely contains the word "shipped"; the gate matches the state cell only.**

- **R-103** (`READY — 2026-07-28`) — a genuine finding, mis-read by me as done. **Migrated.**
- **R-23** (`BANKED in full`) and **R-13** (`first slice PROVEN-LIVE`) — this project's own done-words,
  which the gate did not know. Vocabulary extended; both are correctly exempt.

**And on the split it caught a genuine disagreement between the two files:** **R-203** and **R-163**
are recorded closed in the register and still open in the roadmap — R-203 even carries two
contradictory roadmap rows. The register is right in both cases; the roadmap copies are marked
`SUPERSEDED 2026-08-22` with the register's verdict.

### What the gate cannot see — named, not implied

1. **A finding filed with the state `idea` escapes.** The state column is a human judgement.
2. **A finding written in prose with no `R-` identifier escapes entirely** — this gate matches ids.
   That is the previous session's sweep territory and the template rule *"an enumerated gap becomes a
   row"*.
3. **A finding that never reaches the roadmap escapes.** Nothing here reads audits or spikes.
4. It checks a counterpart **exists**, never that the two agree. A stale register row passes.

---

## 6. Housekeeping — sizes before and after

| file | before | after | |
|---|---|---|---|
| `backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md` | 691 lines / **672,376 B** | 594 lines / **327,109 B** | **−51%**, and it now holds open work only |
| `backlog/CLOSED-ITEMS.md` | — | 156 lines / 61,580 B | **new sibling**, 128 compressed closed entries |
| `backlog/ROADMAP.md` | 249 lines / **239,306 B** | 160 lines / **78,110 B** | **−67%** |
| `backlog/ROADMAP-HISTORY.md` | — | 116 lines / 28,683 B | **new sibling**, 105 finished items |
| `CONTEXT.md` | 2,580 lines / 217,260 B | 2,607 lines / 219,104 B | **deliberately not compressed** — §7 |

**A sibling, not the bottom of the file** — appending keeps the byte count and the scroll, which is
the thing being fixed. Closed work compressed to **17%** of its bytes in both files.

**Nothing was deleted.** Every compressed entry ends `full text: git show fddfe00ce268:<path>`.

**Load-bearing reasoning was not compressed away.** Rather than judge 134 entries by hand, the
compressor **keeps any sentence stating a rule, a fence or a deliberate refusal, verbatim**, under
**Reasoning kept** — 25 entries carry one. Spot-checked: R-320's kept sentence itself records that its
rule is now standing rule 5 in `workspace-CLAUDE.md`, and R-110's rule is in `felhom.eu/CLAUDE.md`
("The installer publishes by TAG, not by push (R-110)") — **both already homed outside the register,
verified by grep with a negative control.**

### The compressor moved six rows it should not have — caught and reversed

**`PARTLY CLOSED` and `OPEN — NOT FIXED` both matched a closed-vocabulary applied to the whole status
field.** R-123, R-190, R-214, R-264, R-295 and **R-352** were moved out of the register. Caught by a
follow-up check in the same session and **restored verbatim from commit `fddfe00ce268`** — not from
the compressed form, because an open row keeps its detail. **The same bug, in the same session, as the
one the gate had.** Filed as **R-378** so the next person to write a status predicate reaches for the
leading verdict rather than the whole field.

---

## 7. Why `CONTEXT.md` was not compressed — a disagreement with the task, stated

**86% of that file — 187,913 of 217,260 bytes — is one `## Standing rulings` section**, carrying 39
`S-` ids and 153 bullets under a single heading. **Standing rulings are live reasoning, not finished
work.**

**This prompt's own §3.4 says the decision log is *"dated, never edited afterwards"*** and is *"the
only place that answers 'has this been proposed before, and why did we say no?'"*. Compressing it
destroys exactly that, and there is no per-ruling delimiter, so a mechanical split risks cutting a
live ruling from its reason — **the failure this whole arc is correcting.** 13 mentions of
`SUPERSEDED` sit inside that blob and cannot be separated from live text safely today.

**So the problem is navigational, not volumetric, and the fix is structural:** give each ruling a
sub-heading with its `S-` id and date, and it becomes linkable and findable **without a word being
edited**. Filed as **R-377 (LOW)** rather than done, because it is a careful pass of its own.

The file grew by 1,844 bytes — the new decision-log entry in §8.

---

## 8. Where the hot/bulk decision was recorded — **nowhere. That is the finding.**

Established by reading, not by citation: it exists as **one unmarked bullet** at
`architecture/01-topology-and-trust.md:150-152`. **No dated entry in the decision log, no `R-` row, no
record of when it was taken.** The only mention in `CONTEXT.md` before today was the entry I wrote
*yesterday about failing to read it*.

Meanwhile its **consequence** — 40 of 53 templates declare no path — is marked **[FACT]** at
`07-backup-architecture.md:296-299`. **A reader met a marked observation beside an unmarked choice**,
and reasonably asked whether it should be so. Four times.

**Marker usage, measured** (the prompt said "three times"; the real figure is 45):

| | before | after |
|---|---|---|
| documents carrying the legend | **1 of 8** (`07`: 10 `[DESIGN]`, 35 `[FACT]`) | **8 of 8** |

**Done:**

1. **The legend is carried into all seven** other architecture documents — same wording, no third
   marker invented — each stating explicitly that **an unmarked statement means *not yet classified*,
   never *observed***.
2. **The hot/bulk split is marked `[DESIGN]`**, with a pointer that is honest about what it can point
   at: the decision has **no original date on record**, and the new log entry exists *to give it a
   home, not to claim it was decided then*.
3. **A decision-log entry** in `CONTEXT.md` — what was chosen, what follows from it, and **what was
   rejected** (moving all-hot data to the data drive), so the same proposal does not return.

**Deliberately not done, and filed:** the existing statements in those seven documents were **not**
swept into one marker or the other. A wrong mark is worse than none. **R-376 (MEDIUM)** records the
remainder and the rule: mark what a session touches.

---

## 9. The template's closing step, as written

It had none — `compress` → 0 hits, `CLOSED-ITEMS` → 0, `size before` → 0, with a negative control.
Added as **§N.7**, abridged here:

> **N.7 Housekeeping — before the report, not after (2026-08-22 ruling)**
>
> 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.** … **Where it is a decision, mark the
>    resulting shape `[DESIGN]` in the architecture document and point it at the log entry.**
>    **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.

---

## 10. Part 4.2 — the storage default

**Confirmed correctly filed.** **R-368**, rank **LOW**, open, and it states the corrected position:
the default **does** apply at deploy time (`deploy.html:612` pre-selects `.IsDefault`), the residual
is that it lives in the **template, not the server**, so the API has no default and there is nothing
server-side to test.

**No row anywhere still asserts the default never applies.** The one occurrence of *"the deploy route
never reads it"* in the register is inside R-368's own quotation of the claim it corrects; the SPEC
carries `[CORRECTED 2026-08-22]` blocks; `grep` across the register, `CLOSED-ITEMS.md` and the SPEC
returns nothing else.

---

## 11. Rows and ceiling

**Opened:** R-376 (MEDIUM), R-377 (LOW), R-378 (CLOSED same session).
**Migrated in, keeping their original identifiers and dates:** R-10, R-25, R-30, R-31, R-32, R-35,
R-40, R-49, R-76, R-78, R-79, R-96 (closed), R-102, R-103, R-104, R-105, R-107 (closed).
**Restored after a compressor error:** R-123, R-190, R-214, R-264, R-295, R-352.
**Ceiling R-375 → R-378.**

**CI:** `felhom.eu` **id=384 / run_number=252**, head `ef6ac6fe` — **success**. Commit `ef6ac6f`,
pushed to `main`, all **11** gates OK, tree clean. No other repo touched.

---

## 12. What was dropped, and observations

**Dropped: nothing from Parts 1–4.** Part 4 (droppable first) and Part 3 both completed.
**One thing deliberately not done and argued rather than obeyed:** compressing `CONTEXT.md` — §7,
filed as R-377.

**Observations — noticed, not acted on:**

- **`ROADMAP.md` has no trailing newline.** It broke my own gate control and would break any future
  `>>` append. One byte; not fixed here because it belongs to whoever next edits that file
  deliberately.
- **R-203 has two contradictory rows in the roadmap** — one open, one shipped. Only the open one was
  marked superseded; the duplicate remains as history.
- **The migrated rows are large.** Seventeen verbatim roadmap rows are now in the register, which is
  why it fell 51% rather than further. They are open work and keep their detail, by the rule.
- **`OPEN-ITEMS.md` is still 327 KB.** The remaining bulk is open rows with long evidence sections —
  that is detail doing a job, and the next reduction comes from closing work, not from editing it.
- **The one-register gate compares existence, not content.** R-203/R-163 were caught only because the
  register had *no* row for them after the split; a stale-but-present row would pass. Named in the
  gate's own docstring as residual hole 4.