A session picked up work from .scratch/continue.md and offered the human a doc
trim that was already in HEAD. The handoff was written at 01:06 saying the trim
awaited a yes; the commit containing the trim was amended at 01:12, underneath
it. Five defects made that possible, and four of them are the harness's.
The read order inverted trust: docs/README.md sent the next session to the
handoff "if present, otherwise git log" — consulting the one ungated file
instead of the record that cannot lie, which is backwards from every other rule
here, where the code beats state.md and generated surface.md beats memory. The
handoff is now step 4 of CLAUDE.md's read order, explicitly after the harness
and never instead of it, and anything it calls pending is checked with
git log -- <path> first.
The tick fired too early. "A planned item completed → tick it in continue.md"
sat in the Document step, so it recorded the plan's version of events while the
commit could still move; an amend, a squash or a late fix moves it. Reconciling
now happens after the commit exists, and a completed item is deleted rather than
ticked, because a ticked item still reads as an item.
HARNESS.md authorised the drift outright — it said the file holds "what is
done", which is exactly what continue.md's own header promises it never records.
It is now described as what it is: a temporary handoff, uncommitted, ungated,
discardable, holding the continuation point and the carried findings.
state.md still pointed at .scratch/build-queue.md, replaced two commits earlier.
The dangling-path gate missed it because .scratch was absent from its
alternation, so no pointer into the handoff directory was ever checked. It is
included now, guarded on the directory existing — a fresh clone has no handoff
and must stay green. Both directions were run: present with a stale pointer
fails, absent with docs naming it passes. The gate then flagged its own
explanatory comment, which is why that one path is written without backticks.
No gate can compare an uncommitted file against anything, so the file's job is
narrowed instead of enforced, and HARNESS.md now says which mechanism stands in
for the missing gate rather than implying one exists.
6 files, +47/-9. No rule, threshold or counter moved. CLAUDE.md 138 → 142 of 150.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bdeshiandClaude Opus 5
8f5d479f06