Failure Archaeology

Failure Archaeology — 2026-07-29/30 session

Dead ends, traps, and residue from the contributor-PR campaign session, so no future agent re-walks them. Entry fields per the project-skill template: disposition / what happened / mechanism / standing rule / residue location.

1. dead — hand-rolled CI wait loop

• What: an until-loop ("wait until no check is pending") was launched to wait for PR #90's CI, then stopped; the session's own live note hedged that an inverted loop condition would return early. A transient API error landed in the same window. (Transcript-recorded only — the stopped loop left no repo artifact.)
• Mechanism: a hand-written wait predicate is unverifiable from the outside — when it exits you cannot distinguish "done" from "predicate wrong", and a mid-wait interruption leaves no state.
• Standing rule: read CI state directly and re-derive on every resume — gh pr checks <n> — instead of encoding the wait condition in a loop you cannot test. The session's later CI waits (#93, #97) completed as plain background status checks.
• Residue: none (the loop was stopped; nothing landed).

2. dead — untested runtime-semantics text in #96 (fixed in gate)

• What: contributor text asserted os.environ["KEY"] "silently reads empty" in non-interactive shells, and its ❌ example used '\\n' inside single quotes.
• Mechanism: prose about runtime behavior that nobody had executed. Both lenses converged on the KeyError correction (r1); sol+luna refined .get() → None (r2); a lens executed the printf example and showed '\\n' emits a literal backslash-n, so the example could never produce the incident it described.
• Standing rule: runtime claims in doctrine get executed verification before shipping (gate-adjudication-and-folds).
• Record: 6fa6154, 5fa241b, PR #97 body, #96's evaluation comment.

3. recurring-trap — covenant markers missing on contributor clauses

• What: #95's clause carried only the Provenance-level label (f529014); the #85–#89 batch needed six in-body markers added (814d116); a sweep found five Provenance entries missing the contributor-reported label (#90 body).
• Mechanism: contributors satisfy the covenant at the Provenance level and miss the in-body standing form; every batch re-imports the same gap.
• Standing rule: sweep new clauses for marker + label pairing as an integration fix BEFORE gate round 1 (doctrine-change-conventions).
• Tripwire: a new clause whose opening sentence lacks the marker while its Provenance entry says unprobed.

4. recurring-trap — your own folds introduce defects

• What: #90's gate caught the staged-diff gate's circular trigger (the catch is named in #90's body; that an earlier fold introduced it is session-recorded).
• Standing rule: folds are attack surface for the next round; no terminal close on unreviewed folds outside the disclosed bounded-loop residual (gate-adjudication-and-folds).

5. residue, not in-progress work — local branch graveyard

• What (observed 2026-07-30): local branches with deleted upstreams ([origin/…: gone]: integrate-pr62-65, integrate-pr68-69, phase-a…d, hook-, delegation-) plus never-pushed mine-* and pr3x-review branches from earlier mining campaigns.
• Standing rule: residue — do not adopt-and-finish, do not delete without the owner's ask (cleanup mutates the owner's workspace; operational-rigor §2). Observed mechanics: this repo merges with TRUE merge commits, so git branch --merged main DOES list all of these branches as merged (verified 2026-07-30: 37 of 37) — reachability is the authoritative signal here. The canonical squash-merge caveat ("squash defeats --merged") applies to squash-based repos, not to this one's observed history. The never-pushed mine-*/pr3x-review branches are also listed as merged — their content landed via other branches; still residue, not live work.
• Residue location: git branch -vv on the owner's machine.

Deliberately-not-done (do not "helpfully" complete)

• No version bump for #84–#97 — doctrine-only merges do not bump (doctrine-change-conventions). Do not "fix" the badge forward.
• #91 was NOT merged into #90 although it was open before #90 merged — mid-campaign arrivals stay out of the pinned set (contribution-gate-playbook step 0). It got its own campaign (#93) instead.
• No r12 for #90 — sol's r11 residue closed under the bounded-loop precedent and ships labeled sol-unverified in the PR body. Do not re-open the campaign to "finish" sol's convergence; a future finding against those two folds is a NEW finding, handled fresh.
• security-enhancement.md and chat-history.md stay untouched at the repo root — owner disposition pending (issue #100; UNCERTAINTY.md item 1). Do not move, stage, or edit them.

Re-verify

git branch -vv | grep -c ': gone' (nonzero = residue still present) and gh pr view 90 --json body --jq .body | grep -n 'sol-unverified\|bounded' (the disclosed residual is still the record). Entry 5's branch list is machine-local — re-observe it rather than trusting this file's snapshot.

Provenance

Distilled 2026-07-30 from the session transcript; commits, PR bodies, and comments cited inline were re-read in-repo the same day; the branch list was observed directly (git branch -vv, 2026-07-30).