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revert: remove the throwaway protection-verification test from main (#61) - #62

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revert: remove the throwaway protection-verification test from main (#61)#62
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fix/revert-throwaway-protection-test

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Reverts a8886f2d. main currently carries a deliberately failing test — mine, from verifying the new branch protection. This removes it.

Why it merged

enforce_admins: false, enabled minutes earlier by owner decision to keep an escape hatch for a runner outage. Admin bypass did exactly what it says: the merge API honoured it for the owner token, so a red required check did not stop the merge.

The gate itself worked. It reported mergeable_state: "blocked" correctly — both while checks were pending and after test (ubuntu-latest, py3.14) reached failure.

Why my verification was wrong

"Attempt a merge and confirm it is refused" cannot be run by a caller holding admin bypass. The refusal I was testing for is one that applies to non-admins. So the only possible outcomes were the merge succeeding — which is what happened — or a false pass if it had failed for some unrelated reason. mergeable_state: "blocked" was the correct and sufficient evidence, and I already had it before attempting the merge.

I designed a test whose result could not mean what I wanted it to mean, in the same session where I flagged that exact class of error repeatedly. Recording it plainly rather than quietly reverting.

What did hold

  • The live protection object, re-read after the write: 12 contexts, strict: true, enforce_admins: false, and every field intended to be preserved still intact. This endpoint replaces the whole object, so the body was derived from the live GET with each carried-over field asserted, never hand-written.
  • comm -23 between the 12 required names and the names that actually run on a real PR head is empty — no required context is unsatisfiable. That is the trap the vault repo fell into, where 10 required contexts come from disabled workflows and no PR can ever merge.

)

Reverts a8886f2. I merged a deliberately-failing test into main while verifying
the new branch protection, and that is entirely my error.

WHY IT MERGED: `enforce_admins: false`, which was enabled minutes earlier by
owner decision to keep an escape hatch for a runner outage. Admin bypass does
exactly what it says -- the merge API honoured it for the owner token, so the red
required check did not stop the merge. The gate itself was working and reported
`mergeable_state: "blocked"` correctly, both while checks were pending and after
`test (ubuntu-latest, py3.14)` went to `failure`.

WHY THE VERIFICATION WAS WRONG: "attempt a merge and confirm it is refused"
cannot be run by a caller holding admin bypass. The refusal I was testing for is
one that applies to non-admins, so the only outcomes were a merge succeeding
(what happened) or a false sense of security if it had failed for some unrelated
reason. `mergeable_state: "blocked"` was the correct and sufficient evidence and
I already had it. I designed a test whose result could not mean what I wanted it
to mean, on the same day and in the same session as flagging that class of error
half a dozen times.

The two verifications that DID hold, and were the ones that mattered:

  * the live protection object re-read after the write -- 12 contexts,
    strict:true, enforce_admins:false, and every field I intended to PRESERVE
    still intact (this endpoint replaces the whole object, so the body was
    derived from the live GET with each carried-over field asserted, never
    hand-written);
  * `comm -23` between the 12 required names and the names that ACTUALLY RUN on a
    real PR head is empty, so no required context is unsatisfiable -- the trap the
    vault repo fell into, where 10 required contexts come from disabled workflows
    and no PR can ever merge.
@wshallwshall
wshallwshall merged commit 701730e into main Jul 30, 2026
32 checks passed
@wshallwshall
wshallwshall deleted the fix/revert-throwaway-protection-test branch July 30, 2026 02:00
wshallwshall added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 4, 2026
…6-08-03)

Every open item now carries a current value x difficulty score. Before this, 23 had
none at all and the other 69 were from the frozen 2026-07-10 pass, which predates the
2026-07-28 reconcile that closed 31 items -- and a stale score reads exactly like a
fresh one.

Method, unchanged from the pass it supersedes: scored from each item's own Scope /
Why / Trigger / Nearest-existing-mechanism text rather than rescaled from the old
number, then adversarially verified against the code -- a second reader per batch
attacking build state first, then verdict/tier, then value and difficulty. 26 of 92
scores were overturned by that pass and carry the refuter's number.

The banner is the live record and the table is a view of it; both are written here and
a mechanical check confirms 92 banners and 92 rows agree on every triple.

THE RATIONALE IS REPLACED, NOT JUST THE NUMBERS. Carrying an old justification under a
new score is how a banner comes to argue against itself:
  - #114's surviving "clean workaround via the on-demand test probe" is a claim PR #162
    explicitly retracted -- both destinations' test_connection CREATE the target dir, so
    the probe cannot answer the question the toggle asks. That is what lifts it off the
    parity-with-a-workaround band to 6/3. Its replacement rationale was ALSO stale (it
    described the silent-ignore #162 had just fixed) and is hand-corrected.
  - #105's "large greenfield 71-action mapper needing its own ADR" describes an importer
    that has since shipped under ADR 0086.

Scheduling barely moved, which is the reassuring result: only TWO tiers changed --
#64 DEMAND-GATE -> P3 (an index over levers that live in #62/#63/#47/#34, so it ships
nothing runnable of its own) and #105 P3 -> DEMAND-GATE. Neither contradicts an
explicit demand-gate/on-trigger ruling in its own body; that was checked for all 51
items carrying a prior tier.

Distribution is RECOMPUTED with the table rather than carried forward, and all four
lines sum to 92. The superseded table keeps its own frozen lines and now says so.

  Tiers: P1 4, P2 19, P3 17, DEMAND-GATE 52
  Quadrants: quick win 22, big bet 5, fill-in 56, money pit 9

The four P1s: #341 (9/3, a handler returning a tuple/set of Sends delivers nothing
silently -- an accept-and-drop CLAUDE.md §12 forbids), #324 (7/2), #325 (6/2), #327 (6/2).

NOT in this commit: 24 items were found to misdescribe their own build state -- prose
asserting a gap that has since shipped, or citing messagefoundry/console/, a package
retired with #103. Those are banner corrections and land separately; the scores here
already price the remainder rather than the original scope.

Two mechanical faults were caught by reading the output rather than trusting the run:
the quadrant regex omitted the hyphen in "fill-in", so 57 of 69 items took the fallback
branch and got a SECOND score inserted beside the first; and the synthesizer's own
distribution lines did not follow from its own table (11 quadrant mismatches, 8
ordering violations, difficulty summing to 95 of 92). The script now refuses to write
when any line carries two score spans or the scored count is not 92.

backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 277 items across both files.
wshallwshall added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 4, 2026
The 2026-08-03 re-score flagged 24 open items as misdescribing what the code does.
Re-verified each against the tree as it stands -- after the archive move and after
PR #162, both of which post-date the findings -- and 10 survived. The other 14 did
not, and are recorded here rather than silently dropped:

  #84 #95 #99 #105 #114 #124 #125 #127 #133 #137 #167 #169 #214 #228

Most of those already carry an amendment that covers the stale sentence (#95, #99,
#105, #114, #124, #125, #127, #133, #228), and stacking a second ruling saying the
same thing is noise. The rest did not survive verification: the finding was itself
wrong or overstated, and a wrong correction in a ledger is worse than a stale one.

CORRECTIONS ARE ADDED AS DATED AMENDMENTS, NOT PROSE REWRITES. This file's convention
is to leave the original claim standing and rule against it, so the record shows what
was believed and what replaced it. Silently editing the stale sentence would destroy
the evidence that makes the correction checkable.

Applied to #62 #64 #131 #166 #179 #182 #237 #321 #329 #336. Representative:

  - #329 "Five MEFOR_ALLOW_INSECURE_TLS cells": the census is FOUR. #323 landed and
    routed transports/direct.py through the clamp; it now holds no call to the raw
    predicate at all (:63, :197, :215).
  - #321 "no test asserts the detectors can see a site code": false --
    tests/test_scan_forbidden.py has per-class hit tests for at least the site code
    (:126), a customer name (:83), a case-sensitive code (:91) and a routable IP
    (:107). The detector-coverage half of its Proposed 2 is already in the tree.
  - #62 plans a dual-read over "existing mfenc:v1 rows", but cell-bound mfenc:v2 is
    the default writer (settings.py:383 -> base.py:1841; crypto.py:36), and v2 folds
    (table, column, pk) into the GCM tag -- so a body landing under a different column
    must be RE-ENCRYPTED, not merely re-encoded. That tightens the catch.
  - #64's ordered plan still reads live ("Nothing builds before it"), but the
    measure-first phase completed 2026-07-12 (ADR 0051) and its step-2 lever is
    refused outright (ADR 0055 withdrawn; ADR 0107 "Do not build F2 or F3").

The refuters removed two overclaims before they landed: #62's draft asserted a live
store holds both mfenc markers (a fresh store under the shipped default holds only
v2 -- the defensible claim is that a MIGRATION must expect both), and #64's asserted
the multi-DB log split still remains, which could not be verified against ADR 0098 and
would have been a fresh false claim.

No item closes here: in every case the correction narrows the remainder rather than
discharging it, and the 2026-08-03 scores already price the remainder.

backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 277 items, one status banner each.
wshallwshall added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 4, 2026
…ones (#163)

* docs(backlog): close BACKLOG #226 — the estate Hybrid-layout sweep is done, off-repo

The per-feed Hybrid split (connections.toml / <INBOUND>_router.py /
<INBOUND>_handler.py / _<feed>_transforms.py) landed across the ported estate in
the maintainer-internal migration repository. Owner-attested; nothing in this
repository changes, which is also why leaving the item open could never have
closed it.

Both "Also" clauses are recorded as NOT delivered, with the reason each is not a
residual of this item:

  - "align the IDE Corepoint-import / scaffold path to emit the Hybrid layout" —
    there is no Corepoint-import path in ide/ to align. That tooling is #105,
    still open, so the clause is a constraint on #105's design rather than work
    #226 can perform. The scaffold half is misaddressed too: Insert Element (#48)
    drops per-file idioms into the current buffer (ide/src/insertElement.ts:1-5)
    and emits no multi-file feed layout.

  - "consider a recursive-glob / folder-per-feed loader enhancement" — filed as a
    consider, and not taken: load_config still globs *.py non-recursively
    (config/wiring.py:4162), the flat-merge behaviour the Hybrid layout is built
    around.

Follows the #227 precedent: close the primary, state the off-repo/misaddressed
residuals explicitly so the item is not re-opened for them.

backlog_status_check.py: OK — 277 items, each declaring exactly one status.

* fix(ledger): teach the number-space gates to span an archive, and fix two holes found proving it

Prerequisite for moving the 185 closed BACKLOG items into docs/archive/backlog/.
No item has moved yet; this only makes the guards able to see one when it does.

The item namespace will span two paths, so every guard now reads their UNION:

  - backlog_status_check.py: scan() takes (label, text) pairs and parses them as ONE
    namespace. A number re-used across BACKLOG.md and the archive was structurally
    undetectable before -- `seen` was per-parse -- which is the erratum's own shape.
  - ledger_check.py: triggers on any backlog-bearing path, not the one literal, and
    builds head/base as the union. Reading the union on both sides also removes a
    false positive: the move relocates 185 items, so head-union == base-union and
    `head - base` stays empty, where a per-file view would report 185 vanished
    numbers with a remedy that renumbers cited items.
  - alloc.ps1: sweeps both paths in the all-refs term and the working-tree term.
  - backlog-hygiene.yml: accepts a banner updated in either location.

Two pre-existing defects surfaced only because the gates were made to fail on
purpose first, neither of which is about the archive:

  1. alloc.ps1's working-tree term has NEVER worked. `[regex]'^...'` anchors at the
     start of the STRING; the term feeds it `Get-Content -Raw`, one string starting
     "# Backlog". Measured: 0 of 277 headings matched without Multiline, 277 with.
     The all-refs term hid it by covering every number committed somewhere -- i.e.
     every case except the uncommitted one this term exists for.
  2. backlog-hygiene.yml diffed BASE_SHA..HEAD_SHA (two-dot), which credits a PR for
     main-side changes to paths it never touched. One main-side edit to BACKLOG.md
     -- the move being a large one -- would let every PR with an older base pass the
     "must update BACKLOG.md" required check while enforcing nothing. Now three-dot,
     matching ci.yml's form for the same question.

Anti-narrowing, because a green gate over a shrunken corpus is the failure mode:
  - `--min-items N` fails when fewer items are found than required, and CI pins 277.
    Without it, 277 -> 92 fails nothing.
  - The scanned files are always printed with the count; a bare integer cannot
    distinguish "items closed" from "a file stopped being read".
  - A liveness receipt in the test suite asserts the same floor.
  - An explicitly-named --backlog path that does not exist is an error, not a skip.

alloc.ps1 gains `-ShowFloor`: print the floor and the swept paths, allocate nothing.
Allocation is a one-way door, so before this the only way to ask what the floor could
see was to spend a number on the question -- which is how it ran a whole release
reading two refs while its header promised all of them. Get-Floor takes -Peek so the
inspection cannot advance the high-water ratchet; the first -ShowFloor run against a
planted number moved this clone's watermark 316 -> 990 before that was fixed.

Proofs run, each observed failing BEFORE the fix:
  - archive-only unallocated #1007 staged: old gate rc=0, new gate BLOCKED.
  - #990 planted in the archive: old sweep floor 353 (blind), new sweep 990.
  - cross-file duplicate #118: detected, naming the other file.
  - banner violations inside the archive only: detected.
  - --min-items over a narrowed corpus: rc=1 with the scanned-file list.
  - -ShowFloor twice against a plant: watermark unchanged at 316.

ruff + mypy --strict clean; 43 gate tests pass.

* docs(backlog): move the 185 closed items into docs/archive/backlog/BACKLOG-CLOSED.md

docs/BACKLOG.md becomes the ~92 items someone can act on: 8,742 -> 3,648 lines.
The closed items are not deleted, summarised, or rewritten -- they are relocated
verbatim, so the file that gets opened, grepped and edited daily is the open set.

MOVED, NOT REWRITTEN. Every relocated block is byte-identical to the one that left
BACKLOG.md, headings included. Verified mechanically against a pre-move copy:

  - 277 items before = 92 after + 185 archived, no overlap, union identical
  - every OPEN block byte-identical to its source
  - every ARCHIVED block byte-identical to its source
  - all non-item prose in BACKLOG.md preserved verbatim

Byte-identical headings are load-bearing, not tidiness: GitHub derives anchor slugs
from heading text, so all 64 archived->archived cross-references keep resolving with
no edit at all. That is the whole argument for one archive file rather than a split
by status, year, or cluster -- #52 alone receives 99 of the 110 in-file anchors, and
its citers span #65 to #184, so no cut isolates them.

Cutting item blocks at the next '## ' heading of EITHER kind, not the next numbered
item: 4 blocks in this file are followed by a section header, which a naive cut would
have dragged into the archive along with the prose beneath it.

Anchors, all 127 re-resolved against real headings after the edit:
  - 44 rewritten in BACKLOG.md   -> archive/backlog/BACKLOG-CLOSED.md#<same-slug>
  -  1 rewritten in the archive  -> ../../BACKLOG.md#<same-slug>  (#226 -> #105)
  -  3 cross-file links repointed: AOAG-DEPLOYMENT.md (#100, #101), ADR 0026 (#30)
  - 64 archived->archived untouched, by design

13 anchors still do not resolve, and ALL 13 WERE ALREADY DEAD BEFORE THIS COMMIT --
confirmed by running the same check over the pre-move file, which returns the
identical multiset (11 bare-number self-anchors: #40 x4, #323 x3, #28, #29, #329,
#333; plus 2 links to #13 in COUNSEL-ENGAGEMENT-BRIEF.md, a number this sequence
never had). They are left dead and documented in the archive header rather than
repointed at a plausible neighbour: a citation resolving to the WRONG item is the
erratum's failure mode, and unlike a dead link it looks like success.

The archive carries its retirement banner inline rather than in a sibling README --
docs/archive/throughput/ needs a README because it indexes five documents; one file
does not, and two documents that must agree is a drift surface. It states the rules
that keep the namespace honest: never renumber, re-open by moving the block back
(never by copying, which creates the cross-file duplicate the status check now
fails), and add any future archive file to alloc.ps1's $backlogPaths AND
backlog_status_check.py's DEFAULT_SOURCES in the same commit -- a file named in
neither is policed by nothing.

Gates verified post-move:
  - backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 277 items, and it now PRINTS
    "scanned: docs/BACKLOG.md (92), docs/archive/backlog/BACKLOG-CLOSED.md (185)"
  - ledger_check.py on the staged move: rc=0 (relocation adds no numbers, because
    head-union == base-union -- the exact false positive the union view removes)
  - alloc.ps1 -ShowFloor: floor 353 across both paths, next 1000
  - 43 gate tests pass

Note the floor is unchanged at 353 because the highest item (#353) is open and stays
in BACKLOG.md. The archive-sweep fix is therefore PROSPECTIVE, not a save: it starts
mattering the first time a top-of-range item closes and moves.

* docs(backlog): re-score all 92 open items on the ten-level scale (2026-08-03)

Every open item now carries a current value x difficulty score. Before this, 23 had
none at all and the other 69 were from the frozen 2026-07-10 pass, which predates the
2026-07-28 reconcile that closed 31 items -- and a stale score reads exactly like a
fresh one.

Method, unchanged from the pass it supersedes: scored from each item's own Scope /
Why / Trigger / Nearest-existing-mechanism text rather than rescaled from the old
number, then adversarially verified against the code -- a second reader per batch
attacking build state first, then verdict/tier, then value and difficulty. 26 of 92
scores were overturned by that pass and carry the refuter's number.

The banner is the live record and the table is a view of it; both are written here and
a mechanical check confirms 92 banners and 92 rows agree on every triple.

THE RATIONALE IS REPLACED, NOT JUST THE NUMBERS. Carrying an old justification under a
new score is how a banner comes to argue against itself:
  - #114's surviving "clean workaround via the on-demand test probe" is a claim PR #162
    explicitly retracted -- both destinations' test_connection CREATE the target dir, so
    the probe cannot answer the question the toggle asks. That is what lifts it off the
    parity-with-a-workaround band to 6/3. Its replacement rationale was ALSO stale (it
    described the silent-ignore #162 had just fixed) and is hand-corrected.
  - #105's "large greenfield 71-action mapper needing its own ADR" describes an importer
    that has since shipped under ADR 0086.

Scheduling barely moved, which is the reassuring result: only TWO tiers changed --
#64 DEMAND-GATE -> P3 (an index over levers that live in #62/#63/#47/#34, so it ships
nothing runnable of its own) and #105 P3 -> DEMAND-GATE. Neither contradicts an
explicit demand-gate/on-trigger ruling in its own body; that was checked for all 51
items carrying a prior tier.

Distribution is RECOMPUTED with the table rather than carried forward, and all four
lines sum to 92. The superseded table keeps its own frozen lines and now says so.

  Tiers: P1 4, P2 19, P3 17, DEMAND-GATE 52
  Quadrants: quick win 22, big bet 5, fill-in 56, money pit 9

The four P1s: #341 (9/3, a handler returning a tuple/set of Sends delivers nothing
silently -- an accept-and-drop CLAUDE.md §12 forbids), #324 (7/2), #325 (6/2), #327 (6/2).

NOT in this commit: 24 items were found to misdescribe their own build state -- prose
asserting a gap that has since shipped, or citing messagefoundry/console/, a package
retired with #103. Those are banner corrections and land separately; the scores here
already price the remainder rather than the original scope.

Two mechanical faults were caught by reading the output rather than trusting the run:
the quadrant regex omitted the hyphen in "fill-in", so 57 of 69 items took the fallback
branch and got a SECOND score inserted beside the first; and the synthesizer's own
distribution lines did not follow from its own table (11 quadrant mismatches, 8
ordering violations, difficulty summing to 95 of 92). The script now refuses to write
when any line carries two score spans or the scored count is not 92.

backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 277 items across both files.

* docs(backlog): correct 10 items whose own prose misdescribed build state

The 2026-08-03 re-score flagged 24 open items as misdescribing what the code does.
Re-verified each against the tree as it stands -- after the archive move and after
PR #162, both of which post-date the findings -- and 10 survived. The other 14 did
not, and are recorded here rather than silently dropped:

  #84 #95 #99 #105 #114 #124 #125 #127 #133 #137 #167 #169 #214 #228

Most of those already carry an amendment that covers the stale sentence (#95, #99,
#105, #114, #124, #125, #127, #133, #228), and stacking a second ruling saying the
same thing is noise. The rest did not survive verification: the finding was itself
wrong or overstated, and a wrong correction in a ledger is worse than a stale one.

CORRECTIONS ARE ADDED AS DATED AMENDMENTS, NOT PROSE REWRITES. This file's convention
is to leave the original claim standing and rule against it, so the record shows what
was believed and what replaced it. Silently editing the stale sentence would destroy
the evidence that makes the correction checkable.

Applied to #62 #64 #131 #166 #179 #182 #237 #321 #329 #336. Representative:

  - #329 "Five MEFOR_ALLOW_INSECURE_TLS cells": the census is FOUR. #323 landed and
    routed transports/direct.py through the clamp; it now holds no call to the raw
    predicate at all (:63, :197, :215).
  - #321 "no test asserts the detectors can see a site code": false --
    tests/test_scan_forbidden.py has per-class hit tests for at least the site code
    (:126), a customer name (:83), a case-sensitive code (:91) and a routable IP
    (:107). The detector-coverage half of its Proposed 2 is already in the tree.
  - #62 plans a dual-read over "existing mfenc:v1 rows", but cell-bound mfenc:v2 is
    the default writer (settings.py:383 -> base.py:1841; crypto.py:36), and v2 folds
    (table, column, pk) into the GCM tag -- so a body landing under a different column
    must be RE-ENCRYPTED, not merely re-encoded. That tightens the catch.
  - #64's ordered plan still reads live ("Nothing builds before it"), but the
    measure-first phase completed 2026-07-12 (ADR 0051) and its step-2 lever is
    refused outright (ADR 0055 withdrawn; ADR 0107 "Do not build F2 or F3").

The refuters removed two overclaims before they landed: #62's draft asserted a live
store holds both mfenc markers (a fresh store under the shipped default holds only
v2 -- the defensible claim is that a MIGRATION must expect both), and #64's asserted
the multi-DB log split still remains, which could not be verified against ADR 0098 and
would have been a fresh false claim.

No item closes here: in every case the correction narrows the remainder rather than
discharging it, and the 2026-08-03 scores already price the remainder.

backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 277 items, one status banner each.

* docs(backlog): file BACKLOG #1000 — prove each required merge context can fail

Escalated by the coordinator on the ground that it outlives the PR that fixed it.
Deliberately NOT filed as "fix the two-dot diff": that instance already landed in
39b62bf, and filing shipped work is the rot the hygiene gate exists to prevent.

The item is the CLASS. `.github/required-contexts.txt` names 13 contexts that block
merge, and not one of them is proven able to go red. The deliverable is a negative
control per context -- a fixture carrying the exact violation that context exists to
catch -- plus a CI job that fails when a required context has none, so the coverage
cannot silently decay as contexts are added.

Scoped narrower than "test the gates" on purpose: it does not re-test what each gate
checks, since the gates' own suites do that. It asserts one property per context --
this gate is capable of failing.

The argument is that the class has now fired at least four times here, each found by
hand and none by CI:

  #334  semgrep, required and blocking, scans a two-directory allow-list
  #327  six .gitignore rules are the sole control over maintainer-internal docs, and
        nothing asserts they still match anything
  #321  the forbidden-content gate exited 0 on a real site code and partner product
  #325  the same gate's home-path detector misses 1 of 4 spellings of a Windows path

Each is correctly filed as its own defect. None of them establishes the property that
would have caught all four before they shipped, and that property is a different
artifact from any of the individual fixes.

Value 7 / Difficulty 3, quick win, P1 -- not demand-gated; the trigger fired four
times. Ranked table and all four distribution lines recomputed to 93 open items; a
mechanical check confirms 93 banners and 93 rows agree on every triple.

Number allocated atomically via scripts/coord/alloc.ps1 (#1000 -- the first in the
post-partition public sequence, clamped to >= PUBLIC_BACKLOG_FLOOR), never grepped.

backlog_status_check.py --min-items 277: OK, 278 items across both files. The floor is
a floor, so growth passes it; it is there to catch shrinkage.
wshallwshall added a commit that referenced this pull request Aug 7, 2026
Retiring a backlog item moves it verbatim from docs/BACKLOG.md into
docs/archive/backlog/BACKLOG-CLOSED.md. Every citation that named the live file
keeps pointing at a file the item is no longer in. The link still resolves, so
nothing in CI can see it. #1094 fixed two such markers in CLAUDE.md section 12;
this is the same defect at repo scale.

73 citations across 34 files, href-only. No prose was rewritten. Visible labels
changed ONLY where leaving them would contradict the target -- a label reading
`BACKLOG.md` pointing at the archive -- and then only to `BACKLOG-CLOSED.md`.

THE TEST IS "DOES THE CITED FILE CONTAIN THE ITEM", NOT "IS THE ITEM CLOSED".
Those differ, and keying on closure would corrupt correct citations: #1073 is
closed and still legitimately in the live ledger. Item locations came from
parse_items imported from scripts/docs/backlog_status_check.py, per CLAUDE.md
section 11 -- never a hand-rolled scan of the banner alphabet.

DELIBERATELY NOT TOUCHED, each for a stated reason:

  Both ledger files -- ZERO edits to docs/BACKLOG.md and BACKLOG-CLOSED.md.
    Only two sites named them and both are excluded, so this change costs no
    conflict against the merge trains or the pending #1096 filing. The one real
    site (#322 at BACKLOG.md:2720) is left because the file is the most
    contended in the repo and the item number is visible in plain text a search
    away.

  docs/CONNECTIONS.md:2436 -- the #27 serial/ASTM row. Already fixed on a branch
    inside merge train #274. Sweeping it from origin/main would re-fix stale
    text and collide.

  QUOTATIONS OF THE DEFECT. docs/BACKLOG.md:6319, inside #1094, reads "Two of
    its markers CITED [`docs/BACKLOG.md`](BACKLOG.md) #26 and #27" -- past
    tense, describing rot that is already fixed. Repointing it would corrupt a
    historical record. A regex cannot tell this from a live pointer, which is
    the reason this was not done with sed.

  THE WRONG-NUMBER CLASS, which is a different defect and must not be swept into
    this one. ADR 0068:10 cites #11 and ADR 0113:9 cites #239; both numbers are
    absent from the live ledger, but the ARCHIVE's #11 ("`check` dry-run
    cross-products") and #239 ("Re-measure Steps view estate coverage") are
    unrelated to WebAuthn passkeys and to a Windows tray manager respectively.
    Repointing would convert a vague reference into a confidently wrong one that
    lands the reader on the wrong item. Left, and reported.

  MIXED-LOCATION LINKS, where one link covers items in both files so no single
    target is correct: docs/AI-OFF-MATRIX.md:50 (six items), docs/adr/0001:13
    (#1 archived, #3 live), THROUGHPUT-IMPROVEMENTS.md:215 (#62 live, so its
    link is already correct).

VERIFICATION
  - Plan applied by literal replacement on the named line only, requiring the
    quoted string to occur EXACTLY ONCE there; a mismatch aborts rather than
    fuzzy-matching. Dry run: 73/73 clean, 0 problems, before anything was
    written.
  - All 35 distinct anchor fragments introduced match exactly one real "## N."
    heading in the archive, checked after applying, with a known-bad fragment
    run through the same check to prove it can report a miss. Fragments were
    derived with a slugger that does NOT collapse consecutive spaces -- the
    doubled hyphens are correct, not typos.
  - All 74 archive hrefs in the changed files resolve to the archive from their
    own directory depth; the relative prefix differs by depth and was computed
    per file, not pattern-matched.
  - Coverage confirmed with a DELIBERATELY LOOSER regex than the one that built
    the work list: it finds exactly one wrong-file site outside this change set,
    docs/CONNECTIONS.md:2436, which is the intended exclusion.
  - backlog_status_check.py: OK, 365 items. No mixed line endings introduced.
    All 34 changed files are markdown; diff is 67 insertions / 67 deletions,
    line-for-line.
  - Staged by explicit path from the plan, cross-checked against git's modified
    set, so nothing another session is editing was swept in.

Not included: the broken-href class (13 sites, mostly (docs/BACKLOG.md) written
from inside docs/testing/master-test-plan/), the 12 line anchors past EOF, and
the 31 in-range anchors that drifted onto unrelated text. Those are separate
classes under #1095 and are catchable by a link checker, which this repo still
does not run.
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