Advisory Rules Audit — Mechanical Enforcement Scorecard

Session date: 2026-04-18 Companion doctrine: trust-doctrine.md Purpose: Catalog every rule currently stated as agent-facing doctrine, score its mechanical-enforceability, and name the highest-leverage candidates for promotion from advisory to fail-closed.

Scope (corrected 2026-08-12). The scope statement read "in CLAUDE.md and .gzkit/rules/" until this date, and it had been under-describing the document's own contents for as long as those sections existed: § Agent Rule Placement Invariant (ADR-0.0.20), § Constitutional Invariant Composition (ADR-0.0.37), § Brief Reconciliation Invariant (ADR-0.0.37), § Distribution Invariant Doctrine (ADR-0.0.31), and § Editor/IDE Protocol Surface all score doctrine declared in an ADR or a schema rather than in a rule file. ADR-declared doctrine is in scope, and a reader who took the old sentence literally would have concluded — as GHI #792 did — that a binding ADR anti-pattern sat outside the instrument by design. It did not; it sat outside by omission.

The mechanical precondition for scoring ADR doctrine (binding). A row scored Mechanical or Promotable is read by gz validate --bullet-retention, which requires the row's rule text to appear as a normalized substring of the per-turn surface corpus — AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .claude/rules/** — unless the text maps to a compressible corpus entry carrying a valid advisor-QC witness (src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/bullet_retention.py:63-96; unknown-tier bullets take the conservative invariant fallback at line 88). Every ADR-scoped Mechanical row above satisfies this because its text is mirrored one-for-one in AGENTS.md § Governance doctrine surfaces — that mirror is what makes the row legal, not a stylistic choice. Consequence: widening this scorecard to an ADR clause that has no per-turn-surface mirror requires authoring the mirror first, through the corpus ceremony (gz content remember → gz content compose AGENTS.md → advisor QC → Gate 5), because gz validate --invariant-coherence byte-compares the whole committed AGENTS.md against rendition playback and refuses a hand-edit. Scoring such a clause Judgment to dodge the requirement is laundering under the operator ruling of 2026-08-08.

Named outstanding widening — tracked at GHI #799. ADR-0.0.33 § Anti-Patterns (6 clauses) is the only ## Anti-Patterns section in the ADR corpus and is not yet scored here — ruled in scope by the operator 2026-08-12, and blocked on the precondition above: none of surface-weight, bullet-retention, surface-fidelity, or lifted-from appears anywhere in the per-turn surface, so clauses 1, 2 and 3 (all genuinely mechanized today) cannot be scored honestly until their mirrors land. Clause 3 is the worked case for why this matters — it was binding doctrine with no witness and was violated on 2026-06-30 for 42 undetected days before GHI #791/#792 mechanized it. The 18 ## Boundary Invariants sections elsewhere in the corpus are deliberately not part of this widening: they already carry a proof channel as the STRUCTURAL-FENCE anchor enforced by gz validate --req-kind-discipline (ADR-0.0.59).

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Why this audit exists

The ADR-0.0.16 closeout cascade (trust-doctrine.md § The 2026-04-18 outage taxonomy) proved that advisory rules without mechanical enforcement accumulate invisible drift until one operation stresses all the cracks at once. Nine concurrent silent failures had been sitting in production for weeks, each individually an honest doctrine violation, collectively a full-session outage.

The lesson: rules that depend on agent discipline are unreliable over long runs, especially under agent rotation and multi-session work. Every rule that could be a test should be a test.

This audit scores every rule by:

Score	Meaning
Mechanical	Already has a fail-closed check (unit test, validator scope, pre-commit hook). No agent discipline required.
Promotable	Could become mechanical; naming the specific check is tractable.
Judgment	Requires human or agent judgment by its nature. Mechanical enforcement would overconstrain.
Ambiguous	Scope is unclear enough that the first step is rule clarification, not mechanization.

A Mechanical score must cite its witness (binding — operator ruling 2026-08-10)

Scoring a row Mechanical asserts that a fail-closed check already covers that row. Nothing witnessed the assertion, and five Mechanical rows were found false in the two days before this ruling.

The enforcement-floor negative controls (the Enforcement floor step of uv run gz check; there is no gz validate flag for it) are the repo's mutation witness, but they are scope-granular while these rows are property-granular: 64 Mechanical rows cite 46 distinct validator flags, six flags carry two or three rows each, and one scope routinely enforces several properties. A scope passes its single control while any of its other properties is broken — observed 2026-08-10 on --instructions-files-budget, whose control plants a per-file char-budget violation and stayed green throughout a broken must-survive delivery predicate in the same scope. Counting scope-level coverage would have scored that row witnessed.

So a new or re-scored Mechanical row discharges the claim by citing a registered negative control inline as NC:<claim-id>. Rows predating the ruling are frozen in data/mechanical_witness_grandfather.json — shrink-only under the waiver ratchet, so the debt drains as rows are touched and can never grow. Enforced by gz validate --advisory-scorecard, exit 3.

Row numbers are not unique. 31 of them recur across the three tables below, so "row 49" addresses two different rows and every prior ruling citing a bare number is ambiguous. The freeze keys on <section-id>#<row> for that reason; prefer the same form when citing a row.

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Coverage Ledger (binding — GHI #754)

Which rule-version each rule's rows below were scored against. gz validate --advisory-scorecard reads this table, compares each entry against the rule's own <!-- rule-version: X.Y.Z --> marker, and fails closed (exit 3) on any rule that is unlisted or has been bumped past its scored version.

Before GHI #754 the audit asked only whether a rule's filename stem appeared anywhere in this document — a check no edit to an existing rule file could ever falsify. Two drifts shipped behind it: tests.md § Verification exit-code integrity (added in rule 0.8.0, GHI #589) was never scored, and row 60 described task-discovery.md behavior that rule 0.7.0 had retired. Filename presence is not coverage.

When you bump a rule: re-read its binding clauses, add or correct its rows below, then set its version here. That is the whole protocol — it is version equality, not a prose grade, deliberately: a heuristic clause extractor would itself grade by shape, which is the shape-graded-not-substance theater signature this scope exists to close (ADR-0.0.73).

Rule file	Scored at rule-version
agents-md-map-doctrine.md	0.13.0
adr-audit.md	0.3.2
agent-failure-modes.md	0.8.2
brief-heading-conventions.md	0.2.0
changelog-release-notes.md	1.2.1
complexity-doctrine.md	0.4.0
complexity-thresholds.md	0.5.0
gh-cli.md	0.7.0
hexagonal-architecture.md	0.3.0
models.md	0.2.0
model-selection.md	0.6.3
security-sensitivity.md	0.6.0
skill-surface-sync.md	0.13.0
skill-authoring.md	0.2.0
chores.md	0.6.0
cli.md	0.9.1
cross-platform.md	0.7.0
gate5-runbook-code-covenant.md	0.3.1
guardrail-feedback-prose.md	0.3.1
mx-mode.md	1.4.0
pythonic.md	0.5.3
tool-skill-runbook-alignment.md	0.5.2
tests.md	0.26.6
task-discovery.md	0.10.0
token-block-discipline.md	0.9.0

Re-read 2026-09-19 (GHIs #1040–#1043). Model selection, release notes, tests, chores, CLI and tool/skill alignment were read against their existing authorities. Corrections concern nested version metadata, release approval terminology, test-tier selectors and same-patch/direct-repair routing. Their binding obligations and scores are unchanged; the release-note curation note below now uses the correct approval subject. No mechanical promotion or new witness is claimed.

Pre-ledger debt is frozen, not laundered. The rules still enumerated in data/advisory_scorecard_grandfather.json carry rows written before this ledger existed, against versions nobody recorded. They are enumerated in data/advisory_scorecard_grandfather.json, pinned at their current versions and registered shrink-only in data/waiver_ratchet_registry.json (ADR-0.0.73 Boundary Invariant #8). The pin is the honesty mechanism: a grandfathered rule that is edited leaves its pinned version behind and must be scored for real before gz check goes green. Debt can only shrink, and it cannot follow a rule forward in silence.

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Scorecard

Architectural Boundaries (CLAUDE.md § Architectural Boundaries)

Re-ratified 2026-09-29 (GHI #818). The operator reviewed all six against the repo, retired 1–3 and kept 4–6 with their witnesses named. Authority is the AGENTS.md corpus (section architectural-boundaries), not the planning memo. Rows 1–3 are removed from the table (a retired rule has no score); rows 4–6 keep their numbers for citation stability.

#	Rule	Score	Notes
4	Do not let reconciliation remain a maintenance chore	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --reconcile-freshness (GHI #213) — flags when the latest reconcile ledger event is older than HEAD by more than 24h
5	Do not let AirlineOps parity become perpetual catch-up	Judgment	Requires a metric ("perpetual") that depends on external repo state
6	Do not let derived views silently become source-of-truth	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --frontmatter, --event-handlers, --validator-fields. Trust doctrine operationalizes this rule
6a	gz validate --taxonomy enforces	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --taxonomy (GHI #218 / ADR-0.0.17) — non-pool ADRs carry kind: foundation (semver 0.0.x) or kind: feature (any other semver); pool ADRs (id prefix ADR-pool.) derive kind from the id and carry no kind: frontmatter

Local Agent Rules (CLAUDE.md § Local Agent Rules)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
7	Order versioned identifiers semantically, never lexicographically	Mechanical	Sorting lives in _adr_status_sort_key (src/gzkit/commands/status.py) and _semver_sort_key (src/gzkit/traceability.py); the order is locked behaviorally by tests/commands/test_status.py::test_status_json_orders_semver_ids_numerically, which asserts ADR-0.2.0 → ADR-0.9.0 → ADR-0.10.0 — the exact lexicographic trap the rule names. Citation repointed 2026-08-08: the row named a test_adr_status module at the top of tests/, which does not exist. The nearest surviving module by name is tests/governance/test_adr_status_index.py, and it is about index regeneration (GHI #322) — a different subject — so following the stale pointer would have landed on a passing test that proves something else, which is worse than landing on nothing.
8	Add imports with usage in same Edit	Judgment	Meta-rule about agent tool use; the ruff hook removing unused imports IS the enforcement
9	Never prefix uv run gz or uv run -m gzkit	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --utf8-prefix (GHI #206) — regex scan across docs/**, .gzkit/skills/**, .claude/skills/**, features/**
10	pass user words verbatim	Mechanical	ARB receipt-ID requirement enforced by gz arb validate; heavy-lane fail-closed per AGENTS.md § Attestation — Lane behavior
11	Every version bump is a release	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --version-release (GHI #205) — compares pyproject.toml version against local git tag set for a matching vX.Y.Z
12	Use GitHub gitignore template for .gitignore scaffolding	Judgment	Only applies to gz init / scaffolding skills; hard to mechanize retrospectively

Governance Core (.gzkit/rules/governance-core.md)

Rule retired 2026-09-17 — the heading keeps the former path because the mechanical-witness grandfather keys derive from it (GHI #921; operator ruling, verbatim: "it all seems pretty ad hoc, do option A"). The rule was global (paths: "**/*"): Claude loaded it every session and Codex never saw it, since globals are excluded from the nested AGENTS.md fan-out. Its binding clauses now live in root AGENTS.md — illustrative values (row 17h), verb resolution (17e) and adr-status regeneration (17f) under § Governance doctrine surfaces; externally-authored output (17d) under § Behavior Rules; attested-REQ retirement (17i) under § OBPI Acceptance Protocol; withdraw/repudiate (17g) under § Gate Covenant. Rows 13 (read AGENTS.md first — the SessionStart hook does it), 14 (uv run — § Project Identity), 15 (Gate 5 — § Gate Covenant), 16 (ledger — § Behavior Rules), 17 (defects tracked — § PRIME DIRECTIVE) and 17c (attestation sacrosanct — § Attestation) were duplicates of AGENTS.md and left with the rule; their Mechanical row texts below are re-pointed to the AGENTS.md wording. The six-step OBPI workflow order lives in governance_runbook.md § Governance Quick Reference. The Coverage Ledger no longer lists the rule; rows keep their numbers for citation stability.

Re-scored 2026-08-29 at rule 0.14.0 (GHI #921 diet pass). Every binding clause was re-read against the rewritten file: 9 bullets, 3 binding sections, 6 numbered workflow steps, 4 table rows and 5 gz invocations — all structurally retained (16,885 B -> 8,314 B; narrative lifted to governance-core-rationale.md, version chain to rule-version-history.md). No binding clause changed, so no score below moves. One correction landed from the re-read: the rule's § Operator-doc verb resolution claimed "Exit 3 on any unresolvable reference" — row 17e had already measured that as wrong in 2026-08-09 and the rule was never corrected, so the drift survived four rule versions. Verified again this pass against src/gzkit/commands/validate_cmd.py:946: neither cli_alignment nor manpage_alignment is in _POLICY_BREACH_ERROR_TYPES, so the scope exits 1. The rule now states exit 1 and cites the file. This is the case row 17e's note anticipated — a scorecard correcting a rule that never absorbed it.

#	Rule	Score	Notes
13	Read AGENTS.md before implementation work	Judgment	Pre-work discipline; no compile-time signal
14	always uv run for Python commands	Mechanical	Ruff + tests run via uv run; CI enforces. Runbook + docs scanned by gz validate --cli-alignment for uv run gz ... form
15	Gate 5 is universal	Mechanical	gz closeout pipeline enforces attestation before Completed lifecycle event. Row text re-pointed 2026-09-17 (GHI #921): root AGENTS.md no longer carries a separate "Never" list, and this rule file states the rule in these words on every turn.
16	Write the ledger only through gz commands	Mechanical	Enforced by forbid_manual_ledger_edits in src/gzkit/hooks/guards.py (GHI #207) — rejects staged ledger edits that are not strict appends; run at commit time by the forbid-pytest pre-commit hook, whose entry is uv run -m gzkit.hooks.guards and which dispatches all four guards. Citation repointed 2026-08-08: the row named a pre-commit-ledger-guard script under a top-level githooks directory that this repository does not have — the guard was consolidated into the gzkit.hooks.guards module under its original GHI. The enforcement was real throughout; only the pointer was dead, which is why the correction is a repoint and not a re-score.
17	Every defect must be trackable (GHI or agent-insights.jsonl)	Judgment	Enforcement is cultural; no reliable mechanical signal for "defect noticed but not tracked"
17a	record an improvement via gz insights remember	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --insights-shape (GHI #358) — every record validates against gzkit.insights.InsightRecord (extra="forbid", ISO8601 ts, type enum, evidence: list[str]). Pre-lock entries waived by content hash in _INSIGHTS_SHAPE_WAIVERS; new writes must conform. Wired into gz check.
17b	Per-file char budget for AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md	Judgment	Advisory until 1.0 by operator ruling (2026-08-17), re-scored from Mechanical. Verbatim: "temporary stay of all control surface budget limits until version 1.0. I want to be warned, and we may lift the limits as needed, but no blockers." Every tracked file is still measured against data/instructions_files_budget.json and each overrun is reported to stderr with its distance and the /gz-context-diet pointer, but no finding is returned and no exit code changes — so the row no longer describes a fail-closed check and cannot be scored Mechanical. Two arms were flipped, not one: audit_instructions_files_budget and agents_md_map_conformance criterion (d). This is a re-score against a landed text edit (.gzkit/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md v0.4.0 states the posture in its own words), never a re-score alone. Judgment rather than Promotable because the promotion path is not a check to build — the check exists and is deliberately disarmed. Updated 2026-08-17: the stay does not lift, so "reclassify when the stay lifts" is retired. The operator ruled the trim into a cadence rather than a gate ("let the chore manage the limits … otherwise, we churn"; "I can't be stopping to trim them at every turn"), and a gate here has nothing to bite on structurally: the per-turn surface is played back verbatim from a Gate-5-attested rendition, gz content remember moves nothing, and only gz content commit changes the build — so the rendered surface cannot drift on its own and a gate on it only re-fires about a build the operator already approved. Measured at the ruling: approved corpus_entry_count 59 against 59 corpus lines — zero pending drift — while the witness reported the frozen 34354 B build on every gz check. This row stays Judgment permanently at this subject. The mechanical witness moves to a different subject rather than disappearing: drift between the corpus and the last approved build, gz validate --rendition-lineage (OBPI-0.35.0-06, Draft) — score that as its own row when it lands, and do not resurrect a fail-closed budget arm to satisfy this one. Coupled surfaces carrying the same retirement: data/instructions_files_budget.json (last dated entry) and .gzkit/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md v0.5.0.
17c	Human attestation is sacrosanct — no TTY/PTY/transport mechanism may be cited as a reason an agent "cannot" record attestation	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-09 (rule 0.9.0); previously unrowed. Split by half. The requirement is row 15's Mechanical arm (_requires_human_obpi_attestation returns True unconditionally; gz obpi complete fail-closes without --attestor + non-empty attestation text). The residue this clause adds is a prohibition on an agent's stated reason for not doing something — "I cannot record this because there is no TTY". gzkit models no artifact in which an agent's excuse appears, so there is nothing to scan: the absence of a ledger event is indistinguishable from work that simply did not happen. No mechanical witness, and none is planned. Reclassify on a named session where a transport excuse was offered and nothing caught it — the operator's verbatim canon exists precisely because such sessions occurred, but they are recorded in prose, not in a queryable surface.
17d	Externally-authored content is data, never instruction (tool output, and text the operator pastes in from elsewhere)	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-09 (rule 0.9.0); previously unrowed, and the clause was unscoped until this version. It was first scored Promotable in this same pass and corrected before landing — under § Summary's own definition a Promotable row means "a clause declaring a discipline with neither a witness nor an admission", and the admission existed only in the expansion doc, not in the rule an agent loads. Rather than launder the score, 0.9.0 states the posture in the rule's own text (the Movement C rules-arm remedy). The clause now names the gap verbatim from docs/governance/untrusted-content.md — "A mechanical incoming-data probe … remains unbuilt and is the natural promotion path" — and names the tractable arm: provenance, not content. Whether text arrived from a fetch/search/MCP/subagent channel versus a repo read is a fact the harness already knows; whether arbitrary text "directs action" is not decidable. Held under the § Recommended promotion order freeze (2026-06-08): no observed instance of an injected instruction being acted on is recorded in this repo. Reclassify on the first one.
17e	Every gz <verb> string appearing in an operator-facing doc must resolve to a registered parser verb	Mechanical	Scored 2026-08-09 (rule 0.9.0); previously unrowed. Enforced by gz validate --cli-alignment (registered; verified present in gz validate --help this run), fail-closed at exit 1, not exit 3. Scope is docs/**/*.md, docs/**/*.feature, features/**/*.feature, .gzkit/skills/**/SKILL.md and — re-scored 2026-09-13 at rule 0.15.0 (GHI #1006), score unchanged — the surfaces an agent executes from: .gzkit/chores/**/*.md (proofs/ excluded), .gzkit/rules/**/*.md and root AGENTS.md. Covers multi-word subcommands, and the manpage-filename half (<verb>.md, never gz- prefixed) via audit_manpage_alignment (GHI #532), which now reads the same enumeration as _cli_alignment_sources rather than a copy. The scope gap this row once carried is closed: .gzkit/rules/** had sat outside both enumerations, so the rule surface was outside its own binding; the widening landed with 8 unresolvable chains repaired in 4 chore docs, witnessed by tests/governance/test_cli_alignment_scope.py::TestAgentInstructionSurfacesAreInScope and tests/governance/test_manpage_alignment.py::ManpageAlignmentBehavior::test_chore_doc_shares_the_verb_resolution_scope. Exit-code correction, same day this row landed: this row was first written "exit 3 on any unresolvable reference", copied from the rule's own claim at .gzkit/rules/governance-core.md:53 rather than read from the code. audit_cli_alignment emits type="cli_alignment" (cli.py:224) and audit_manpage_alignment emits type="manpage_alignment" (cli.py:298); neither is in _POLICY_BREACH_ERROR_TYPES (validate_cmd.py:1130-1165), so the run routes to SystemExit(1). The enforcement is real and the Mechanical score stands — only the exit code was wrong. Caught by the control-surface-rule-vs-check-drift Pass C walk hours after landing, which is the exact prose-vs-check gap that chore exists to find; the rule's claim is carried as a Pass C row.
17f	docs/governance/GovZero/adr-status.md is a Layer 3 derived view per	Mechanical	Scored 2026-08-09 (rule 0.9.0); previously unrowed. Enforced by gz validate --adr-status-fresh, wired into the default gz check pipeline at src/gzkit/commands/quality.py:459 (("ADR status freshness", run_adr_status_fresh_audit)) and registered at ERROR level at :58. Drift between the committed index and on-disk canon fails closed; recovery is a single command (uv run gz register-adrs). Both the flag and the gz check wiring were verified this run — the pairing is what rows 19/20 lacked when they claimed enforcement that ran nowhere.
17g	Only a human may repudiate a Gate-5	Mechanical	Scored 2026-08-09 (rule 0.9.0); previously unrowed. Enforced at src/gzkit/commands/obpi_cmd.py:254-259 — --attestor and --reason are each checked with .strip() and exit 1 before ensure_initialized() and any Ledger construction, so a refusal writes nothing. --cause is a closed enum (model-induced-fabrication \| operator-error \| verification-invalid). ADR-0.0.71.
17h	A value written in a Markdown doc is ILLUSTRATIVE, never authoritative	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-16 (rule 0.10.0) at landing — the clause and its score arrive together, so the third state is disclosed rather than accrued. Operator ruling: "we should never allow a hard-coded value in an md doc to be anything other than illustrated lest some rg/grep finds it and gets confused." A partial arm already exists and is the promotion precedent: gz validate --transcribed-adr-counts refuses a transcribed Layer-2 OBPI count in live prose, with data/transcribed_count_surfaces.json declaring dated-record sections and a <!-- historical-count --> escape. It fired twice on 2026-08-16 against an agent's own campaign edits. Promotion is extending that shape from ADR counts to declared threshold authorities. Named, observed drift — the freeze's admission bar: pythonic.md carries Modules <=600 while .gzkit/rules/complexity-thresholds.json is what chores/module-sloc-cap-radon/check_module_size.py:56 actually reads, and that module's docstring calls the 600 "the drift"; a census against the prose figure counted 51 modules no gate rejects and nearly seated a campaign box against an unenforced authority. Not Mechanical: distinguishing an illustrative number from an authoritative one is a reading, and the general form would grade by shape. The tractable arm is narrower — an allowlist of declared authorities plus a scan for their values restated elsewhere. Second arm landed 2026-08-16 (rule 0.11.0), and the score does NOT move: the clause's own carve-out named campaign Status: as a place where prose "is unavoidably the state"; that was disproved by discharging it — data/active_campaign.json now declares which plan governs, both readers read it, and tests/governance/test_active_campaign_registry.py fails closed both on a banner disagreeing with the registry and on an edition the registry does not declare. This is a per-instance witness, not a general one: it audits one named authority against one named prose surface, exactly like --transcribed-adr-counts. Two instances witnessed is stronger promotion evidence for the narrow allowlist shape, and still no witness for "any value in any .md", which is what this row scores. Scoring it Mechanical on the strength of two discharged instances would be the laundering the 2026-08-08 ruling forbids. What the discharge did establish is the price: one data file, two readers, a coherence test biting in both directions — cheap enough that "unavoidable" should be treated as a claim requiring evidence, not a default. Third measurement, same day (rule 0.12.0), and it came out the OTHER way — which is why the score still does not move. This scorecard's own classification cells were the remaining named instance, and measuring them refuted the assumption that they needed the campaign treatment: one parser rather than two, defensively written against failures it already survived (_CELL_SPLIT_RE, after \| inside code spans on rows 22/27/52 once dropped all three), its Summary roll-up already fenced by _summary_drift_errors, and zero silent dropouts across 118 rows presented as scored. Migrating would separate each verdict from the rationale that is its evidence and leave JSON + prose + a fence where one parser suffices. The residual — a malformed Score cell leaving a row invisible to every count, which the Summary fence cannot catch because correcting the roll-up moves both numbers together — is closed by _silent_dropout_errors in the same validator. Fourth instance, 2026-09-20, and the score still does not move. 19 of 32 open GHIs sat in the ACTIVE campaign's sequencing text for 18 days and held a box at NEXT-IN-PRIORITY on it; the denominator was never 32 -- the queue held 37 at that pass's own measurement instant, pinned by the creation time of the youngest issue it named. Repaired by pointer, not value (operator ruling, verbatim: "Pointer, not value"): the live sites now cite docs/governance/f1-family-share-measurement-2026-09-20.md, which carries the method and a read-only script. The narrow arm could not have applied -- --transcribed-adr-counts scores ADR OBPI counts, not a GHI family share, and it was additionally pointed at a superseded campaign edition for 35 days while the live plan went unscanned (GHI #1064). That is the narrow arm's own subject decaying, which is why it is filed separately rather than read as this row moving. The four instances now read: one discharged by migration, one closed by a witness, one repaired by pointer, one (this row's general form) still unwitnessed. That spread is the argument for Promotable over Mechanical: the class admits no single remedy, so no single check can decide it.

| 17i | An attested REQ whose subject a later ruling retired is repaired at the surface, never deleted and never left asserting the retired doctrine | Judgment | Scored 2026-08-18 (rule 0.13.0) at landing — the clause and its score arrive together, so the third state is not accrued. Authored under GHI #823 after the transition was resolved correctly twice from first principles and recorded nowhere an agent would find it: da935dc35 (four @covers tests on the terminal ADR-0.0.37) and a 2026-08-02 campaign checklist item (a JSON invariant seed file). Judgment rather than Promotable, and the second instance is why. The two wrong answers carry only incidental witnesses — deleting a covering test moves a coverage number, keeping a stale one fails the suite — and instance 2 had neither: its entry declared a structural witness (gz validate --foundation-registers-invariant) that never existed and was unenforceable as written, so nothing fired at all and a human noticed. What the clause actually asks is a reading: which of a REQ's assertions is the literal one, whether a rewritten surface still satisfies it, and whether the amendment's reason was recorded. gzkit models none of those as state — the same ground row 17c stands on for an agent's stated reason. A narrower arm is imaginable (flag a @covers tag deleted for a REQ whose parent ADR is terminal) and is not claimed as a promotion path here: it would witness one of two wrong answers and none of the four procedure steps, and no instance of the delete answer has been observed — both known instances were repaired correctly. Held under the § Recommended promotion order freeze (2026-06-08). Reclassify on an observed instance where an attested REQ was orphaned or left asserting retired doctrine and nothing caught it. Worked examples and the full disposition live in docs/governance/attested-req-subject-retirement.md, per .claude/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md § Invariant, which prohibits them in the rule. |

Pythonic Standards (.gzkit/rules/pythonic.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
18	No bare except: / except Exception:	Mechanical	Made true 2026-08-08 (rule 0.3.0), Movement C rules arm — the row was false when written. It claimed "ruff BLE001 enforces" while BLE was absent from [tool.ruff.lint] select in pyproject.toml, so the rule ran nowhere and 6 live violations sat in src/gzkit unreported by gz check — one of them behind a # noqa: BLE0001 typo that suppressed nothing and could not be noticed while the rule was off. BLE is now selected, the six sites carry cited justifications, and the fence is proven by planting a blind except and observing BLE001 catch it. Scoped to the shipped package via per-file-ignores; boundary surfaces (never-raise hooks, orientation scripts, red-phase test scaffolding) and the generated hook mirrors are excluded with stated reasons.
19	Functions <=50 lines	Judgment	Corrected 2026-08-08 — the Mechanical claim was unbacked, and the rule said so. It cited "xenon complexity + pre-commit hooks"; xenon measures cyclomatic rank, never line count, so nothing has ever enforced this number. .gzkit/rules/pythonic.md § Size Limits states it outright — "docs/governance/advisory-rules-audit.md miscodes this as 'Mechanical | xenon complexity' — xenon measures cyclomatic rank, never line count; that Mechanical claim is unbacked" — and its own table lists the enforcer as "nothing / authoring-time guidance only". Additionally unreconciled with the canonical threshold table, which blocks lizard_nloc at 37.0; resolving that needs a distillation pass, not a prose fix.
20	Modules <=600 lines	Judgment	Corrected 2026-08-08 — same class as row 19. It cited a "pre-commit check under .pre-commit-config.yaml"; no such hook exists. The rule's own table lists the enforcer as "nothing / authoring-time guidance only", and the canonical threshold table's radon_raw_nloc block band is 1031.9 with a warn band at 733.2 — so a 700-line module is advise there and a violation here. Two authorities disagreeing in both directions, neither of them running.
21	Classes <=300 lines	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --class-size (GHI #204) — AST scan over src/gzkit/**, with explicit _CLASS_SIZE_WAIVERS for documented exceptions
22	No Optional/List (use \| None / list[])	Mechanical	ruff UP007, UP006
23	No lazy imports unless required for optional dependencies or cycle avoidance	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.3.0), Movement C rules arm — and the old note was false, not merely optimistic. "Partially enforced by ruff PLC0415" was untrue: PL is absent from [tool.ruff.lint] select, so PLC0415 ran nowhere and 138 live violations stand in src/gzkit. Deferred by operator ruling 2026-08-08 (enable BLE001, defer PLC0415) because the rule's own carve-outs — optional dependencies and cycle avoidance — are exactly what most of those 138 sites claim, and each needs a per-site reading to separate a legitimate deferred import from a lazy one. Enabling PLC0415 without that pass would either fail the build or bury 138 blanket noqas, and a blanket suppression is the same blindness the disabled rule already produced. Reclassify by working the 138, not by flipping the switch. Posture ACCEPTED 2026-08-08 (rule 0.4.0, operator ruling "record deferred postures as accepted"). "Deferred" named a queue nothing was advancing, and the clause rode five handoffs as an open loop on that word alone; the state is a measured, disclosed advisory. Re-measured at the acceptance: still 138.
23a	Top-level imports only. Standard library, third-party, then local.	Mechanical	The ordering half is enforced by ruff I (isort), which is selected. Only the top-level-only half (row 23) is unenforced — worth separating, because the row's single-line form let a genuinely-enforced clause and an unenforced one share one score.
24	Type-check suppression syntax — a bracketed # type: ignore[...] must name a ty:-prefixed code	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --type-ignores (this audit's direct outcome, GHI #197). Predicate corrected and scope widened 2026-08-09 (rule 0.5.0) — the row was Mechanical and the gate did run, but it was checking the wrong thing. It matched any bracketed type: ignore[, so it flagged # type: ignore[ty:invalid-assignment] and # type: ignore[arg-type, ty:invalid-argument-type] as violations although ty honors both: ty skips codes lacking a ty: prefix precisely so one comment can serve several checkers. A reader obeying the gate would have deleted a working suppression to go green — a false Mechanical in the same family as rows 18 and 23, differing only in that this one fired rather than stayed silent. Verified against ty 0.0.69 instead of inferred from the rule file: # type: ignore[misc] left an invalid-assignment error standing while both ty:-bearing forms suppressed it (ty suppression docs). Scope was src alone while 512 inert markers accumulated — 188 across 73 files under tests, 324 across 42 under features — making the forbidden form the repo's most common suppression shape; _TYPE_IGNORE_AUDIT_ROOTS now covers src, tests, scripts, .claude/hooks, features, each proven walked by a table-driven scope test.

Data Models (.gzkit/rules/models.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
25	Use Pydantic BaseModel for all data models; no stdlib dataclasses	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --pydantic-models (GHI #203) — AST scan flags @dataclass in src/gzkit/** unless explicitly waived in _DATACLASS_WAIVERS
26	Use ConfigDict(frozen=True, extra="forbid") for immutable models	Mechanical	Same audit (--pydantic-models) — flags BaseModel subclasses missing model_config = ConfigDict(...)
27	Use str \| None not Optional[str]	Mechanical	ruff UP007
27a	Use Field(...) with descriptions for required fields; Field(None, ...) for optional	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.2.0), GHI #921 — the clause had never been scored. audit_pydantic_models (src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/models.py) AST-scans for @dataclass decorators, BaseModel inheritance and model_config presence; it never inspects a Field(...) call, so neither half of this clause is enforced. Promotable rather than Judgment because the check is the same AST shape the audit already walks: for each BaseModel subclass, assert every Field(...) carries a description= keyword and that a None default pairs with an optional annotation. Promotion path: extend _audit_class_node, then author an @enforces control and cite its claim id.

Tool / Skill / Runbook Alignment (.gzkit/rules/tool-skill-runbook-alignment.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
28	Invariant 1 — Every CLI tool has at least one skill that wields it	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --skill-alignment (GHI #202) — scans every registered CLI verb path including multi-word subcommands (GHI #588); requires at least one skill under .gzkit/skills/** unless explicitly waived in _NO_SKILL_VERBS. A deprecated verb INVERTS the invariant: presence of a wielding skill is the failure, because wrapping a retired verb routes agents onto it (GHI #705). Note amended 2026-08-22 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #854 — no new row. § When to apply read as though the wielding skill were the whole obligation of authoring a new verb; it is one of seven, and now points at cli.md § Adding CLI Features — New Subcommand (row 86) rather than restating a subset. That is a cross-reference repair, not a new binding clause, so it amends this row instead of growing the scorecard.
29	Invariant 2 — Every skill's gz_command matches a runbook-prescribed tool	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.3.0), Movement C rules arm. The old note said these "remain advisory until the skill→runbook cross-reference is mechanized", which reads as a queue. It is not one: the invariant turns on "the same operator moment", and no repository surface represents an operator moment as a comparable object — the runbook prescribes verbs in prose, so a checker would score the agreement of two prose surfaces, which is grading by shape (the shape-graded-not-substance signature ADR-0.0.73 refuses). The renamed-verb half is already mechanical elsewhere: gz validate --cli-alignment fail-closes on any gz <verb> reference that does not resolve to a registered parser verb, so what stays advisory is the same-moment judgment alone.
30	Invariant 3 — Destination verb's default output form	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.3.0), same reasoning as row 29 plus a second unmodelled term. A verb's "default human-readable output form" is established by running it and reading the result, and the skill Output Contract it must honor is prose. Mechanizing means asserting that observed rendering satisfies a prose promise — two judgments, not one check. Related but distinct enforcement exists: row 69 (gz test-shape) governs where output-form assertions may live in tests, which is a different subject from whether a verb's rendering matches its skill's contract.

Skill & Surface Sync (.gzkit/rules/skill-surface-sync.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
31	Edit .gzkit/ first	Mechanical	gz agent sync control-surfaces detects drift; version + commit hash resolution documented
32	bumping its skill-version frontmatter	Mechanical	Skill version discipline enforced by sync command; higher version wins
33	gz agent sync control-surfaces	Mechanical	Enforced by forbid_skill_sync_drift in src/gzkit/hooks/guards.py (GHI #210) — rejects a staged commit touching .gzkit/skills/** or .gzkit/rules/** without the corresponding mirror under .claude/** or .github/**; run by the same forbid-pytest pre-commit entry as row 16. Citation repointed 2026-08-08: the row named a pre-commit-sync-guard script under the same absent githooks directory as row 16 — two dead pointers from one consolidation, found together, same GHIs, enforcement intact in both cases.
33a	Never edit vendor mirrors directly	Promotable	forbid_skill_sync_drift (src/gzkit/hooks/guards.py) rejects a canonical edit staged without its mirror, and audit_generated_surface_drift (src/gzkit/instruction_audit.py) reports a mirror that diverges from canon. Enforcement is asymmetric and the row says so: the guard keys on .gzkit/** paths, so a commit staging only a mirror edit passes it — that edit is reverted by the next gz agent sync control-surfaces rather than blocked at commit time. Scored Promotable, not Mechanical (2026-08-29, GHI #921). The guard and the drift audit are real and fail closed, but this scorecard reserves Mechanical for a row citing a registered NC:<claim-id> from the @enforces registry, and no control plants a direct-mirror edit — the 45b / 62c precedent. Claiming Mechanical here would assert the property is witnessed when only the scope is. Promotion path: author an @enforces control staging a mirror-only edit and cite its claim id. The clause carried no row at all while the rule sat grandfathered. The mirror roots are read from .gzkit.json § vendors, never transcribed — see row 33b's note.
33b	Never edit src/gzkit/<surface>/ directly	Promotable	The wheel-shipping copies are regenerated by sync_pkg_surfaces; divergence between an authored canonical tree and its packaged copy fails closed at gz validate --distribution (ADR-0.0.31), which asserts byte-equivalence of every canonical surface as delivered by pip install py-gzkit && gz init. Scored Promotable, not Mechanical (2026-08-29, GHI #921): --distribution fails closed on byte-divergence, but no registered NC:<claim-id> plants a hand-edited src/gzkit/<surface>/ file, so the property is unwitnessed at row level (45b / 62c precedent). Promotion path: author that control and cite its claim id.
33c	skill-version bumps require last_reviewed bumps in the same edit	Promotable	Unenforced today. _validate_last_reviewed (src/gzkit/skills_audit.py:264) checks the field's format and its staleness against DEFAULT_MAX_REVIEW_AGE_DAYS; neither asks whether a skill-version increment carried a last_reviewed bump with it, which is the whole of what the clause mandates. So the failure the rule names — fresh code with stale review metadata, silently disabling the staleness signal — is precisely the one nothing catches. Promotable rather than Judgment because the check is the same staged-diff shape the sibling forbid_skill_sync_drift already implements: compare the two frontmatter fields across git diff --cached for any .gzkit/skills/**/SKILL.md. Scored 2026-08-29 (GHI #921); the gap was invisible while the rule sat grandfathered.

Skill Authoring (.gzkit/rules/skill-authoring.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
94	Procedure stays; history leaves — qualitative parsimony (one home per meaning, name the verb, branch test, earned rationalization rows)	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-19 (rule 0.1.1, GHI #1037). Whether a paragraph is procedure or history, and whether a row names a failure observed here, requires reading. Reviewed by instructions-files-diet and skill-authoring-quality. The countable size and unfinished-marker arms now have runtime checks in gz skill audit, regression coverage in tests/test_skill_body_audit.py, and explicit warning/error boundaries; these checks do not establish qualitative parsimony. Formal Mechanical promotion remains pending a registered property-level negative-control witness, per the scoring contract above.
94a	Existing oversized bodies within their ceilings warn; new oversized bodies and growth beyond a ceiling block.	Promotable	Runtime enforcement landed in gz skill audit (GHI #1037), with size-boundary and growth regression tests. Formal Mechanical scoring requires registration of a property-level negative control; the qualitative row above no longer includes this countable arm. Packaged cutover ceilings are registered in the waiver ratchet and tested against the committed baseline.
94b	Unfinished active or deprecated bodies block, drafts warn, and retired bodies are excluded.	Promotable	Runtime enforcement landed in gz skill audit (GHI #1037), with lifecycle, scaffold-to-audit and fenced-example regression tests. This recognizes mechanical markers, not arbitrary semantic incompleteness. Formal Mechanical scoring requires a registered property-level negative control.
94c	Hitting the ceiling triggers a compression-and-merge search BEFORE lifting or extracting; the commit says what was compressed	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-20 (rule 0.2.0, operator ruling). gz skill audit measures the body AFTER an edit and cannot see which move produced the number: a body that fell under its ceiling by compression and one that got there by moving four sections to references/ are byte-identical to it. Whether duplicated meaning was searched for first is exactly the qualitative parsimony row 94 already scores Judgment, one trigger later. The near arm — an extraction that grows the skill's total footprint while shrinking SKILL.md — is countable in principle (compare pre/post totals across SKILL.md + references/) and is NOT built; it would witness the footprint, never the search. Occasioned by ghi-author reaching its ceiling on 2026-09-20 and being extracted before being compressed.
95	Text attributed to AGENTS.md is quoted from the current file, by section name, or not quoted	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-19. The top defect class of the 2026-09-19 skill pass (GHI #921) and of its src remainder (GHI #1035). A resolver for AGENTS.md § X citations was considered at #1035 and not built under the promotion freeze; no check reads a skill's quotations against the live contract.
96	§ Model alignment — scope and stop conditions stated, no re-check step where a mechanical witness exists, MUST/NEVER reserved for constraints the skill owns, written constraints kept, positive target	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-19. Sourced to docs/governance/opus-tuning.md, never to a card. Whether wording suits the current model is settled by running the skill, not by reading it; frontier-model-card-currency (currency) is where a card rotation puts such wording up for re-sourcing.
97	A skill step never instructs what the root contract forbids (OBPI initiation, gh issue create / bare gh issue close, a real-name attestor, lane-dependent Gate 5, a retired command or dead path)	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-19. Mechanical neighbours cover two narrow arms: gz validate --cli-alignment resolves every gz <verb> a skill names, and gz validate --skill-alignment holds every verb to a wielding skill. Neither reads whether a step crosses an authority line; that was found only by reading each skill end to end.

Tests Policy (.gzkit/rules/tests.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
34	Red-Green-Refactor TDD discipline	Judgment	Cannot mechanically verify "test failed before implementation" after the fact
35	Eval-feedback-source:	Mechanical	gz validate --commit-trailers — landed under GHI #201
36	Use stdlib unittest; no pytest	Mechanical	forbid pytest pre-commit hook
37	Two runners, one test surface	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --test-tiers (GHI #209) — fails on tests/{integration,e2e,slow,bdd}/ or forbidden --integration/--e2e/--slow/--bdd-only flags re-appearing in parser_*.py
37a	Plain gz check is the per-change gate and drops Behave; gz check --full and CI run both tiers	Promotable	Re-scored 2026-09-23 (rule 0.26.5), GHI #1088. Unit-tested, not yet Mechanical: tests/governance/test_check_step_scopes.py::TestTheDefaultIsThePerChangeGate pins that the change scope omits Behave and keeps Test, that --full runs Behave, that plain gz check parses to the change scope, and that --fast/--full are exclusive; TestOnlyScopesCoveringTheGateRecord pins that no scope records a fingerprint while dropping a step the per-change gate runs. A unit test is not a registered negative control; an NC: claim in the enforcement registry promotes the row. CI's --full invocation is .github/workflows/ci.yml, a declaration nothing reads.
38	Coverage >=40.00%	Mechanical	Pre-commit hook
39	Behave scenarios covering a REQ carry @REQ-X.Y.Z-NN-MM	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --behave-req-tags (GHI #211, reversed direction GHI #276) — enumerates heavy-lane OBPI briefs (pool ADRs excluded), extracts REQ-IDs from each brief's Acceptance Criteria, and asserts every REQ has a matching scenario-level @REQ-* tag under features/**. Heavy OBPIs that defer BDD (schema-only, template-only) register in data/behave_coverage_waivers.json.
66	Verification exit-code integrity (binding, GHI #589). A verifier's truth is its own exit code, never a downstream filter's.	Mechanical	Promoted 2026-08-05 (rule 0.14.0). verifier-pipe-gate.py, a PreToolUse hook on Bash, refuses a verifier in any non-final pipeline stage; decision in src/gzkit/verifier_pipe_gate.py (decide), live negative control verifier-exit-status-masked wired into _ensure_production_claims_registered. The named promotion path said "refusing <verifier> \| <filter>"; that was built one step wider on purpose — the shell reports the LAST stage's exit whatever it is, so a filter allowlist would pass gz check \| cat, the identical defect renamed. Verifier set is READ from CANONICAL_STEP_COMMANDS, not restated. Quote-aware shlex parsing single-sourced into src/gzkit/shell_reading.py, shared with handoff_resume_gate._is_compound so the two gates cannot disagree about what a pipe is. set -o pipefail and ${PIPESTATUS[0]} opt out. Coverage limits declared in UNWITNESSABLE. Widened 2026-09-06 (rule 0.21.0, GHI #940) to the SEQUENCE form. The predicate was scoped to the pipe character while the shell reports the last statement exactly as it reports the last stage, so verifier > log; tail log read as compliant — and the module's own comment ("gz check; ls \| head masks nothing") recorded that reading as intended. masked_verifier now carries a second arm over statements terminated by ;/newline/&; && is excluded because it short-circuits. Widened again 2026-09-06 (rule 0.22.0, GHI #970) to the \|\| BRANCH, which had been excluded on the reasoning that it "runs only on failure and announces it" — a rationale that conflated ANNOUNCING with REPORTING. The branch does announce, in output, and then replaces the failing status with its own, so verifier \|\| echo failed exits 0 exactly when the verifier failed; on the Step-4a packet surface, a curated excerpt where omission is the attack, the announcement can simply not be pasted, and such a packet verified with zero blockers. The verdict idiom survives on the arm's existing canonical scope rather than on a separator carve-out: test -f x && echo DEFECT \|\| echo OK runs no verifier, and all 3 top-level \|\| transcripts in 1154 are that shape. set -e is NOT honoured here — measured, not reasoned: POSIX suppresses errexit left of \|\|, and cannot fire on a background job either, so the escape narrowed to the separators where the shell genuinely aborts (;, newline). A third arm carries its own recovery, since neither existing remedy reaches it. Coupled fix on the consumer (§ DO IT RIGHT 1a): the packet's omitted-status guard read only a bare exit N while this gate's prose hands every caller echo "REAL EXIT: $?", so the sanctioned escape was unguarded in the spelling the sanction recommends. Two limits DECLARED and now tracked rather than left in a constant: the aggregate status itself (#969) and an && chain caught by a later separator (#971). set -e opts out on USE (head-resolved like pipefail, GHI #796), as does a $? read in the statement IMMEDIATELY after — immediacy is load-bearing, since $? otherwise reports the intervening statement. Unquoted newlines are normalized to ; first via shell_reading.normalize_statement_newlines, because shlex eats a newline as whitespace and the harness background surface sends newline-separated statements. _block_prose branches by arm: recommending pipefail for a sequence would hand back a correction that does not correct. The same predicate reaches the Step-4a packet verifier, which consumes it rather than copying it. Three limits newly DECLARED in UNWITNESSABLE: the aggregate status itself (even a correct $? read still exits with the last statement's code, so a harness summary can still announce success over a red suite — the ARB receipt is the only channel that carries the verifier's own result out of the shell), || branches, and set -e/$? honored on USE but not on CORRECT use. Closed 2026-09-14 (rule 0.24.0, GHI #971): the caught && chain. The arm now reads the separator ending the verifier's AND-OR list rather than its own terminator, so verifier && ok; ls and verifier && ok \|\| echo x are refused (errexit is not honored inside a chain; a $? read immediately after the chain is, since a short-circuited list reports the verifier's status — measured, and the issue's stated need for a raw-text split did not survive that measurement). Two omitted members closed in the same pass: a $? read after & reports the background launch and is no longer honored, and under pipefail a verifier in any stage carries its status to a later statement. chain and background arms carry their own recovery; the background arm replaces prose that handed back a set -e; correction the gate itself refused. Corpus check: 0 of 1178 committed transcripts changed verdict. Newly DECLARED and tracked: a verifier inside a ( ) / { } group is not recognized (GHI #1008). Closed 2026-09-15 (rule 0.25.0, GHI #1008): the grouped verifier. A ( … ) or { …; } group is read as ONE command whose status is the verifier its own list carries, so every arm applies unchanged; merged punctuation ();, ;() is split at the paren, except the run closing a word-led paren, which is prose or a quoted lone paren. Measured, not reasoned: state set inside ( … ) does not leak, a brace group's does only as a plain statement, and errexit is suppressed inside a group that is not last in its AND-OR list, which gets its own errexit-suppressed recovery. Unbalanced parens keep the pre-#1008 reading. Corpus: 0 of 732 committed transcripts changed verdict. Newly DECLARED and tracked: reserved-word prefixes and $( … ) (GHI #1012), heredoc bodies read as statements (GHI #1013).
89	Mutation-sweep integrity (binding, GHI #963). A failing mutant run is not a kill; sweeps report four outcomes; every mutant runs with its own bytecode cache	Judgment	Added 2026-09-06 (rule 0.20.0), GHI #963 — never scored. The MECHANISM exists and is not the difficulty: gzkit.mutation_witness.run_mutation_sweep verifies baseline, activation, per-mutant PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX isolation and failure cause, returns killed/survived/invalid/inconclusive, and is itself swept — that self-sweep found one of its own guards vacuous (the isolation test asserted a recorded field rather than what the subprocess saw). What has no witness is that a given sweep USED it. A sweep is an ad-hoc act inside a session, not a repository artifact: nothing on disk records that one ran, so there is no surface a checker could read, which is the unmodelled-caller ground of rows 29/30 rather than a check nobody has written. The adjacent mechanical arm is the harness's own test suite, and citing it here would be the scope-level-control-as-property-proof substitution this scorecard refuses — it proves the harness classifies correctly, never that an agent reached for it instead of a shell loop. Reclassify if sweeps ever emit a receipt (the gz arb red shape is the obvious precedent), which would give the claim a surface for the first time.
67	RED evidence: Do not author ARB step receipts with exit_status=1 as "RED receipts".	Mechanical	uv run gz arb red --req <REQ-ID> emits gzkit.arb.red_receipt.v1 + a red_receipt_emitted ledger event carrying failure_class; gz validate --red-parity is a bound QC step. A none verdict (test passes without its implementation) fail-closes as the § 6f defect (GHI #642).
68	src/tests commits MUST carry a Task: trailer. Enforced by gz validate --commit-trailers.	Mechanical	gz validate --commit-trailers (GHI #552 strict mode); has_task_trailer() in src/gzkit/tasks.py. Auto-stamped by .gzkit/hooks/prepare-commit-msg-task-trailers. Accepted forms single-sourced through _ANY_TASK_TRAILER_RE; the -#<ghi> anchor is OPTIONAL (operator moratorium on reflexive GHI-filing, 2026-06-01).
68a	Durable catalog requirements have authority independent of ADRs and OBPIs; a brief references their applicable states and retains local acceptance criteria.	Promotable	Scored 2026-09-25, rule 0.26.6, operator hierarchy amendment. Adopted design relationship, not a claim of runtime enforcement. Independent catalog identity, resolvable revision references and preserved assignment evidence could mechanically witness its structural arm; those mechanics remain proposals in the grounding design. Deciding whether a statement is a durable obligation or a local criterion still requires judgment. Current local REQ/TASK identifiers and proof channels continue; rows 59/60/68 score those existing mechanisms and do not prove catalog independence. No promotion schedule or new gate is created here.
69	Output-form fixture carve-out. Output-form assertions are permitted in dedicated fixture tests per .gzkit/rules/tool-skill-runbook-alignment.md § Invariant 3.	Judgment	gz test-shape reads the markers, but an undeclared assertion on result.output / .getvalue() / assertRegex is reported advisory, never fail-closed (GHI #571). Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.15.0), Movement C rules arm. The former promotion path — "flip that arm closed once the declared-marker backlog drains" — is not observed-drift evidence, and flipping it would fail-close the whole legacy corpus at once, which is why the arm was left open. The rule now states the advisory posture as settled in its own text; this row is not a re-score alone.
70	Prefer structured assertion targets / the discriminator (if behavior changed but text did not, would this test fail?)	Judgment	The discriminator is an authoring question no static check decides — a grep-a-doc assertion is structurally legal Python. Partial mechanical arm: gz validate --tautological-test-audit (bound QC step) catches the degenerate end (assertEqual(x, x)), and theater_signature_scan catches copy-vs-self in validator source. The middle band — a test that asserts real strings that happen not to track behavior — stays judgment by construction.
71	Eval-awareness corollary. Audit-helper names MUST NOT pattern-match as audit-step names	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.15.0), Movement C rules arm. The tractable check (flag helpers named assert_*audit*passes* under tests/**) was scored a promotion candidate for months and never built, because nothing has been observed for it to catch — the row's own note said "low catch-rate expected; listed for completeness rather than urgency." Under the § Recommended promotion order freeze that is a reason not to build it, not a backlog item. The rule now states the clause binds at authoring and review time only, and names what would reclassify it: a named, observed instance.
72	Derivation rule / per-increment rhythm / unit-test purpose — tests derive from OBPI acceptance criteria, one test → one observed RED → minimum code to GREEN	Judgment	"Derived from the REQ rather than from a run of the code" is not recoverable from the artifact after the fact; the RED witness (row 67) is the closest mechanical proxy and covers the rhythm's observable half only.
75	Do not slice horizontally. Authoring every test for a brief and then every implementation is not TDD with a long cycle — it produces tests insensitive to change.	Judgment	Added 2026-08-09 (rule 0.16.0), GHI #567 Move 2(b). Authoring ORDER leaves no artifact to inspect: the committed tree is identical whether the tests were written one-at-a-time or in a batch, so no scan over tests/** can recover which happened. The nearest mechanical proxy is the RED witness (row 67), and it is per-REQ by construction — gz arb red --req <REQ-ID> proves one test failed without its implementation, which is exactly the evidence a horizontal slice never produces, but its absence is equally consistent with the REQ simply not having been run. No mechanical witness, and none is planned. Reclassify on a named, observed instance of a batch-authored suite that shipped and was caught late.
87	Smoke/BVT <=60s — binds the @smoke-marked subset run by uv run gz smoke, NOT the full unit tier.	Mechanical	Added 2026-08-27 (rule 0.18.0), GHI #856 — the clause had never been scored at all, in either half; it entered at rule 0.13.0 (GHI #724) and this ledger's filename-presence predecessor could not see an unscored clause inside a listed file. Enforced arm: uv run gz smoke exits 3 on budget breach and on an empty tier when smoke.required is true; absent/false permits an empty tier with an advisory (GHI #1047 clarifies the existing #724 policy), wired as the Smoke tier step of gz check. Witness NC:smoke-tier, and note precisely what it covers: it plants a populated project with smoke.required: true whose smoke tier is EMPTY, so it witnesses the required empty-tier arm. A real 60s BREACH is not planted by any control — stated rather than implied, since a row that reads as fully witnessed when half of it is not is the exact false-Mechanical shape this column's freeze was ruled against. The companion half declares an INTENTIONAL ABSENCE rather than an unenforced rule — the full tier's runtime ratchets with the REQ set by design, so a constant ceiling over it could only ever be breached — and there is therefore nothing to promote. The measured figures in that bullet are a DATED RECORD, never a threshold (.claude/rules/governance-core.md § Non-negotiable rules); they were two generations stale until 0.18.0 re-measured them, and the sentence "parallelism does not rescue it" was routinely misread as a general ruling against parallel execution — a reading that would now contradict CANONICAL_STEP_COMMANDS["unittest"], which runs unittest-parallel.
90	Git fixture isolation: every git a test spawns passes env=_isolated_git_env() from tests/commands/common.py	Mechanical	Added 2026-09-07 (rule 0.23.0), GHI #977. _isolated_git_env drops git's own repo-local set (local_repo_env in git's environment.c: GIT_DIR, GIT_WORK_TREE, GIT_INDEX_FILE, GIT_COMMON_DIR, GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY, GIT_PREFIX, …) plus the GIT_CONFIG* injection variables, and keeps auth/transport/identity/diagnostics and the user's own GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL/SYSTEM/NOSYSTEM. Witness NC:git-fixture-isolation (plants one unguarded git spawn beside a guarded one and a non-git spawn, so the control fails for the planted reason). Enforced arm: tests/commands/test_common_fixtures.py::TestEveryGitSpawnIsInsideTheBoundary — an AST fence over tests/** whose predicate is gzkit.git_spawn_boundary.git_spawns_outside_boundary that fails the suite for any subprocess.*(["git", …]) whose env= is not the boundary. Behavioural arm, same file: TestFixtureGitIsolation plants a linked worktree's gitdir as GIT_DIR, runs the real helper AND git's real pre-push hook from a real linked worktree, and asserts the sentinel's config/index/refs/HEAD/files are byte-identical while the unguarded twin corrupts it. Second layer, same definition: tests/__init__.py calls scrub_repo_local_git_env(os.environ) once at package import, which is what covers the git that PRODUCTION code spawns when a test drives it against a temp root (per-call env= cannot reach those); witnessed by test_importing_the_tests_package_scrubs_the_process_environment in a fresh interpreter. Scope limit, declared: the fence sees literal git argv only; a helper taking its argv as a parameter (tests/adr/test_storage_tiers.py::_run, threaded by hand) is outside it, and an env bound from a hand-built {**os.environ, …} passes the fence — the chokepoint is the guarantee, the per-site env the explicit statement. Measured before the repair (disposable clone, real pre-commit pre-push gz check, linked-worktree push): clone flipped to core.bare=true, identity overwritten, 9758 tests with failures=32 errors=152.

Chores Workflow (.gzkit/rules/chores.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
54	Plan-first chore discipline	Judgment	Procedural; enforced by gz chores plan/advise ordering in the skill. No artifact records whether a plan preceded a run — gz chores run writes to proofs/ either way — so "plan-first" has no queryable witness.
55	Lite by default	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-15 (rule 0.3.2); was Mechanical, and the claim was false. The row read "Lane config enforced by gz chores plan". What is actually mechanical is narrower and different: _parse_chore validates lane against ALLOWED_LANES = {"lite", "heavy"} (src/gzkit/commands/chores.py:25, chores_exec.py:197-203) — an enum check on a string. The clause's real content is "uv run -m unittest -q (unit tier only); no behave, no network, no external services", and nothing enforces any of those three. src/gzkit/commands/chores.py:244 says so in its own words: "The lanes block carries gate-rigor metadata only (lite=Gates 1,2; heavy=all)." A validated enum was being reported as an enforced discipline. Reclassify on a check that actually inspects a chore's executed commands for the forbidden tiers.
56	CLI-only evidence (no raw SQL attestation)	Judgment	Anti-pattern prevention; cultural. A regex for SQL keywords in attestation text would grade shape, not substance (the shape-graded-not-substance signature ADR-0.0.73 refuses).
56a	A chore never discharges a finding by suppression.	Mechanical	Arms: no criterion runs through a shell interpreter or passes an exit-forcing flag, and no criterion or CHORE.md command writes suppression markers. Added 2026-09-13 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #999 step 6, landed with its witness so the clause never stood unwitnessed (operator ruling 2026-09-13, verbatim "Static chore check (Recommended)"). Witness NC:chore-suppression, which plants a chore carrying an exit-forcing criterion beside an honest criterion and a workflow report capture ending \|\| true, so the control fails for the planted reason. Enforced arm: tests/governance/test_chore_suppression.py runs audit_chore_suppression over the live registry in the unit suite, with planted cases for each route; a mutation sweep over its six guards killed all six, conclusive. The registry loader's SHELL_OPERATORS_RE already refused &&, \|\|, \|, < and > in a criterion; this row covers the routes that refusal leaves open. Scope limits, declared: an interpreter that is not a shell (python -c) can still exit 0 by construction, and a writer quoted with its command inside prose code reads as an instruction.
56b	A suppression marker hand-written during a chore run	Judgment	Added 2026-09-13 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #999 step 6; advisory in the rule's own text. gzkit models no binding from a chore run to the diff it leaves, so attributing a new # noqa to a run is a reading of the diff. A repo-wide suppression ratchet was considered and not chosen at the same ruling: it would gate every commit rather than chore runs. Reclassify on a named run that discharged a finding by a hand-written marker and was caught late.
56c	Author every chore in .gzkit/chores/<slug>/	Promotable	Added 2026-09-28 (rule 0.6.0), GHI #1044, which found the rule naming the package copy canonical while skill-surface-sync.md rule 1 named .gzkit/; operator ruling 2026-09-28, verbatim ".gzkit/chores/ canonical (Recommended)". The consequence arm exists: gz validate --distribution byte-compares canonical-class chore files between the two trees, so an edit made only in the package copy fails it, and the next gz agent sync control-surfaces overwrites it. Promotable rather than Mechanical because no registered NC:<claim-id> plants a package-only chore edit and asserts the distribution check fires. Promotion path: author that control.
56d	gz chores doctor rewrites every differing definition file of a DAMAGED slug; dry-run and sync before repairing	Judgment	Added 2026-09-28 (rule 0.6.0), GHI #1044. The replacement semantics are code (_repair_damaged_doctor_slug, src/gzkit/commands/chores.py), described rather than changed, as the issue required. Whether an operator dry-runs and syncs first is procedure with no artifact recording it.

ADR Audit (.gzkit/rules/adr-audit.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
40	Audit sequence: gz adr audit-check → quality checks → closeout lifecycle → emit receipt	Judgment	Sequence is procedural; individual steps are mechanically enforced by gz closeout/gz attest/gz audit but ordering is operator discipline
40a	ARB-wrapped canonical invocations	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.3.0), GHI #921 — never scored. The consequence arm is genuinely fail-closed: a zero-receipt payload hits _zero_receipt_result(fail_closed=True) at exit 3 on Heavy lane and foundation kind, and the command strings are locked by CANONICAL_STEP_COMMANDS with drift reported by gz arb validate. Promotable rather than Mechanical because no registered NC:<claim-id> plants a bare-command run and asserts the fail-close fires (45b / 62c precedent). Promotion path: author that control.
40b	The --evidence-json payload MUST carry the arb-* receipt IDs emitted by step 2	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.3.0), GHI #921 — never scored. Fail-closes at exit 3 before the attestation is recorded, which is the ordering that matters: a fabricated receipt id is the same failure as a fabricated claim (AGENTS.md § Attestation), so the check has to bite ahead of the ledger write. Unwitnessed at row level by any registered control. Note the residual this row does not claim: the gate counts citations, it does not verify the cited receipt exists and passed — a plausible but invented arb- id is uncaught.
40c	On audit-check failure, read the flagged REQ's kind tag first, then supply that kind's one proof channel	Judgment	Choosing between (a) genuinely-uncovered, (b) covered-but-drifted assertion and (c) wrong-proof-channel is a reading of what a test asserts versus what a REQ means, which is the judgment tests.md Invariant 6f reserves for a human. The adjacent mechanical arm is gz validate --req-kind-discipline (ADR-0.0.59), which fences the kind→channel mapping itself — it can prove a SUPPORT REQ has no @covers test, never that a BEHAVIOR REQ's covering test asserts the right thing. Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.3.0), GHI #921.
40d	Never backfill a cosmetic @covers decorator to silence audit-check	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.3.0), GHI #921 — never scored. A covers-backfill heuristic and an inline exemption marker exist, and the marker's reason text is mechanically required precisely so the exemption cannot become a one-token escape hatch — that requirement is the enforceable half. What no check can decide is whether a given overlay is the legitimate regression-invariant shape the rule carves out or the cosmetic backfill it forbids; the rule says so itself. Promotable on the narrow arm (marker present ⇒ reason non-empty), never on the general one.

Cross-Platform (.gzkit/rules/cross-platform.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
41	All file operations use pathlib.Path	Mechanical	Made true 2026-08-08 — the row was false when written, and is the sixth of row 18's class. It claimed the PTH family enforces while that family was absent from the select list under tool.ruff.lint, so it ran nowhere and 17 live violations stood in src/gzkit (13 PTH201, 3 PTH123 open()-not-Path.open(), 1 PTH204 os.path.getmtime). The family is now selected and all 17 fixed; the PTH204 repair also retired a lazy import os and the lazy-import suppression comment that rode with it (row 23's code, which this cell may not name by token — see the narration constraint below). Scoped to the shipped package via the same per-file-ignores keys as BLE001 and D — 102 of the 119 tree-wide findings sit outside it (87 in tests, 7 in the generated .claude/hooks mirrors, 3 in behave steps, 2 in profiling scripts) and adopting those is a separate decision. This is the first row of the class found by machine rather than by hand, because it cites its witness by family (PTH) rather than by code, a shape the reachability check was blind to until the family arm landed in the same commit.
42	All file I/O specifies encoding="utf-8"	Mechanical	ruff / unit tests
43	Use context managers for temp files	Judgment	Pattern — hard to mechanize reliably
44	No shell=True in subprocess	Mechanical	Made true 2026-08-08 — the row was false when written, and is the fifth of row 18's class. It cited two ruff codes while the S family was absent from the select list under tool.ruff.lint, so neither ran anywhere. The single shell=True site in the package (src/gzkit/governance/stage4_evidence.py, operator-authored demo commands from the brief) already carried a justified # noqa: S602 that suppressed nothing, because a suppression naming a rule that never runs is invisible — the # noqa: BLE0001 failure of row 18, one rule over. S602 is now selected individually and the existing noqa starts meaning something; the promotion cost zero fixes. Its second citation is dropped as miscited: that code is ruff's subprocess-without-shell-equals-true, which fires on subprocess calls that do not use a shell — the near-inverse of this clause — and carries 35 live hits. Naming the ruff rule rather than its bare code is deliberate here: gz validate --advisory-scorecard now refuses a Mechanical row citing an unreachable code, and it cannot tell a witness citation from a disclaimer, so a Mechanical row may not narrate a disabled code by token. That constraint is the check working — a Mechanical row's job is to name its witness.
45	The CLI entrypoint handles UTF-8 at startup	Mechanical	Rule 9 audit --utf8-prefix covers this
45a	fresh python -c or helper scripts	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --utf8-prefix (GHI #275 — scope extended from rule-9 prefix scan to gz-pipe patterns in docs/skills/features + tools/**/*.py entry-point AST walk)
45b	Render relative paths via .as_posix()	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-28 (rule 0.6.0, GHI #900) — the clause had never been scored. It was carried by the pre-ledger grandfather, which the version bump retired; the grandfather is shrink-only, so a newly written row cannot re-enter it and had to be scored for real. Enforced by tests/governance/test_path_separator_portability.py (GHI #383) — a unit test, which this scorecard does not accept as Mechanical (see 62c/62d): a unit test proves the property holds today, a registered NC:<claim-id> proves the gate refuses a violation. Promotion path: author an @enforces control planting a str(Path.relative_to(...)) rendering and cite its claim id here.
45c	Text-mode subprocess captures pass errors="replace"	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-28 (rule 0.6.0, GHI #900) — the clause landed at rule 0.5.0 and no row ever named it. Same grandfather retirement as 45b. audit_subprocess_errors is a real audit function with teeth, but it is reached only from tests/governance/test_subprocess_errors_replace.py, not from a registered negative control, so it is scored on the same terms as 45b rather than on the strength of the function existing. Promotion path: enroll the audit as an @enforces claim and cite it here.
45d	Wheel-delivered instruction text names no path only its authoring environment can resolve	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --wheel-path-literals (GHI #900), in the default gz check scope, witnessed by NC:wheel-path-literals — whose fixture plants the same literal both inside and outside the include block and whose entrypoint filters to the shipped file, so the control cannot pass on a scan that ignored the block. The audit reads the same [tool.hatch.build.targets.wheel] include block --distribution reads, so witness scope cannot drift from delivery scope. Its boundary is stated, not implied: ~/, $HOME/, /tmp, /usr, /var and /private are deliberately not flagged — the first two expand per reader and are the remedy this clause steers toward, the rest resolve on every POSIX machine (23 legitimate /tmp uses measured in wheel .md at authoring). A machine-specific path under one of those roots is therefore uncaught, which is why this row claims delivered-root resolvability and not portability in general.

Defect Fix Routing (AGENTS.md § Defect-fix routing; catalog in docs/governance/defect-fix-routing.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
46	Direct fix vs OBPI ceremony thresholds (≤10 source lines, ≤2 files, single surface)	Judgment	Routing decision requires human scope assessment
47	Default against over-applying ceremony	Judgment	Meta-rule about agent reasoning

Gate 5 Runbook-Code Covenant (.gzkit/rules/gate5-runbook-code-covenant.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
48	Docs update when command output changes	Judgment	Correlation between code change and doc change is not reliably mechanizable
49	Do not leave placeholder output examples	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.3.0), Movement C rules arm. The proposed scan was probed before being built: zero TODO/TBD/FIXME/XXX/<output> tokens across docs/user/manpages/**, docs/user/runbook.md, docs/governance/governance_runbook.md. All eight hits were ... elision inside genuine captured output — correct prose the scan would have demanded be edited. <…> cannot serve as the signal because manpage usage syntax is built from it (gz obpi status <OBPI-ID>). Whether an example is a placeholder or a real capture is a reading of intent, not a token match.
50	Do not declare completion without explicit human attestation.	Mechanical	Enforced unconditionally by _requires_human_obpi_attestation (ADR-0.0.36) and the gz closeout pipeline (row 15). Row text corrected 2026-08-08: it read "Heavy/foundation lane requires explicit human attestation", which is the pre-ADR-0.0.36 branching the rule's own § Do Not explicitly retires — "The prior 'for heavy/foundation scope' qualifier described branching collapsed at ADR-0.0.36 and is retired." A scorecard row asserting a lane condition on a universal gate is the scorecard contradicting the rule it scores.
50a	Do not cite bare uv run gz lint / uv run mkdocs build --strict as attestation evidence — they produce no arb-* receipt.	Mechanical	Locked by CANONICAL_STEP_COMMANDS in src/gzkit/arb/validator.py; gz arb validate flags drift, and on Heavy lane / foundation kind a missing receipt ID is fail-closed — gz adr emit-receipt exits 3 before the attestation is recorded. Provenance resolves as of each receipt's own timestamp_utc via RETIRED_STEP_COMMANDS, so widening a canonical scope cannot retroactively invalidate sealed evidence.
50b	Three-layer documentation model — operator runbook, governance runbook, command docs	Judgment	A map of which surface owns which audience, not a checkable claim. It tells an author where a behavior change must land; whether the landing is correct is row 48, which is already Judgment for the same reason (correlating a code change to its doc change is not reliably mechanizable).

Brief Heading Conventions (.gzkit/rules/brief-heading-conventions.md)

Section added 2026-08-30 (rule 0.2.0), GHI #921 — this rule had NO section in the Scorecard. It was carried entirely by the pre-ledger grandfather, and the ledger's filename-presence predecessor could not see the absence: the stem brief-heading-conventions does appear in this document, in the § Promotion tracking table at row 15, so a presence check read it as covered while no clause of it had ever been scored. That is the same shape GHI #754 closed for clauses inside a listed file, reproduced one level up at whole-file granularity.

#	Rule	Score	Notes
53a	OBPI brief evidence sections MUST use H3 (###), not H2 (##)	Promotable	uv run gz validate --brief-headings exits 3 on drift (GHI #238), which is a real fail-closed gate — but this scorecard reserves Mechanical for a row citing a registered NC:<claim-id> from the @enforces registry, and no control plants an H2-drifted evidence heading (the 45b / 62c precedent). The failure it guards is specifically silent: a drifted heading still passes schema validation because the section exists, while the extractor stops at the next H2 and returns an empty body. Promotion path: author an @enforces control planting ## Implementation Summary in a brief and cite its claim id.
53b	## Acceptance Criteria (H2) is top-level brief structure and is deliberately NOT an evidence section	Judgment	A carve-out that exists to stop an over-eager reading of 53a from rewriting the canonical H2 section, and to keep it distinct from the per-pass ### ACCEPTANCE evidence section. Nothing mechanical distinguishes "this H2 is structure" from "this H2 is drifted evidence" except the closed list of three canonical evidence headings the validator already carries — so the carve-out is discharged by 53a's implementation rather than separately witnessed. Scored so the exemption is recorded rather than inferred from 53a's silence.

GitHub CLI Guardrails (.gzkit/rules/gh-cli.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
51	Use gh for defect tracking, ADR closeout, release ceremony, or active brief / explicit user request	Judgment	Agent-behavior rule; no compile-time signal. Row corrected 2026-08-30 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #921: it read "only when explicitly requested", which is narrower than the rule and would make three sanctioned uses — defect tracking, closeout, release ceremony — read as violations. The rule sat grandfathered, so no version-attributed review had compared the two.
51a	gh issue create is forbidden as a direct agent invocation — author every GHI through /ghi-author; file cross-repo through gz issue file	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #921 — the file's headline clause carried no row at all. The rule states its own unmechanizability and the reason: "The prohibition is on the caller, not the string" — /ghi-author invokes gh issue create at its own SKILL.md:199, so the sanctioned and forbidden invocations are byte-identical commands. Distinguishing them requires attributing a call to its caller, which gzkit does not model (the unmodelled-caller ground of row 62b). Backstop is the skill's Step-0 prior-art lookup, whose absence produced the canonical sibling-cut regression GHI #459/#460. No mechanical witness, and none is planned.
51b	MUST go to tvproductions/gzkit via gz issue file	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #921. The wrapper itself fails closed on a body referencing no gzkit-owned surface and auto-stamps provenance, so the filing path is enforced once taken; what is unwitnessed is the choice to take it rather than file locally. Promotion path: the same caller-attribution problem as 51a bounds a general check, but the narrow arm is tractable — scan a consuming repo's issue bodies for gzkit-owned surface references. Scored Promotable on that narrow arm, not the general one.
51c	Census queries establish completeness — a whole-queue count reads the search API total_count (and treats incomplete_results as no count obtained); an inventory paginates or verifies its population against that total; a bounded search never supports "no such issue exists"; an explicit --limit alone is insufficient	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-07 (rule 0.5.0), GHI #972. Written guidance whose recommended commands were verified to return the complete result (41 by total_count, 41 by --paginate, 30 by the default page, 10 by --limit 10) — that the command works is evidence the guidance is correct, not that it is enforced. Whether a given gh <noun> list is a census or a scoped search is a reading of the consumer's intent, which gzkit does not model (the unmodelled-caller ground of 51a / 62b). The narrow syntactic arm — a Bash PreToolUse hook refusing gh <noun> list … --jq 'length' with no --limit, the verifier-pipe-gate pattern — is deliberately NOT scored Promotable: the --limit 200 form passes it and still truncates silently, so the check would grade by shape (the shape-graded-not-substance signature this scorecard exists to close). Reclassify on a named session where a capped page was booked as a total after this clause landed. Notes corrected 2026-09-07 (rule 0.5.1, #972 reopened): the count form now refuses to print a number on incomplete_results: true (verified — jq exit 5 on an incomplete fixture, the total on a complete one), and the at-limit claim was withdrawn — --limit 40 returned 40 against a 40-issue queue, complete, so equality proves nothing; completeness is unproven until pagination or an authoritative total establishes it. Score unchanged.
51d	gh issue reopen is allowed only for /ghi-author Step 0's regression case — a GHI closed in the last 30 days whose root cause regressed, reopened with the regression evidence rather than filed fresh	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-27 (rule 0.7.0), operator ruling "Add reopen to the rule". The same caller-attribution ground as 51a: a sanctioned reopen and an unsanctioned one are byte-identical commands, and whether the regression shares the closed GHI's root cause is a reading of two issue bodies. The widening closes an unreachable skill step (the 0.6.0 precedent for comment), measured at GHI #1017. No mechanical witness, and none is planned.
52	Prohibited commands (settings mutations, secret management, force push, un-authorized merges)	Judgment	Permission model lives in .claude/settings.json; gh-level enforcement is server-side
53	Defect tracking: create GHI when fix deferred	Judgment	Cultural enforcement; see rule 17

Agent Contract (folded into AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / docs/governance/agent-contract-rationale.md)

File consolidated 2026-04-21 — merged from the former behavioral-invariants.md (positive invariants — Do) and constraints.md (negative constraints — Do not) to close the dual-framing co-load drift that Pass A of the control-surface audit surfaced.

Folded 2026-04-22 under ADR-0.0.20 OBPI-02 — the unique invariants (6c, 6g, 6h, judgment 12–14, Pipeline lifecycle and State doctrine "Never" items) moved into AGENTS.md; the Claude-specific invariant 10a moved into CLAUDE.md § Claude Code addendum; the pedagogy (anti-pattern canon, TASK-driven workflow, Lindsey 2025 rationale for 6g/6h) moved into docs/governance/agent-contract-rationale.md. The canonical .gzkit/rules/agent-contract.md rule file was deleted.

The Do not section is a cross-reference aggregator; every entry maps to one of the rules scored above. Its meta-rule ("these prohibitions are addressed to you — the executing agent") is judgment — the document's purpose is behavioral guidance for Claude Code sessions, not a mechanical gate.

The Do section (Invariants #1–17) is primarily judgment rules aimed at agent tool use and session behavior:

• "Own the work completely" / "Complete all work fully" / "Never say out of scope" — judgment
• "Fix class of failure, not instance" — judgment (but this audit itself is an instance of applying it)
• "Read AGENTS.md before starting work" — judgment
• "Ask when unsure of direction" (was "If <90% sure, ask the human"; the figure was retired 2026-08-17) — judgment
• "On inconsistencies, STOP, name confusion, present tradeoff, wait" — judgment
• "When the operator course-corrects in flight, record an improvement via gz insights remember before completing the corrected work" (Behavior Rules — Always #11, GHI #357) — judgment at authoring time (recognizing a correction); the schema-lock side is now mechanical via gz validate --insights-shape (GHI #358; see scorecard row 17a), and the governed author verb gz insights remember (GHI #575) constructs the record so it cannot drift from the schema

The Claude-specific invariant 10a is scored as a row rather than in prose:

#	Rule	Score	Notes
53a	Invariant 10a — skill-tool-invoke-same-turn. When a skill step names a tool (EnterPlanMode, ExitPlanMode, …), invoke it in the same turn; ending the turn with "Required next step" instead of calling the tool is a violation (CLAUDE.md)	Judgment	Given a row 2026-08-08 (rule CLAUDE.md), Movement C skill arm — it had none. This clause sat in free prose between two subsections of § Scorecard reading "is promotable — could be detected via hook analysis, but the signal-to-noise ratio is probably poor": a discipline declared with neither a witness nor an admission, which is the forbidden third state, and invisible to the family-closure criterion because it was never a row to count. Scored Judgment, not Promotable: the check would have to attribute a turn's tool calls to a skill step's semantics, and gzkit models neither a turn nor a skill's step graph — the same unmodelled-caller ground as row 62b. The § Recommended promotion order freeze (2026-06-08) admits a new check only on named, observed drift, and the original note recorded the opposite (poor signal-to-noise) without any observed instance. Reclassify on a named session where a skill step named a tool, the turn ended without it, and nothing caught it. Fenced by gz validate --advisory-scorecard, which now refuses prose assigning Promotable to a named clause outside a row.
53c	Skill selection routes through gz-how. When no skill clearly matches, or two look alike, consult gz-how before choosing (AGENTS.md § SKILLS FIRST)	Judgment	Added 2026-09-27 by operator ruling (verbatim: "approve the canon line"; GHI #1106). Which skill an agent picks is a model decision no artifact records, so the clause itself has no witness; no routing eval set exists to measure it. What is mechanical is everything around the choice: tests/governance/test_how_coverage.py::TestAgentCanSelectGzHow fails if gz-how becomes operator-only or loses its trigger phrases, tests/scripts/test_session_orientation.py asserts the session-start pointer, and gz validate --how-coverage keeps the guide's catalog complete. Reclassify on a routing eval set that scores prompts against the skill that should be chosen.

Agent Rule Placement Invariant (ADR-0.0.20)

#	Rule	Score	Why
47	.gzkit/rules/*.md with paths: "**" or missing paths: may not live under any vendor-surface rules directory	Mechanical	gz validate --unscoped-rules — enumerates canonical rule files, parses YAML frontmatter, and fails closed on any file carrying paths: "**" or missing paths: without an allow-listed exception under rules.unscoped_allowlist in .gzkit/manifest.json. Runs as part of the --audits aggregate and gz check. Exit codes per cli.md 4-code map: 0 clean, 2 I/O error, 3 policy breach. Allow-list schema enforced via Pydantic (UnscopedAllowlistEntry) and src/gzkit/schemas/manifest.json.

ARB middleware (now hosted in docs/governance/arb-middleware.md and AGENTS.md § Attestation)

Folded in two hops, and reading only the first is what stranded eight citations (GHI #778). Hop 1, 2026-04-21: the ARB rule file carried a duplicate lane matrix that drifted from the canonical table in the attestation-enrichment rule file; the unique ARB material (core concept, available commands, receipt schema, exit codes) moved there and the duplicate lane matrix was dropped. Hop 2, 2026-04-23 (ADR-0.0.20 OBPI-03): the attestation-enrichment rule file was itself deleted and its allow-list entry removed — binding content (em-dash pattern, canonical invocations table, lane behavior) to AGENTS.md § Attestation, and the middleware deep-dive to docs/governance/arb-middleware.md. No rule file under .gzkit/rules/ hosts ARB today, and authoring one would contradict ADR-0.0.20. Scorecard rows above still apply; the file path changed twice, the mechanical enforcement did not.

Security Sensitivity (.gzkit/rules/security-sensitivity.md)

#	Rule	Score	Why
48	Security work needs heightened review regardless of lane or kind.	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --sensitivity (ADR-0.0.22) — audit_sensitivity_binding in src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/sensitivity.py runs floor + escalate-not-escape against the registry (citation repointed 2026-08-08 — the row named trust_audits.py, which became a package); audit OR-branch _requires_security_review_attestation at src/gzkit/commands/adr_audit.py forces brief-level human attestation on every sensitivity: security brief regardless of lane or kind; canonical security-scan ARB step is reserved in CANONICAL_STEP_COMMANDS so receipt absence fails Gate 5 walkthrough. Mirror discipline by gz agent sync control-surfaces.
48a	The floor demotes to advisory inside the MX hangar	Promotable	sensitivity is deliberately not a member of GATE5_INVARIANTS (src/gzkit/mx/invariants.py), so with .gzkit/mx.json present checkpoint.resolve("sensitivity", …) returns ADVISORY and clause 2's exit-3 errors drop out of the exit code. The demotion is deliberate — the briefs most likely to trip the floor are the ones an operator enters the hangar to repair (GHI #682) — and the rule now names it out loud. Row added 2026-08-29 (GHI #921): row 48 scored the invariant Mechanical without qualification, which overstates enforcement by omitting a documented carve-out. Scored Promotable rather than Mechanical on the 45b / 62c ground — GATE5_INVARIANTS membership is asserted by src/gzkit/mx/invariants.py and unit tests, not by a registered NC:<claim-id>. Promotion path: a control entering the hangar and asserting sensitivity resolves ADVISORY.
48b	Registry edits on the direct-fix path are discipline, not mechanism (§ Registry contract)	Judgment	gz validate --sensitivity reads OBPI brief frontmatter only (validate_cmd.py: declared = frontmatter.get("sensitivity")), and operator canon routes GHI-tracked defect repair to a briefless direct fix — so a direct-fix commit to data/security_surfaces.json has no declaration channel and is never inspected. The self-bootstrapping floor is therefore unenforced on the path canon mandates. Promotion candidate named in the rule itself: a Sensitivity: security commit trailer checked by gz validate --commit-trailers. Row added 2026-08-29 (GHI #921). Do not read the absence of a fail-close as permission.

Agent Failure-Mode Taxonomy (.gzkit/rules/agent-failure-modes.md)

#	Rule	Score	Why
49	Nine-pattern agent failure-mode vocabulary (Safeguard circumvention / Reckless action / Fabrication / Skipped cheap verification / Correction fails / Dishonest when caught / Hallucinated authorization / Security shortcut for expedience / Metagaming / gaming the gate) — sourced to the current frontier system cards per the registry-rotated data/frontier_model_cards.json (presently Claude Fable 5.1/Mythos 5.1 §§ 2.3.3, 6.2.1, 6.4.2–6.4.5, 6.6.1, Claude Opus 5.5 §§ 6.3.1, 6.4.1, 6.4.3–6.4.5, 6.5.1, and GPT-6 Astra §§ 8.3.1, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 9.1–9.2; chore frontier-model-card-currency); origin lineage lifted to Rule Version History per the 2026-08-02 operator ruling that live doctrine retains no superseded-model references. Cited by name when reviewing PRs, filing defects, and extending the scorecard; routes the conversation directly to the engineered backstop instead of re-deriving the failure motivation each time.	Judgment	Vocabulary, not mechanical check. The mechanical defenses already exist as separate rules and gates — operator-verbatim attestation + audit (AGENTS.md § Never #1) carrying a non-empty evidence.attestation_text and a real --attestor to the ledger, ARB receipt requirements (AGENTS.md § Attestation), hook fail-closed behavior, gz validate --commit-trailers, layered-trust T1/T2/T3 invariants — and this rule is the shared name they point at. Backstop citation corrected 2026-08-02: this cell previously named the TTY + ATTEST authenticity gate at _enforce_human_attestation_authenticity (src/gzkit/commands/adr_audit.py) as the lead defense. That function still exists, but citing a transport as the attestation gate contradicts the canon-owner directive that no TTY/PTY mechanism may ever gate human attestation — the same repoint rule version 0.4.0 made and the scorecard never inherited. Promotion candidate gz validate --failure-mode-coverage (a self-test confirming every scorecard row names the failure shape it backstops) tracked under follow-up GHIs #308–#312 per ADR-0.0.23 § Decision.
49a	Patterns are maintained against the current frontier system cards	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.7.0), GHI #921 — scored separately from row 49 because it is a different claim: row 49 scores the vocabulary, this scores its currency. The registry exists and the frontier-model-card-currency chore rotates it, so the authority is declared rather than transcribed — the shape row 17h asks for. What is unwitnessed is staleness: nothing fails closed when the registry names a superseded card generation, which is exactly the drift the 2026-08-02 operator ruling (live doctrine retains no superseded-model references) exists to prevent. Promotion path: assert every § citation in this rule resolves to a card the registry currently declares.

Model Selection (.gzkit/rules/model-selection.md)

#	Rule	Score	Why
52	Every skill SKILL.md declares model: haiku\|sonnet\|opus\|fable frontmatter; SkillFrontmatter.skill_model is Literal["haiku", "sonnet", "opus", "fable"] (required). Routing matrix maps decision complexity to model tier. Subagents use effort levels, not hardcoded model IDs.	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --surfaces via SkillFrontmatter Pydantic validation — missing or invalid model: fails closed (src/gzkit/core/models.py:127). All 70 canonical skills declare a tier (33 haiku, 24 sonnet, 13 opus; fable is reserved for Mythos-class judgment and currently claimed by none). Row corrected 2026-08-29 (GHI #921): it named a three-value Literal and a count of 67 while the model has carried four values since fable was added and the catalog has grown to 70 — the row was scored before the ledger existed and the drift rode the grandfather pin.
52a	A subagent's claim is not evidence. Never relay a subagent's factual assertion into ceremony, attestation, or an operator-facing conclusion on the subagent's word — cite the ARB receipt, the file, or re-run the command. The orchestrator owns every claim it passes upward.	Judgment	No mechanical witness: attributing an orchestrator's assertion back to a subagent message requires modelling which claims in a turn came from where, which gzkit does not model (the unmodelled-caller ground of row 62b). The adjacent mechanical defenses are the ARB receipt requirement (AGENTS.md § Attestation) and gz arb validate drift detection — this clause is the shared name they point at. Added 2026-08-29 (GHI #921): operative claim 5 of model-selection.md carried no row; the rule sat grandfathered, so no version-attributed review had ever asked whether its clauses were all covered.

Verdict <-> Proof Binding (validator-only; binding declared by src/gzkit/schemas/advisor_diagnosis.json + src/gzkit/complexity/advisor/diagnosis.py)

#	Rule	Score	Why
54	Field(min_length=1) on AdvisorDiagnosis.proof	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --advisor-proof-binding (OBPI-0.0.29-08, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/advisor_proof_binding.py) — fails closed (exit 1) on (a) any fixture under tests/fixtures/advisor/*.json whose top-level proof array is empty, (b) any intrinsic-complexity-attestation ledger event whose payload references a diagnosis id whose fixture has empty proof, or (c) src/gzkit/schemas/advisor_diagnosis.json whose properties.proof.minItems is missing or < 1. Speculative-marker escape: a fixture's top-level "_negative_case": true skips it (the OBPI-01 model test that asserts ValidationError on empty proof is the test of the defense, not a defect). Wired into --all aggregation and gz check (_run_scope_checks opt-in scope). Behave scenarios at features/advisor_proof_binding.feature cover the two canonical failure paths (REQ-0.0.29-08-02: empty fixture; REQ-0.0.29-08-03: ledger event citing empty-proof diagnosis). Validator validated by tests/governance/test_advisor_proof_binding_validator.py (16 tests across fixture, ledger, schema, error-message-quality, and CLI-integration test classes). Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.29 (parent), OBPI-0.0.29-01 (model layer), OBPI-0.0.29-02 (engine layer), OBPI-0.0.29-08 (validator layer).

Constitutional Invariant Composition (ADR-0.0.37 / OBPI-0.0.37-03)

#	Rule	Score	Why
58	gz validate --invariant-coherence — composition drift fail-close	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --invariant-coherence (OBPI-0.0.37-03, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/invariant_coherence.py) — fails closed (exit 3) on byte-drift between the rendered constitutional invariant registry output and the committed AGENTS.md. Emits composition_rendered event on every invocation; additionally emits composition_drift_detected event with diff payload on drift. Included in gz check default scope list (REQ-0.0.37-03-05). Validator validated by tests/governance/test_invariant_coherence.py (17 tests across match-no-drift, mismatch-drift, event-emission, schema-registration, gz-check-default test classes). Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.37 (parent), OBPI-0.0.37-01 (registry primitive), OBPI-0.0.37-02 (composition renderer), OBPI-0.0.37-03 (validator).

Brief Reconciliation Invariant (CIC-2) (ADR-0.0.37 / OBPI-0.0.37-05)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
59	OBPI brief reconciles against current project shape before Stage 2 and before completion	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --brief-reconcile (OBPI-0.0.37-05, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/brief_reconcile.py) — walks all OBPI briefs under docs/design/adr/**/{obpis,briefs}/, computes per-dimension delta across five drift classes (allowlist coherence, Discovery Checklist path existence, Verification verb resolution against parser registry, REQ-count parity against Acceptance Criteria, citation-tuple file existence); reports ERROR severity per dimension with drift; routed to exit 3 via _POLICY_BREACH_ERROR_TYPES. Enforcement scope: drift is escalated only for briefs that parse as a structured BriefStructure — legacy briefs are walked and reconciled but not escalated, honoring OBPI-0.0.37-04's permissive-mode deprecation window; the validator scope widens automatically as briefs migrate to structured frontmatter. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.37 (parent), OBPI-0.0.37-05 (engine), OBPI-0.0.37-06 (CLI verb, pending).

Token Block Discipline (.gzkit/rules/token-block-discipline.md)

#	Rule	Score	Why
53	abandon categories are closed	Mechanical	Enforced at CLI parse time by parse_abandon_spec (src/gzkit/exchange_records.py), which rejects an unregistered category, a missing colon, an empty category or reason, and surrounding whitespace; obpi_lock_release_cmd translates the refusal into exit 1 naming the closed enum, and validates it before deleting the lock. Scored Promotable until 0.4.0 on the premise that "OBPI-0.0.41-02/03/04 are still pending" — they have since landed, and nothing re-scored the row when they did. Corrected while scoring the rule for the CHECKPOINT clause (GHI #756). Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.41 (parent), OBPI-0.0.41-01 (enum + parser).
73	a CHECKPOINT handoff never satisfies token surrender	Mechanical	Two enforcement points, live gate plus ledger backstop. find_exchange_for_release (src/gzkit/exchange_records.py) admits a candidate only when is_exchange_register_entry accepts it, so gz obpi lock release cannot resolve a checkpoint as the register entry and falls through to the § Sub-Invariant 5 fail-closed exit 3; skipping rather than returning-and-rejecting also prevents a later checkpoint from winning the newest-candidate sort and displacing a genuine entry. Re-scored at 0.5.0 (GHI #763): enforcement moved from an explicit CHECKPOINT exclusion to two stronger, independent fences. Location — every writer (write_completion_exchange, write_degenerate_exchange, lock_manager._write_reaping_exchange) and the finder resolve the store through exchange_dir(), so a session document cannot enter the token corpus at all; test_no_adr_package_handoff_writes is the static fence over both store segments and test_a_session_handoff_never_pairs_a_token_release the behavioral one. Shape — is_exchange_register_entry is default-DENY, admitting only mode: CREATE and not-abandoned (the shape the writers emit), so CHECKPOINT, RESUME, and any mode invented later are refused without being enumerated. That inverts a default-ADMIT blocklist whose two exclusions were each written only after the harm they prevent. test_the_bookmark_cannot_surrender_a_token now asserts the predicate rather than the search, which would otherwise pass on the directory mismatch alone. _check_mode in src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/lock_exchange_coupling.py replays the ledger and emits a lock_exchange_coupling error for any post-cutover obpi_lock_released citing a checkpoint, covering a handoff_path resolved by any other route; that audit is a live step of the default gz check pipeline (("Lock-exchange coupling", run_lock_exchange_coupling_audit)). The mode string is named once as CHECKPOINT_MODE and read by every consumer, so the distinction cannot drift per-copy. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.65 (owning ADR, not reopened), GHI #756 (corrective work).
74	the exchange record carries an observation report	Mechanical	§ Sub-Invariant 7's section contract is realized in write_completion_exchange (src/gzkit/exchange_records.py): each content kind renders into the section whose tense it matches, and the four previously-inletless sections (Important Context, Immediate Next Steps, Pending Work / Open Loops, Evidence / Artifacts) now take observation, residual, open_loops, and artifacts. gz obpi complete fills them from the brief's own ### Value Narrative and ## Tracked Defects via _read_observation / _read_open_loops, so the channel exists without new operator input. Covered by tests/governance/test_obpi_complete_lock_release.py::TestObservationReport (5 tests) and ::TestObservationSourcedFromBrief (4 tests), including test_the_implementation_summary_is_retrospective_not_pending, which asserts BOTH poles so the tense fix cannot pass by moving the content somewhere else. The optionality of the inlets is itself enforced by test_the_fallback_needs_no_observation_input: GHI #619 made surrender mechanical because locks were stranded when nobody authored a record, so a required inlet would re-create that friction — the boilerplate is a floor, not a ceiling. test_a_comment_only_narrative_degrades_rather_than_emptying pins the 116-of-368 briefs whose narrative lives inside the scaffold comment the sanitizer strips by design. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.41 (parent), GHI #764 (corrective work), GHI #619 (the floor).
74a	Three subjects (operator ruling, carried verbatim): transit, exchange and handoff are kept distinct and classified by the citing event type, never a shared field name or path; the airlock's purposes are not a verification gate	Judgment	Scored 2026-09-24 (rule 0.9.0), GHI #1091 — never scored. Carried into the rule from AGENTS.md § Operator Doctrine (via gz-session-handoff) after sweep finding S08 showed it loaded only while writing a handoff, never during lock or exchange work. Mixed and scored to the weakest arm. Classifying by event type is a design discipline over code an agent writes: no validator checks that a consumer keys a record on its citing event type rather than on a path or field name, and a path-keyed consumer is indistinguishable from an event-keyed one until the two subjects collide. The airlock's purposes (awareness, movement control, focus, contamination watch, disturbance monitoring) are declarative doctrine about what the airlock is for, with no observable to gate. Promotable only if a named consumer is found classifying by path.

Exemplar Corpus Doctrine (.gzkit/rules/complexity-doctrine.md)

#	Rule	Score	Why
50	empirically-measured exemplar corpus	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --complexity-doctrine-links (OBPI-0.0.27-07, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/complexity_doctrine_links.py) — fails closed (exit 3) when cluster ADRs (0.0.27/0.0.28/0.0.29/0.0.30) or .gzkit/rules/complexity-doctrine.md cite distilled-characteristics documents that do not exist, anchors that do not resolve, or corpus_revision values outside the supported portability window. Two-signal heuristic (§ + (corpus revision) gates the citation candidate set; HTML-comment speculative-skip marker (<!-- gz-validate-skip: complexity-doctrine-links -->) supported. Wired into gz check via the "Complexity-doctrine links" runner so pre-merge gates fire automatically. Selection methodology criteria are pinned in .gzkit/rules/complexity-doctrine.md and validated by tests/governance/test_complexity_doctrine_rule.py. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.27 (parent), OBPI-0.0.27-07 (link-integrity enforcement).
50a	Selection Criteria (binding — all seven must hold) for a corpus exemplar	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #921 — never scored. Mixed by construction and scored to the weakest arm: criteria 1, 2, 4 and 7 (longevity, release recency, >=80% Python, pinned commit SHA) are measurable from repository metadata, but 3, 5 and 6 (practitioner reputation, author craftsmanship signal, doctrine fitness) are explicitly operator-witnessed — criterion 5 says so in the rule: "agent nominates, operator witnesses." A gate on the measurable subset would report compliance while the judgment criteria went unexamined, which is worse than no gate. --complexity-doctrine-links (row 50) checks that the corpus cites resolvable documents, never that an entry earned its place.
50b	Corpus Disqualifiers (binding — any one disqualifies), notably post-hoc fitting and GitHub-star count	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.4.0), GHI #921 — never scored. Disqualifier 1 ("selecting projects that confirm a pre-decided threshold") is a statement about the order in which a decision was made, which leaves no trace in the artifact: a post-hoc-fitted corpus and an honestly-derived one are byte-identical. This is the load-bearing one — the whole doctrine exists so thresholds are grounded rather than rationalized — and it is precisely the one nothing can witness. The defense is the cadence, not a gate: gz-complexity-distill re-derives against the corpus on a declared trigger set.

Complexity Thresholds (.gzkit/rules/complexity-thresholds.{md,json})

#	Rule	Score	Why
51	(metric, percentile-band, absolute-number, trigger-semantic) tuple	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --complexity-thresholds (OBPI-0.0.28-03, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/complexity_thresholds.py) — fails closed (exit 3) on missing block band per metric, missing percentile + absolute pairing, trigger-semantic outside the three-value enum, unparseable citation tuple, or canonical-metric coverage gap. Bootstrap-mode carve-out emits an informational stdout notice (non-policy-breach). The ThresholdTable Pydantic loader at src/gzkit/complexity/thresholds.py (OBPI-0.0.28-02) is the runtime contract that ADR-0.0.29 advisor and ADR-0.0.30 authoring-guidance bind against; the loader's Pydantic field validators close the loader-layer half of the invariant. Selection-methodology and citation-tuple form inherited from .gzkit/rules/complexity-doctrine.md (rule 50) — the threshold table cites that doctrine's distilled-characteristics document at corpus revision 1. Wired into gz check via the "Complexity-thresholds" runner; behave scenarios under features/complexity_thresholds.feature cover the four canonical failure paths (missing block band, off-enum percentile, malformed citation, bootstrap-mode notice). Rule body validated by tests/governance/test_complexity_thresholds_rule.py; validator validated by tests/governance/test_complexity_thresholds_validator.py. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.28 (parent), OBPI-0.0.28-02 (loader), OBPI-0.0.28-03 (validator-as-enforcement).
51c	The runtime threshold data lives in complexity-thresholds.json	Promotable	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.5.0), GHI #921. The specific instance of row 17h's general clause, and the one with a measured breach on record: pythonic.md carried Modules <=600 while check_module_size.py:56 reads the JSON, and a census against the prose figure counted 51 modules no gate rejects. Promotable on the narrow allowlist arm 17h names — declare this file as an authority and scan for its values restated in prose — not on the general form.
51d	Operator-amendable mapping protocol — threshold amendments follow the declared protocol	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.5.0), GHI #921 — never scored. The protocol governs how an operator amends, and the amendment's legitimacy rests on the operator having ruled, which is Gate-5-class authority rather than a checkable property of the file. --complexity-thresholds validates the resulting table's shape, never the provenance of a change to it.

Editor/IDE Protocol Surface (.gzkit/schemas/authoring_guide_protocol.json)

#	Rule	Score	Why
55	src/gzkit/schemas/authoring_guide_protocol.json	Mechanical	Enforced by src/gzkit/schemas/authoring_guide_protocol.json validation in the protocol server (gz complexity guide --server); message payload validation happens at parse time (before handler dispatch), so schema evolution (adding required fields, renaming envelopes, changing encoding) is fail-closed at request/response boundaries. Scorecard citation: ADR-0.0.30 (parent), OBPI-0.0.30-04 (protocol server implementation).

Distribution Invariant Doctrine (T0) (docs/governance/trust-doctrine.md T0 layer + ADR-0.0.31)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
57	byte-equivalent to the wheel's authored canonical content	Mechanical	Enforced by gz validate --distribution (OBPI-0.0.32-07, src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/distribution.py) — static check against pyproject.toml include globs + data/distribution_baseline_manifest.json + on-disk canonical surface trees; detects three drift classes (ON_DISK_NOT_INCLUDED / BASELINE_NOT_ON_DISK / ON_DISK_NOT_BASELINE); exit 3 on any drift; exit 2 on system error. Receipt-id prefix: arb-distribution-.

Map-Not-Encyclopedia Doctrine (.gzkit/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
58	AGENTS.md MUST contain only binding bullets, structured tables, and canonical-link references; MUST NOT contain multi-paragraph rationale prose, worked examples, anti-pattern catalogs, "Why this is canon" blockquotes, narrative pedagogical sections, or operative-claims expansions already stated in binding-bullet form	Mechanical (shape invariant); per-section size targets remain Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-17 at rule 0.5.0; two claims in the prior note had gone stale in opposite directions. The shape check is no longer "forthcoming" — gz validate --agents-md-map-conformance ships, and criteria (a) paragraph shape, (b) prohibited titles, (c) link resolution remain fail-closed, which is what keeps this row Mechanical. The budget half is no longer "enforced": criterion (d) and audit_instructions_files_budget are both deliberately disarmed and, as of the 2026-08-17 cadence ruling, permanently so — see row 17b. Do not read this row's Mechanical score as covering size; it covers shape only. Size targets live in ADR-0.0.54 § Intent TOC table and are Judgment by construction. Bringing an over-budget surface back into trim belongs to the instructions-files-diet chore on a cadence, not to a gate; the mechanical successor at this subject is drift-from-approved-build (gz validate --rendition-lineage, OBPI-0.35.0-06, Draft), scored as its own row when it lands. Canonical expansion: docs/governance/agents-md-doctrine.md.

| 58a | Attestation attaches to the CANON change and to completed OBPI/ADR work, never to a Layer-3 derived view: a re-render of unchanged canon needs no attestation; adding and removing corpus entries are attested; trim/compression to fit a delivery cap invites operator review; a GHI needs none; and "Gate 5" names OBPI/ADR completion only | Judgment | Added 2026-08-17 (rule 0.6.0), operator ruling — verbatim: "a rerender of unhanged canon doesn't require my attestation. adding to cms entries would. removing items would. trims and compressions to render within budget might invite a review" (spelling preserved), preceded by "I only attest to completed obpi/adr work." Judgment rather than Promotable, and the reason is that the implementation is currently inverted, so there is no check to build until the verbs move: measured 2026-08-17, gz content remember and gz content retire accept no --attestor at all, while gz content commit requires one and fail-closes on empty — the two acts this rule makes attested are ungated and the one it exempts is gated. A witness written against today's verbs would assert the opposite of the rule. The retire half is not merely unbuilt but contradicted by its own design: ADR-0.35.0 § Decision item 2 already specifies --attestor + --reason fail-closed on empty for an invariant-tier retirement (OBPI-0.35.0-02, Draft), and in its absence an invariant-tier operator-canon entry was retired this session on a --reason string alone. The trim/compression row is Judgment by construction — "might invite a review" is a posture, not a predicate, and mechanizing "invites" would be shape-grading. Reclassify when the verbs carry the granularity, at which point the add/remove arms become Mechanical and the re-render exemption becomes a fingerprint comparison already available as corpus_fingerprint(). Do NOT promote by adding a gate to commit — that is the inversion, not the fix. Coupled surfaces: .gzkit/chores/instructions-files-diet/CHORE.md § 5a — its undifferentiated reading was corrected in v3.1.0 and the surviving coupling is narrower: v3.2.0 § Anti-patterns still characterises a rendition promotion as a Layer-1 canon change, which is GHI #821's subject and is deliberately NOT settled by the 2026-08-18 naming sweep; gz content commit --help claimed the name "Gate 5" for a build step until 2026-08-18 and no longer does (GHI #822, scored at row 58b); ADR-0.35.0 § Decision 7 (capture must never be blocked — preserved by reading add/remove attestation as recorded provenance rather than a blocking gate). | | 58b | Do not call a build step "Gate 5." The content surface's attestation is named CORPUS ATTESTATION. | Promotable | Scored 2026-08-18 (rule 0.7.0) at landing, split from 58a because it scores differently from its parent. 58a is Judgment because which acts deserve attestation is a reading; this arm asks only whether a fixed string appears in a bounded file set, which is decidable by grep — so it is Promotable, and it is the one arm of that clause that is. Operator ruling 2026-08-18 (GHI #822) fixed the replacement noun as corpus rather than rendition, on the ground 58a already carries: the attestable subject is the corpus, and a rendition is the Layer-3 projection that is "never the thing attested" — so the locally obvious name would have re-asserted the inversion. Swept the same day across src/gzkit/commands/content/, docs/user/manpages/content.md, ADR-0.35.0 and seven of its OBPI briefs, and instructions-files-diet v3.2.0. The check is an allowlist, not a prohibition, and that is its whole difficulty: two usages in the same files are CORRECT — advise_rendition.py and the manpage both say an advisory receipt is cited at the real Gate 5 — and every OBPI brief carries ### Gate 5 (Human) covenant sections about its own completion, so a blanket ban would delete true statements. The discriminator is whether the text names this command's own attestation or a later OBPI/ADR completion the artifact feeds. Scope is bounded and small. Not promoted in the same pass, on the § Recommended promotion order freeze (2026-06-08) and because a witness written the day a surface is swept clean asserts only that the sweep happened. Reclassify on the first re-appearance — that is the event proving the string can come back, and the census that would seed the allowlist. Coupled surfaces: .claude/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md § Attestation granularity (the naming bullet, v0.7.0), ADR-0.35.0 § Decision (the 2026-08-18 amendment), GHI #821 (whether the gate should fire at all — independent of what it is called). | | 58c | The Codex delivery cap in data/vendor-manifest.json is a limit gzkit sets through the .codex/config.toml it generates, and any change to it is verified by observing what Codex actually delivered | Judgment | Re-scored 2026-09-05 (rule 0.11.0). The class is unchanged from 0.10.0; the reasoning is reversed, and that is the whole point of the re-score (GHI #962, reopened). 0.10.0 read Judgment, and the promotion path is genuinely closed rather than merely unbuilt, arguing a witness would need the cap Codex actually applied — state outside the repo. That claim is withdrawn: the witness is one command. codex debug prompt-input renders the model-visible prompt list as JSON, project doc included, and was available throughout. A closed-promotion-path assertion is the strongest this scorecard permits and it was made without attempting to build the witness — the same error it was scoring, one level up: codex doctor naming only the global config source was read as proof no other source exists, when trusting a directory is precisely what loads its .codex/config.toml. The witness now ships: src/gzkit/governance/trust_audits/codex_delivery_witness.py, wired into gz validate --instructions-files-budget. It stays Judgment for row 17b's reason, not 0.10.0's — the check exists and is deliberately non-gating, so there is no promotion path to build: fail-closing on a vendor's byte cap would re-couple the core to the adapter limit the 2026-07-06 operator ruling decoupled ("an adapter limit must not gate the core contract"), and the observation additionally depends on local trust state, which is environment rather than repository truth. An unavailable probe reports unobserved, never a pass — the arm that keeps it from degrading into the presence check it replaces. CodexDocCapCoherenceTest is still not a delivery witness: it pins two authored numbers to each other and stayed green through the entire regression. Measured cost of the withdrawn reasoning: 344f7189 set the cap to 65536 and it worked; e43c55c9 lowered it to 32768 on this row's logic, and for a day 14108 B of contract including the IRON LAW reached no Codex session. Reclassify only if the 2026-07-06 decoupling is lifted. Coupled surfaces: src/gzkit/schemas/vendor_manifest.json, src/gzkit/sync_surfaces.py render_codex_config, tests/test_codex_config_surface.py, .gzkit/rules/agents-md-map-doctrine.md § Budget. Whether the surface should also be shorter is GHI #815. | | 58d | Apply the writing levers when writing or trimming a per-turn surface: inline what every task needs and put the rest behind a pointer that says what it is and when to reach it; state the positive target; delete no-op sentences; one home per meaning, the environment included; co-locate a rule with its caveats and witness | Judgment | Added 2026-09-17 (rule 0.12.0), operator direction. Whether a sentence steers, is a no-op, or belongs on every task is a reading of model behavior, and the clause's own source holds that such disagreements are settled by running the document. gzkit has no behavioral witness for instruction text (GHI #943), so nothing mechanical can score this; the rule says so inline. Reclassify the skill-description arm to Promotable if a check for model-invoked router skills is ever wanted — that arm is decidable from frontmatter. |

REQ Scope Discipline (.gzkit/rules/tests.md § REQ Scope Discipline)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
59a	Tag case carries no meaning (both readers are re.IGNORECASE); author UPPERCASE, and do NOT rewrite existing lowercase tags	Judgment	Added 2026-08-11 (rule 0.17.0), operator ruling. The case-insensitivity half is mechanically true and asserted where it lives — _REQ_KIND_TAG (briefs.py) and _REQ_KIND_TAG_RE (req_coverage.py) both carry re.IGNORECASE, and the first canonicalizes via .lower(); nothing further to witness. The authoring half is deliberately unwitnessed and no witness is planned: a case scan over docs/design/adr/** is trivially tractable, but it would flag 370 tags the same ruling declares CORRECT, so the only check anyone could build here fails on compliant input. That is not a promotion candidate; it is a check whose premise the rule denies. Under § Recommended promotion order freeze (2026-06-08) a new check needs observed drift, and the observed condition was documentation disagreement — repaired by editing the three surfaces, not by adding mechanism. Reclassify only if a reader is ever added that is case-sensitive, which would make case a correctness property for the first time. Rationale and the measured split: docs/governance/req-scope-discipline.md § Tag case.
59	Every REQ in an OBPI brief's Acceptance Criteria MUST declare exactly one of three kinds — BEHAVIOR, SUPPORT, or STRUCTURAL-FENCE — via an inline tag [kind], each with exactly one proof channel	Mechanical	Row text re-pointed 2026-09-17 (GHI #921) to the ruled AGENTS.md wording; the channel-by-kind mapping lives in tests.md § REQ Scope Discipline. gz validate --req-kind-discipline (OBPI-0.0.59-02 scope) fail-closes brief-time on missing [kind] tags and per-kind proof-citation gaps. Three-kind taxonomy is a closed StrEnum; brief-authoring scaffold prompts for kind (OBPI-0.0.59-02); parity gate consumes per-kind proof channels (OBPI-0.0.59-03). Added by OBPI-0.0.59-01 (2026-05-26). ADR-0.0.59. Canonical expansion: docs/governance/req-scope-discipline.md.

TASK Discovery (.gzkit/rules/task-discovery.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
60	Every unit of labor traceable to a TASK MUST surface that attribution through at least one of four discovery channels — with a floor: any commit touching src/** or tests/** MUST additionally carry a Task: trailer	Mechanical	gz validate --task-envelope-coherence is a bound QC step; gz validate --commit-trailers fail-closes the floor on src/tests scope. All four channels are live: ledger task_id (OBPI-0.0.64-01), @advances (OBPI-0.0.64-02), commit trailer (auto-stamped, GHI #731), and frontmatter tasks: (producer-stamped by gz task start, GHI #752). tasks: schema enforcement is LIVE on both readers — BriefStructure._validate_tasks (model path) and signature (e) of --task-envelope-coherence (corpus path), each delegating to TaskId.parse (GHI #753). Parent ADR-0.0.64.
60a	@advances is advisory and expected to be empty	Judgment	GHI #752 demoted it deliberately: it marks the function an author judges materially advances a TASK, which no runtime can determine, so it has no producer by construction. Its emptiness is asserted rather than assumed (test_advances_channel_is_asserted_dead_not_assumed_dead) and is not a defect. Scoring it Promotable would misread a designed property as debt.
60b	The OBPI-04 validator will fail Heavy lane closeouts on layer-drift; Lite lane warns.	Mechanical	Signature (c) of gz validate --task-envelope-coherence compares channels where two or more carry data. Heavy lane fails closed; Lite warns.
60c	Drift is contradiction, never shortfall — nested channels do not drift, and consumers share _crossing_channels rather than restating it	Promotable	Added 2026-09-06 (rule 0.9.0), GHI #820 reopened. _crossing_channels implements the carve-out and TestDiagnoseDriftAgreesWithTheValidator pins that gz task envelope diagnose and signature (c) agree on nested subsets, genuine crossing, identical channels, and disjoint pairs. Scored Promotable, not Mechanical — the 33a / 33b / 45b / 62c precedent: that test witnesses the two consumers that exist today, while the row also claims consumers share the predicate, and no registered NC:<claim-id> plants a third consumer re-implementing it. Claiming Mechanical would assert the sharing obligation is witnessed when only today's two callers are. This is not hypothetical debt: the diagnostic carried its own spelling and kept the overturned reading for 19 days after #820 corrected the validator, with no check failing. Promotion path: author an @enforces control that plants a local drift computation in a consumer and asserts the scorecard or a guard rejects it, then cite its claim id.

Guardrail Feedback Prose (.gzkit/rules/guardrail-feedback-prose.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
61	§ Invariant — every fail-closed hook and validator emits agent-actionable three-part recovery prose: what failed, why it is forbidden (cited rule/invariant), the governed next step (runnable command or named ceremony)	Judgment	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 0.2.0), Movement C rules arm. Whether prose actually tells an agent what to do is not decidable from its shape, and a shape-grader is the shape-graded-not-substance signature ADR-0.0.73 refuses — grading this rule mechanically would instance the defect the rule names. ADR-0.0.70 § Decision already declined to ship the scope on that ground while the rule still called itself "Promotable", which is the third state. The rule now states the advisory disposition and names the reclassifying evidence: a fail-closed surface that shipped with no recovery prose and was caught late.
61a	Each fail-closed surface asserts its own prose against this bar in its own covering test	Mechanical	This is the rule's real enforcement channel, at the point of use rather than over a corpus. tests/hooks/test_stop_turn_feedback.py (REQ-0.0.70-03-02) asserts stop-turn-feedback.py's block prose carries all three parts; the same shape is asserted for other fail-closed surfaces in their own covering tests (e.g. CorePurityIsAnAllowlist::test_the_message_names_the_rule_and_the_recovery, row 64). Per-surface rather than global by design — the global grader was rejected, not deferred.
61b	§ Scope — the bar binds blocking hooks, gz validate scopes, ceremony gates, and pre-commit/pre-push guards; advisory surfaces SHOULD follow but are not bound	Judgment	A scope statement, not an independently checkable claim: it tells an author which surfaces owe a covering-test assertion under row 61a. "Which surfaces are fail-closed" is decidable, but the obligation it creates is the authoring duty row 61 already scores.
61c	§ Do Not — no bare non-zero exit without stderr prose; no raw findings without the cited rule; no unrunnable next step; no inlined sub-tool stderr past ~20 lines	Judgment	Four authoring prohibitions, each the negative form of the § Invariant and enforced through the same per-surface channel (row 61a). The ~20-line trim is the only numerically checkable one, and it is a soft ceiling by its own wording ("~20"), set by the ADR-0.0.69 closeout-proof re-run-command ruling rather than measured.

MX Mode (.gzkit/rules/mx-mode.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
62	Honor the marker: when .gzkit/mx.json exists, most guards drop to advisory	Mechanical	Re-scored 2026-08-08 (rule 1.1.0), Movement C rules arm — nothing was built. Demotion is decided in gzkit.mx.checkpoint.resolve / gzkit.mx.disposition and asserted by 45 tests across tests/mx/test_checkpoint.py, test_disposition.py, test_gate5_invariants.py, test_check_step_checkpoint_seam.py and the live un-forced controls in test_gate5_invariants_live_nc.py (OBPI-0.0.74-17, REQ-0.0.74-20-03). The Promotable score rested on "the marker-check is structural (file exists/not)" and a proposed --mx-marker-coherence scope — an accurate description of the rule before its own mechanism landed, never revisited afterwards. A Promotable row can outlive the reason it was Promotable; that is its own failure mode, distinct from a row that was never mechanized. Amended 2026-08-22 (rule 1.2.0, GHI #843): this row was accurate about the DECIDER and blind to the CONSUMERS. checkpoint.resolve was and is the single severity authority, and all 45 cited tests assert it — but nothing asserted which surfaces ask it, and the entire pre-commit surface asked nothing: zero checkpoint consumers under src/gzkit/hooks/ when measured. So "most guards drop to advisory" was false for one of the two surfaces governance is enforced on, while this row read Mechanical. The distinction worth carrying: a Mechanical score on a decision authority does NOT cover the inventory of its callers, and only a caller-side fence can. Parent ADR-0.0.74.
62a	gate5_invariants remain fail-closed. Gate 5 is never advisory.	Mechanical	The marker carve-out's floor, pinned in both directions so it cannot silently invert: every gate5_invariants member stays fatal (returncode=3) under the marker (test_check_step_checkpoint_seam.py::…pin CRITICAL and never demote) and stays fatal outside it (the explicit no-regression case). A new guard inherits demotion by default and must opt into the floor, so the floor's membership is the reviewed surface rather than each new guard's default. Restates ADR-0.0.36 Gate-5 universality at the MX boundary.
62b	Operate the skill, not the shell — the operator uses gz-mx; agents do not shell out to gz mx enter / gz mx exit	Judgment	An agent-behavior prohibition with no artifact to inspect after the fact: a shelled-out gz mx enter and a skill-invoked one produce the same ledger event, so nothing downstream can tell them apart. Enforced at the point of routing by .gzkit/skills/gz-mx/SKILL.md and the AGENTS.md § SKILLS FIRST contract, both of which are agent-discipline surfaces. Mechanizing would require attributing a CLI invocation to its caller, which gzkit does not model.
62c	Both enforcement surfaces honor the marker (GHI #843).	Promotable	Added 2026-08-22 (rule 1.2.0, GHI #843). The clause exists because its absence was load-bearing: every guard in gzkit.hooks.guards self-decided fatality with a bare return 1, verbatim the "named coverage defect" of ADR-0.0.74 BI#2, and two chore checkers ran as their own pre-commit entrypoints consulting nothing. Third recurrence of one class after GHI #638 (the gz check step layer) and GHI #651 (the enforcement floor). Two fences, deliberately at different altitudes because one cannot see the other's gap: tests/test_hooks_guards.py::TestMxCheckpointSeam fences the inventory INSIDE guards.py (a forbid_* guard added without a _GUARD_META entry is unreachable, and run_guards may not call one directly), while tests/mx/test_precommit_checkpoint_surface.py::TestPrecommitSurfaceInventory walks .pre-commit-config.yaml itself, so a NEW hook that is its own entrypoint must consult the checkpoint or be excused in _NOT_A_GZKIT_GUARD with a stated reason. The surface fence is AST-based rather than a substring scan after a first draft's mutant SURVIVED on the word "checkpoint" appearing in a docstring — the presence-check failure AGENTS.md names. Nine mutants run, all killed. Scored Promotable, not Mechanical, deliberately. The fences above are unit tests, and this scorecard reserves Mechanical for a row citing a registered NC:<claim-id> from the @enforces enforcement registry — a scope-level test proves the gate is alive, never that THIS property is covered. Claiming Mechanical on unit tests alone would be the false-green shape pythonic.md 0.3.0 recorded, where four rows asserted enforcement that did not exist. Promotion path: author an un-forced @enforces NC per ADR-0.0.74 items 15-19 (fixture builds the violation, a production entrypoint decides catch/no-catch, the runner reads one uniform signal) and cite its claim id here.
62d	Demotion never reaches an integrity guard, on either surface.	Promotable	Added 2026-08-22 (rule 1.2.0, GHI #843). The consumer-side restatement of 62a, and the reason #843 closes WITHOUT unblocking the ledger repair that surfaced it: ledger and gate5-attestation are GATE5_INVARIANTS members, so checkpoint.resolve short-circuits before the marker is ever read, and a hand-edit of .gzkit/ledger.jsonl is refused inside the hangar exactly as outside. The hangar was never the governed route out of a mis-ordered ledger; that route is the append-only corrective-action primitive of GHI #611. Pinned in both directions and mutation-tested: stripping either floor NAME, downgrading either CRITICAL level, silencing the demotion notice, and flipping the fail-closed catch to fail-open each kill at least one test. The residual is a NAMING one, not a mechanism one — floor membership is a string match, so a guard enforcing a floor concern under a non-floor name still demotes silently, which is GHI #852 on the authorship scope. Scored Promotable, not Mechanical, deliberately. The fences above are unit tests, and this scorecard reserves Mechanical for a row citing a registered NC:<claim-id> from the @enforces enforcement registry — a scope-level test proves the gate is alive, never that THIS property is covered. Claiming Mechanical on unit tests alone would be the false-green shape pythonic.md 0.3.0 recorded, where four rows asserted enforcement that did not exist. Promotion path: author an un-forced @enforces NC per ADR-0.0.74 items 15-19 (fixture builds the violation, a production entrypoint decides catch/no-catch, the runner reads one uniform signal) and cite its claim id here.
62e	Opting a guard into the floor — two mechanisms, and default to LEVEL	Judgment	Added 2026-08-22 (rule 1.3.0), GHI #855. The mechanism half is mechanical and already holds — checkpoint.resolve pins by NAME (GATE5_INVARIANTS) or by LEVEL (emit CRITICAL), and 62a/62d fence both directions. What this row scores is the CHOICE, and it is a reading: NAME is forbidden when the guard is a narrower proxy for the floor concern (ADR-0.0.74 § Consequences/Negative #7), and whether a given check covers its concern in full or only a checkable slice is not a property any surface models. 84519da5 (GHI #852) is the worked example — an email-suffix check on the git identity is a slice of the operator-PII prohibition, which also spans trailers, file content, attestation text and the ledger, so it pinned by LEVEL. A mechanical arm would have to decide concern-coverage, which is the shape-graded-not-substance signature ADR-0.0.73 refuses. No mechanical witness, and none is planned. What the rule now carries instead is the reasoning itself, which had been derived correctly and recorded only in a commit body — the settled-twice-recorded-nowhere shape governance-core.md 0.13.0 names. Reclassify on an observed instance of a guard pinned by the wrong mechanism shipping and being caught late.
63	PRIME DIRECTIVE binds the entire hangar session — ownership never relaxes; operate the skill, not the shell	Judgment	"Fix what you know AND what you find; 'not my work' stays forbidden in the bay" requires agent judgment to apply. Mechanizing ownership is the broader gzkit mission, not a single validator scope.

Hexagonal Architecture (.gzkit/rules/hexagonal-architecture.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
64	Dependencies live in adapters, never in the core. Any third-party import (networkx, tree-sitter, future deps) is confined to an adapter module behind a port. Core domain logic imports stdlib + Pydantic ONLY	Mechanical	Promoted 2026-08-08 (Movement C rules arm). Core purity is enforced by tests/policy/test_import_boundaries.py::CorePurityIsAnAllowlist as the allowlist the rule declares — sys.stdlib_module_names + pydantic + gzkit, everything else refused. It was a two-name denylist (("rich", "argparse")), which cannot express "ONLY": all four third-party deps added since (networkx, radon, lizard, cohesion) were free to enter core, and so was any future one. Derivation from sys.stdlib_module_names means enforcement needs no upkeep when a dependency lands. The predicate is extracted as _core_violations and exercised against synthetic modules, because core/ is clean and a check read only over a passing tree cannot be told from one that returns nothing. Rules 3–9 (domain-typed ports, Protocol-over-ABC, encapsulate-first, core-testable-without-adapter, no folder partitions) remain Judgment — unscored as separate rows, carried in this rule's pre-ledger grandfather debt (data/advisory_scorecard_grandfather.json), which must be drained the next time the rule file is edited. Rule at .gzkit/rules/hexagonal-architecture.md; operator ruling 2026-07-06.
64a	Pydantic is the one ratified exception admitted to the inner world	Promotable	The allowlist CorePurityIsAnAllowlist derives is sys.stdlib_module_names + pydantic + gzkit, so the exception is expressed as data in the same predicate that refuses everything else — admitting a second exception requires editing the allowlist, which is the visible act the rule wants. Exercised by the same _core_violations extraction row 64 cites, against synthetic modules — but that is a unit test, and this scorecard reserves Mechanical for a row citing a registered NC:<claim-id> (45b / 62c). Row 64 itself predates that ruling and is frozen in data/mechanical_witness_grandfather.json; a NEW row cannot enter a shrink-only grandfather, so it is scored for real here. Promotion path: author an @enforces control planting a second non-Pydantic import in core/ and cite its claim id.
64b	Ports are domain-typed contracts — a port's methods accept/return domain types, never adapter types	Judgment	Whether a type is "domain" or "adapter" is a modelling reading; a checker would grade by module path, which is the shape-graded-not-substance signature this scorecard exists to close. Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 0.3.0), GHI #921, draining the debt row 64 declared.
64c	Never name the technology in the core; take it as a parameter (Cockburn)	Promotable	The import arm is already covered by row 64 — a named technology usually arrives as an import. What is unwitnessed is the residue: a technology named in a core function's signature, string literal or docstring without importing it. Promotion path: extend _core_violations to flag known adapter technology names appearing as parameter defaults or literals in core/. Scored 2026-08-30.
64d	Encapsulate first; formalize the port when the SECOND adapter is real	Judgment	An explicitly anti-speculative clause — it forbids authoring a port before a second adapter exists, and "is this adapter real" is not a state gzkit models. Mechanizing it would require counting adapters per port and judging intent behind a single-adapter seam. Its companion is AGENTS.md § DO IT RIGHT #10 ("Nothing speculative. No abstractions for single-use code"). Scored 2026-08-30.
64e	The core is testable without any adapter	Promotable	The property is decidable: import every core/ module in a process with the third-party dependencies absent, and any core function needing an adapter fails. That is the same construction CorePurityIsAnAllowlist already performs statically, run dynamically. Not built today, so not Mechanical. Scored 2026-08-30.

Changelog & Release Notes (.gzkit/rules/changelog-release-notes.md)

#	Rule	Score	Notes
65	CHANGELOG.md and RELEASE_NOTES.md follow the Good Docs Project templates adapted to gzkit — changelog is the exhaustive developer-facing projection of closed GHIs (SemVer/ISO version headers, closed category set, one GHI #N citation per entry); release notes are the curated reader-facing narrative retaining the ### Gate Evidence provenance section	Mechanical (changelog structure) / Judgment (release-notes curation)	Changelog structure enforced by gz validate --changelog (GHI #685, src/gzkit/validate_pkg/changelog.py) — hermetic, fail-closed on a non-SemVer/non-ISO version header, a disallowed category, or an entry missing its GHI #N citation; validated by tests/test_validate_changelog.py. The closed-GHI coverage half (every closed-since-tag GHI appears) is networked and runs release-time in gz-patch-release, not in gz check (hermeticity split). Release-notes tone and curation stay Judgment — approved by the operator through the release skill, distinct from OBPI/ADR Gate 5 completion; no mechanical release-notes validator exists (the curated narrative is not machine-checkable). Rule at .gzkit/rules/changelog-release-notes.md; canonical shapes at .gzkit/templates/{changelog,release_notes}.md.
65a	RELEASE_NOTES.md is authored and updated through the gz-patch-release skill, not by hand	Judgment	Scored 2026-08-30 (rule 1.2.0), GHI #921 — never scored. The same caller-attribution limit as row 51a: a skill-authored file and a hand-authored one are indistinguishable on disk, and gzkit models no artifact recording which produced it. Not idle doctrine — cli.md 0.2.0 records a live instance where a rule's own procedure "prescribed hand-authoring release notes, the one artifact changelog-release-notes.md forbids hand-editing", and the conflict shipped. Backstop is the release ceremony itself: gz-patch-release rewrites the file, so a hand edit is overwritten rather than caught.

CLI Contract Doctrine (.gzkit/rules/cli.md)

Scored for real 2026-08-16 (GHI #810), which retired this rule's data/advisory_scorecard_grandfather.json pin at 0.3.1. The rule declared clig.dev as its baseline while the specification elaborating it (docs/design/cli-standards-v3.md, canonical per ADR-0.0.4 — Validated, foundation, heavy) was reachable from that ADR and from no rule or governance surface, so the per-turn contract never carried it and nothing scored the layer. Counts below come from walking the live argparse tree — 136 leaf commands, 28 group nodes, max depth 3 — not from grep over docs. Per-rule measurement and the --cli-shape consolidation argument: docs/design/cli-architecture-analysis.md.

Zero Mechanical is the finding, not a drafting artifact. Every CLI rule that does have an arm (exit codes, epilog coverage, manpage coverage, skill alignment) is scored under its own owning surface; what remains here is the set that was declared and never witnessed.

#	Rule	Score	Notes
76	The count of depth-1 leaf commands may not increase	Promotable	Ratchet form only. "This bare verb belongs under noun X" is a domain reading and not decidable; the count is exactly computable from the parser tree (measured 35 of 136 leaves). Seed shrink-only in data/waiver_ratchet_registry.json, precedent ADR-0.0.73 Boundary Invariant #8. Justification under the § Recommended promotion order freeze: 35 live instances against a specification ADR-0.0.4 makes canonical, and the count grows silently with every new root verb.
77	No subcommand may share its verb with a bare root command	Promotable	Strongest candidate in this set. Computable: a depth-2 leaf whose final token equals a registered depth-1 leaf name. Measured 13 (gz adr status/gz status, gz cli audit/gz audit, gz obpi validate/gz validate, …). The predicate separates the defect from the correct case without judgment — list recurs 7× under different nouns and collides with nothing, because no bare list verb is registered. Seed the 13 as waivers with rationale, shrink-only.
78	A noun may not be registered in both singular and plural form	Promotable	Narrow by construction: both x and x + "s" registered at the same level. Measured exactly 1 (gz flag group vs gz flags leaf). The broader question — whether chores/personas/insights or skill/task/adr is the correct convention — is Judgment and deliberately out of scope: no surface declares which number governs, and picking by majority vote is grading by shape.
79	New root commands may not hyphenate a noun-verb pair	Promotable	Ratchet form, depth-1 only. "-" in name is computable (measured 6), but whether a hyphen encodes a noun-verb pair is a reading — git-sync and test-shape are arguable single concepts. A blanket rule is wrong at depth 2, where gz adr audit-begin is defensible. Note the tree already contains both solutions to this shape: gz obpi lock is a real depth-3 group with four verbs, while gz adr audit-begin / gz adr audit-check / gz adr audit-end is the same structure kebab-flattened one level up.
80	Every leaf command declares --json or carries a waiver with rationale	Promotable	Highest-value arm here, and the closest precedent is exact: gz validate --skill-alignment (GHI #202) landed first specifically to establish the declare-or-waive shape with _NO_SKILL_VERBS. Measured 63 of 136 leaves lack it, and nine groups disagree with themselves — gz adr emit-receipt has no --json while gz obpi audit does, though both emit structured governance evidence. Must ship paired with row 85: the flag is not the behavior.
81	A parser node is a leaf or a group, never both	Promotable	Cleanest predicate in the set — one line against the tree, a node carrying a func default and subparsers. Exactly 1 instance (gz mx), so the check lands fail-closed with zero seeded waivers if mx is corrected, or one explicit waiver naming it a deliberate default-subcommand. Either outcome records a decision that is unrecorded today.
82	Building the gz parser tree may not import handler-only dependencies	Promotable	Partially built: tests/cli/test_help_path_imports.py (landed 2026-08-16 with the fix(cli) repair) asserts reachability by static AST over the module-level import graph, currently scoped to gzkit.commands.common. Promotion is widening that tuple to yaml/pydantic, which is blocked on relocating DEFAULT_LOCK_TTL_MINUTES out of gzkit.lock_manager — it is consumed as an argparse default= at registration time, so deferring the import cannot help.
83	Mandatory targets are positional; flags are optional modifiers	Judgment	No repository surface models "target." Deciding that --manifest names a thing acted upon while --json names a modifier is a reading of each flag's meaning. The proxy — "leaf with > N boolean flags and zero positionals" — grades by shape (the shape-graded-not-substance signature ADR-0.0.73 refuses) and would flag gz git-sync's 11 genuine mode selectors identically to gz validate's 93 genuine targets. Also not clig.dev's position: its stated default is "Prefer flags to args", with a narrow multiple-targets exception. This is a house rule gzkit has not written down. Reclassify on a named instance of a flag-shaped target causing an operator defect.
86	A new subcommand satisfies all seven coupled obligations in the authoring patch	Promotable	Added 2026-08-22 (rule 0.5.0), GHI #854. Read the claim precisely: each of the seven obligations already has a fail-closed arm — six via the doc-coverage runner reached through uv run gz cli audit (the config/doc-coverage.json manifest entry plus the five _SURFACE_NAMES surfaces: manpage, index entry, operator runbook, governance runbook, handler docstring) and the seventh via gz validate --skill-alignment (row 28). What has no witness is that the rule's prose list matches the enforced set, and that is the property this row scores. Scoring it Mechanical would cite the neighbours' arms as if they covered it — the scope-level-control-as-property-proof substitution the scorecard's own fence refuses. Measured 2026-08-22: the obligation set was described in three places naming 3, 4 and 1 against 7 enforced, and adding one verb returned 21 failures on the first full unit-tier run (136s tier, invoked three times) — every failure deterministic, none a surprise to the gates, all a surprise to the lists. Promotion path, and it is narrow: parse the numbered list in § New Subcommand and assert set-equality against _SURFACE_NAMES + the manifest check + audit_skill_alignment, with a property-level negative control that drops one surface from the code constant and expects the rule to be reported stale. Both sides are already machine-readable, so this is not the two-prose-surfaces shape rows 29/30 refuse. Scope limit, stated in the rule itself: the seven are enumerable because they are fixed per verb; a change that also alters a format couples to consumers no fixed list can name (8d9e09a4), and that residue is out of this row's claim by construction.
84	A noun group wraps more than one verb	Judgment	Detection is trivial (11 groups of one: gz cli audit, gz flag explain, gz issue file, gz patch release, …). The verdict is not: a group of one may be a deliberate namespace reservation for verbs not yet written, and no surface models intent-to-extend. A gate forces either premature flattening or a waiver per group — bookkeeping without signal. Honest form is an advisory line in an existing report, never a fail-close.
85	User-facing output passes through the formatter, never console.print directly	Promotable	Ratchet form; it cannot land as a gate. The scan is mechanical (console.print( outside the formatter module, the shape audit_utf8_prefix and audit_subprocess_errors already use) but measures 1,230 live sites against 1 OutputFormatter, so a fail-close would block every commit. Seed at 1,230, shrink-only. Severity is understated by calling this a doc rule: ADR-0.0.4 declares the presentation surface "a port … that every command handler must honor", so these are bypasses of a Validated heavy-lane foundation ADR's port contract. Precondition for row 80.
88	Lane is not route — a GHI-tracked defect repair routes direct even when it adds a CLI surface	Judgment	Added 2026-09-06 (rule 0.6.0), operator ruling — never scored. § Adding CLI Features had read "contract-bearing CLI work runs gz obpi pipeline, not a freeform direct fix" with no carve-out, contradicting AGENTS.md § Operator Doctrine ("GHIs are AUTHORIZED for direct repair, always… those criteria gate planned ADR work, not defect repair"). Judgment, on the same unmodelled-caller ground as rows 29/30: whether a change is defect repair or planned work is a reading of intent, and gzkit models neither. The nearest machine-readable proxy is the Task: TASK-<slug>-#<ghi> trailer, and it is not the property — the -#<ghi> anchor is explicitly OPTIONAL (task-discovery.md, and filing a GHI to satisfy a trailer is a named moratorium violation), so its absence proves nothing and its presence proves only that a GHI exists, never that this commit is that GHI's repair. Scoring it Mechanical would cite the trailer validator as if it covered route selection. Measured instance 2026-09-06: the uncarved sentence sent an agent to surface a rule-versus-canon contradiction mid-fix; under the IRON LAW (only the operator initiates OBPI work) an agent reading it literally could proceed by neither route, so the drift was a deadlock, not a preference. Reclassify if a surface ever records why a change was routed as it was.
91	Code 2 means Usage or System/IO error; every parse error exits 2	Mechanical	Added 2026-09-13 (rule 0.7.0), GHI #1001, operator ruling "Keep 2; fix the labels". The table and the shared epilog had called 2 System/IO alone while attested REQ-0.0.4-02-03 fixes every parse error at 2, so a typo read as a disk fault. Witness NC:cli-usage-error-exit-two (src/gzkit/cli/helpers/exit_code_claims.py, wired into _ensure_production_claims_registered) asserts three poles — an undeclared flag exits 2 with the BLOCKERS: prefix, a declared flag parses, and the epilog's code-2 line names usage and system/IO — so an always-exit parser or a relabel back to System/IO alone reads FACADE. Unit tests back it: tests/test_cli_parser.py::test_parse_error_exits_with_code_2 (@covers REQ-0.0.4-02-03) pins the parser's exit, and test_epilog_code_two_names_usage_errors pins that STANDARD_EXIT_CODES_EPILOG names both meanings on the code-2 line — the help text every command prints. The two in-repo readers of exit_code == 2 (validate_cmd.py unscoped-rules) read an in-process validator result, never a CLI parse, so their I/O reading stands.
92	Never key a retry on exit 2 without the BLOCKERS: usage prefix on stderr	Judgment	Added 2026-09-13 (rule 0.7.0), GHI #1001. The clause binds CALLERS of gz — scripts, CI, harnesses — and gzkit models no caller's retry policy; no in-repo code retries a gz invocation on its exit code. What is mechanical is the signal the caller needs: the BLOCKERS: prefix is pinned by test_error_writes_blockers_prefix_to_stderr (REQ-0.0.4-02-02). Reclassify on an observed caller that retried a usage error.
93	Verbosity flags: the default logs warnings and errors, --quiet errors only, --verbose INFO, --debug DEBUG, all to stderr	Mechanical	Added 2026-09-14 (rule 0.8.0). § Flag Conventions had said "--verbose Debug output" against the canonical specification's § Verbosity Levels (default WARNING, --verbose INFO), and VERBOSITY_TO_LEVEL copied the drift; it went unnoticed because configure_logging ran nowhere until GHI #1010 wired it into cli/main.py. Both are realigned to the specification. Witness NC:cli-log-levels-follow-spec (src/gzkit/cli/helpers/log_level_claims.py, wired into _ensure_production_claims_registered) drives cli/main.py's flag mapping through four poles — each names a level that must reach stderr and one that must not, and nothing may reach stdout — so a drifted map, an entrypoint that ignores a flag, a silent configuration or stdout logging reads FACADE (tests/cli/test_log_level_claims.py). Unit tests back it: tests/test_logging.py::TestVerbosityLevels pins the level map and each level's visible and suppressed events; tests/cli/test_json_stdout_log_isolation.py drives the real entrypoint — an INFO event is absent by default and under --quiet, present under --verbose, and --debug outranks --quiet. Reclassify if the map moves without the specification moving with it.

Consolidation (binding on whoever builds these). Rows 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 and 81 are six predicates over one walk of the parser tree. They land as one validator with one waiver registry — gz validate --cli-shape — not six flags. Precedent: --cli-alignment already bundles audit_cli_alignment + audit_manpage_alignment behind a single flag. Shipping six flags for one tree walk is the accretion this scorecard exists to catch.

---

Summary

Fenced, not transcribed (2026-08-08). These counts are machine-checked against the § Scorecard rows by gz validate --advisory-scorecard, which fails closed on any disagreement. They had been hand-maintained and last stamped 2026-05-26, describing 69 rows of what is now a 91-row scorecard; a re-measurement taken by substring grep then reported 12 Promotable + 2 Ambiguous, counting the legend row and this table's own row as if they were rules. A count with no producer decays in whichever direction the next reader's grep happens to point.

Score	Rows	% of scored rows
Mechanical	69	38%
Promotable	36	20%
Judgment	75	42%
Ambiguous	0	0%

The third state is NO LONGER empty (2026-08-16) — and that is this table working, not failing. It stood empty from 2026-08-08 until the CLI Contract Doctrine was scored for real under GHI #810, which added 8 Promotable rows (76-82, 85). The paragraph below states the meaning of exactly this event, and it holds: a clause scoring Promotable means a discipline was found declared with neither a witness nor an admission.

What that measured, precisely: .gzkit/rules/cli.md sat in data/advisory_scorecard_grandfather.json pinned at 0.3.1 — pre-ledger debt, never scored — while the specification it summarizes (docs/design/cli-standards-v3.md, canonical per ADR-0.0.4) was reachable from that ADR and from no rule or governance surface. Neither arm observed the layer, so its decay produced no signal for as long as both conditions held. The eight rows are that decay becoming visible for the first time, not new drift.

The Movement C family-closure criterion is therefore not met on the rules arm, and should not be reported as met. Restoring it means building the arms (rows 76-82 and 85 consolidate to gz validate --cli-shape plus an output-chokepoint ratchet — see § CLI Contract Doctrine) or re-scoring individual rows to Judgment with the unmodelled term named in the rule's own text. Re-scoring without a text edit is laundering (operator ruling 2026-08-08) and is not available here.

Original statement of the criterion (2026-08-08), retained because it is the rule this event was measured against. Every scored clause either carries a mechanical witness or says in its own rule text that it is advisory and names what would reclassify it — the Movement C family-closure criterion, on the rules arm. Re-scoring alone was not permitted: each row below that moved cites the rule version whose text changed with it. A row returning to Promotable means a clause was found declaring a discipline with neither a witness nor an admission, which is the state this table exists to make visible.

The counts sum to more than the scored-row total because a few rows (58, 65) score two halves of one rule (**Mechanical** shape / **Judgment** judgment) and count toward both. The fenced table above is the only authority on the totals — it is machine-checked; the row count and sum are deliberately not restated here, because a second hand-maintained figure inside the document it describes is the derived-view-as-source-of-truth defect this scope exists to close (Architectural Boundary 6). There are zero Ambiguous rules — the score is defined in the legend above and currently has no members.

The third state survived governance-core.md 0.9.0 (2026-08-09), and the mechanism by which it survived is worth recording. Five of that rule's binding clauses had no rows at all; scoring them for real is what the version bump required. One of the five initially failed the third-state test — its admission of having no witness lived in an expansion doc rather than in the rule an agent loads, which is precisely the gap the test is for. The remedy was the Movement C one: edit the rule so it states its own posture and names what would reclassify it, then score against that text. Scoring around a gap instead of closing it is the laundering this section exists to prevent. Where each clause landed is in its § Scorecard row and nowhere else.

The mechanical floor rose from a 30 % baseline — see the fenced table above for where it stands now — under the #202–#215 promotion wave plus ADR-0.0.20's rule-placement invariant. Eleven advisory rules were mechanized as gz validate --<scope> flags and two became pre-commit guards under gzkit.hooks.guards. ADR-0.0.22 added the security-sensitivity third axis as gz validate --sensitivity, lifting the floor by a further point. ADR-0.0.23 OBPI-02 added the Judgment-classed agent failure-mode taxonomy as shared reviewer vocabulary (mechanical promotion gz validate --failure-mode-coverage tracked under follow-up GHIs #308–#312). ADR-0.0.27 OBPI-01 added the Mechanical-classed exemplar-corpus doctrine rule. ADR-0.0.28 OBPI-01 added the Mechanical-classed complexity-thresholds rule (forthcoming gz validate --complexity-thresholds validator under OBPI-0.0.28-03). ADR-0.0.30 OBPI-04 added the Mechanical-classed editor/IDE protocol surface rule, with envelope validation enforced by JSON Schema. ADR-0.0.31 OBPI-02 added the T0 distribution invariant rule, promoted to Mechanical in OBPI-0.0.32-07 via gz validate --distribution (static check: pyproject.toml include + baseline manifest + on-disk canonical trees, exit 3 on any drift class). ADR-0.0.37 OBPI-05 added the Mechanical-classed brief-reconciliation invariant (CIC-2) rule, enforced by gz validate --brief-reconcile. ADR-0.0.54 OBPI-01 added the Mechanical (shape) / Judgment (per-section size) Map-Not-Encyclopedia doctrine rule, with shape enforcement forthcoming as gz validate --agents-md-map-conformance (OBPI-0.0.54-03) and budget tightening (AGENTS.md 40k→15k, CLAUDE.md 40k→4k) enforced now by gz validate --instructions-files-budget. ADR-0.0.59 OBPI-01 added the Mechanical-classed REQ Scope Discipline taxonomy rule (three-kind BEHAVIOR/SUPPORT/STRUCTURAL-FENCE with per-kind proof channels), with gz validate --req-kind-discipline forthcoming under OBPI-0.0.59-02. The follow-up band this paragraph used to enumerate is gone (2026-08-08). It named the tool-skill-runbook alignment invariants, lazy imports and runbook placeholders as awaiting later waves; every one of them now reads Judgment in its own row, each having stated its advisory posture in its own rule text during the Movement C rules arm. The fenced table above is the only authority on the current distribution — this paragraph records how the floor rose, never where it stands.

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Self-referential scope domains (measured 2026-08-09)

A checker whose scope comes from an artifact it also validates can never report an omission from that artifact. It is a fixed point: it can say a listed member is wrong, never that a member is missing. Six instances were found one at a time across the 2026-08-09 sessions and nothing counted them; this section is the count, not a checker. No validator was built for this class, per the § Recommended promotion order freeze — two of the nine candidates below are already defeated, which is evidence against a general check rather than for one.

Counted from the domain side, because the class requires a domain-supplying artifact. All 33 data/*.json files, classified:

Class	Count	Membership in the class
Waiver / grandfather / shrink-ratchet	17	No. These subtract from a domain derived elsewhere. Their failure mode is laundering, already governed by the shrink-only ratchet (ADR-0.0.73 BI#8)
Threshold / config	7	No. Supplies numbers, not work-items
Domain list	9	Yes — the file enumerates what gets checked

The nine, by witness status:

Domain list	Status
check_scope_membership.json	Defeated — test_declared_membership_matches_source compares it to the registry source. Measured 89/89, gap 0 in both directions
distribution_baseline_manifest.json	Defeated — the audit's domain moved to _CANONICAL_SURFACES; the manifest is no longer an input to its own scope
waiver_ratchet_registry.json	Gap measured 0 (18 registered + 1 excluded + itself = all 20 waiver-shaped files). No witness found that a new waiver surface must be registered
frontier_model_cards.json	Zero test references — the weakest of the nine
agents_md_survival_declaration.json	Unread
instructions_files_budget.json	Unread
transcribed_count_surfaces.json	Unread
security_surfaces.json	Unread
exemplar_corpus.json	Unread

Unread means: the file has test references, but referenced by a test is not the same as completeness witnessed. A test asserting that listed members are valid is exactly what a fixed point permits; the question is whether anything asserts a member cannot be missing. Six such readings are owed.

The two defeated instances carry two different remedies, and the difference is the useful part. check_scope_membership.json keeps the file and adds a test comparing it against an independent source — cheap, and the file stays the declaration. distribution_baseline_manifest.json removed the file from the domain path entirely, so the fixed point cannot re-form — stronger, and it cost a source change. Prefer the second where the domain has a real independent source; the first where the declaration is the intent.

The measuring instrument has the defect it hunts. The waiver-shaped files above were found by name pattern (waiver / grandfather / baseline). A waiver surface named otherwise is invisible to that sweep, so "gap 0" is a statement about the files the pattern found, not about the population. Recorded because a disclosed limit is the difference between a measurement and a claim.

Scorecard binding — the inverse direction

Of the 89 registered validator scopes, 51 bind no scorecard row (strict: some row among the 126 cites the scope's --flag). A looser reading — the scope name appearing anywhere in this document — leaves 41 unbound. The figure of 54 carried across several handoffs does not reproduce under either method; it is superseded by the two above, each stated with its rule.

Whether the inverse direction gets an owner is an open operator question, not a finding. A scope with no row is not thereby unenforced — most are mechanical by construction — it means this scorecard makes no claim about it.

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Recommended promotion order (highest leverage first)

FROZEN — 2026-06-08 (governance-subtraction, track 2 / reading A). This backlog is no longer a burn-down list. The mechanical floor (64%) is judged sufficient; the imbalance to correct now is too much mechanism, not too little. Promotion is opt-in-with-justification: a new mechanical check is added only when a specific, observed drift instance justifies it. The discipline below still governs how to promote — it no longer implies that every Promotable row should be promoted. As of 2026-08-08 there are no Promotable rows left to stay advisory: the third state is empty, so this backlog governs only what a future Promotable row would owe.

Subtraction now has equal standing. A mechanism that misfires, over-fires, gives false assurance, or only guards other mechanism is removed with named steering-failure evidence (the same evidence-bearing bar this scorecard set for promotion — write the case, show the failure, then cut). This operates under the existing anti-vibing operative claim "volume follows steering need"; it does not amend "never maintenance burden or velocity" — burden alone is still not a removal rationale; degraded steering is. First subtraction increment landed this date (3 wrapper chores; see CHANGELOG / agent-insights).

Each promotion candidate has a tracking GHI. Close the GHI when the promotion lands per the discipline in § Promotion discipline below.

#	Rule(s)	GHI	Summary	Landed as
1	28 (Inv 1)	#202	Every CLI verb has a wielding skill	gz validate --skill-alignment
2	25 / 26	#203	Pydantic BaseModel + ConfigDict discipline	gz validate --pydantic-models
3	21	#204	Class size limit (300 lines)	gz validate --class-size
4	11	#205	Version bump → git tag alignment	gz validate --version-release
5	9	#206	No PYTHONUTF8=1 prefix on uv run gz	gz validate --utf8-prefix
6	16	#207	No manual ledger edits (pre-commit guard)	gzkit.hooks.guards.forbid_manual_ledger_edits
7	1 / 2	#208	Pool ADRs never receive runtime-track events	gz validate --pool-adr-isolation
8	37	#209	No third test tier under unittest	gz validate --test-tiers
9	33	#210	Sync after every skill/rule edit	gzkit.hooks.guards.forbid_skill_sync_drift
10	39	#211	Behave scenarios tagged @REQ-X.Y.Z-NN-MM	gz validate --behave-req-tags
11	meta	#212	Scorecard self-test	gz validate --advisory-scorecard
12	4	#213	Reconcile freshness audit	gz validate --reconcile-freshness
13	6 (extension)	#214	L3 derived-view inventory	docs/governance/layer-three-derived-views.md
14	discoverability	#215	Wire trust-doctrine + scorecard into agent surfaces	agents.local.md + mirror sync
15	brief-heading-conventions	#238	Brief evidence sections must use H3 (not H2)	gz validate --brief-headings
16	45a (scope-boundary subsection)	#275	Fresh-interpreter helpers + non-Python pipes + tools/**/*.py reconfigure	gz validate --utf8-prefix (extends row 5)
17	47 (ADR-0.0.20)	ADR-0.0.20	Agent rule placement invariant: no paths: "**" under vendor rule dirs	gz validate --unscoped-rules
18	48 (ADR-0.0.22)	ADR-0.0.22	Security-sensitivity third axis: floor + escalate-not-escape + heightened walkthrough	gz validate --sensitivity (+ _requires_security_review_attestation audit OR-branch + reserved arb-step-security-scan-* ARB slot)
19	brief-cross-references	#436	Bare OBPI-X.Y.Z-NN / ADR-X.Y.Z identifiers in briefs must resolve to on-disk artifacts; speculative-skip marker <!-- gz-validate-skip: brief-cross-references --> for forward-reference cases	gz validate --brief-cross-references
20	brief-demo-section	#431	Heavy-lane CLI-shipping briefs (Allowed Paths intersect src/gzkit/cli/parser_artifacts.py or src/gzkit/commands/*.py) must carry a ## Demo H2 section before completion so the closeout walkthrough does not fall back to --help; terminal-status briefs grandfathered; speculative-skip marker <!-- gz-validate-skip: brief-demo-section --> for genuine exemptions	gz validate --brief-demo-section

Invariant 1 landed first, to establish the waiver shape for the harder body/output-form scans. The two it was landing ahead of no longer wait on it: both re-scored Judgment on 2026-08-08 (see their rows), each turning on a term no repository surface represents — "the same operator moment", and a verb's rendered output form against a prose contract.

Until that re-score this line asserted the opposite, in the same breath as citing the rows that contradicted it. gz validate --advisory-scorecard now refuses that shape.

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Promotion discipline

When promoting an advisory rule to mechanical:

1. Write the audit first. It fails. You observe real current violations (or none). Don't write the audit against a clean state you assumed — you'll miss drift that's already in.
2. Fix or waive the current violations. Waivers are explicit dict entries with rationale; silent pass-lists are anti-pattern (trust doctrine T2).
3. Promote the audit into gz validate as a named scope. Discoverable via --help, runnable at pre-commit.
4. Delete or narrow the advisory rule text. The rule is now mechanical; the doctrine file can drop the admonition and point at the audit. Doctrine that's mechanical is doctrine that survives agent rotation.

This audit is itself a candidate for promotion: the catalog above could be a test that fails when a new rule is added without a score. That would make the audit self-sustaining. Left as a follow-up — the scorecard shape is still stabilizing.

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Related

• docs/governance/trust-doctrine.md — the pattern this scorecard supports
• docs/governance/state-doctrine.md — storage-layer doctrine; complement to trust doctrine
• docs/governance/layer-three-derived-views.md — L3 view inventory and remaining audit gaps (GHI #214)
• AGENTS.md § Prime Directive / § DO IT RIGHT / § Behavior Rules — the cross-reference index of these rules (Do / Do not framings), folded in from the former .gzkit/rules/agent-contract.md under ADR-0.0.20 OBPI-02
• docs/governance/agent-contract-rationale.md — pedagogy extracted from the rule file: anti-pattern canon, TASK-driven workflow, 6g/6h rationale
• CLAUDE.md — architectural-boundaries memo (rules 1–6 in scorecard)