Gate Adjudication And Folds

Gate Adjudication and Folds

Canonical verdict rules: skills/cross-model-review/SKILL.md (findings are claims, §3; the loop is bounded, §4). This file pins the adjudication patterns the 2026-07-29/30 campaigns used, each with its public record. On disagreement, the canon skill wins.

Fold discipline

• Reproduce a finding against the actual file/repo before folding it.
• Fold commits are named Fold gate rN: <what> — single-PR campaigns prefix the target, e.g. Fold #91 gate r1: … — and state which lens produced each item and why the fix is right (see 6fa6154, 5fa241b, 83a038d, 1560b97).
• Your own folds are attack surface for the NEXT round: #90's gate caught the staged-diff gate's circular trigger, a defect an earlier fold itself introduced (the catch is listed in #90's body; the fold-introduced attribution is session-recorded). Do not close on a round whose folds no lens has seen, except under the bounded-loop close below, where exactly that residual is disclosed by name.

Rejections carry in-repo counter-evidence

• A reviewer finding you reject gets a recorded counter-fact in the fold commit and PR body. #90's body records the aggregate — "7 findings rejected with in-repo counter-evidence"; the two worked examples below are session-recorded, their counter-facts re-derived in-repo 2026-07-30:
  • a lens called → a banned glyph — rejected by reading checks.py's banned class (invisible/bidi/Tag-Block only; U+2192 is not in it) and counting occurrences on main (plentiful: 107 hits in skills/*/SKILL.md at the pre-#90 main);
  • a lens called a line over-wide — rejected with the character count (78; the house norm counts characters, not bytes).
• No counter-evidence found = it is not a rejection; it is still an open finding.

Runtime-semantics findings get EXECUTED verification

• When doctrine text asserts what a runtime does, execute it before the claim ships. Precedent chain on #96: the draft said the bracket form "silently reads empty" — execution shows os.environ["X"] raises KeyError; .get() returns None; an unguarded shell $X expands empty (r1 converged must-fix + r2 refinement, 6fa6154, 5fa241b). A lens also executed the ❌ example and showed '\\n' inside single quotes emits a literal backslash-n — the example could never produce the incident it described.
• Rule: a doctrine line stating tool/runtime behavior is a claim to verify by execution, not prose to wordsmith. This applies to YOUR folds too — the r2 refinement corrected an r1 fold's attribution.

Opposite-fix convergence → adjudicate by the protected property

• Two lenses converged on the SAME gap in #91 (the durable/ephemeral overlap for "gitignored but externally archived" paths) with OPPOSITE precedence fixes. Adjudication anchored on what the rule protects — a later reader's ability to resolve the citation — so check-ignore wins: an ignored working path is ephemeral even when an external archive preserves it; cite the archive itself. Recorded in PR #93's body, the fold commit 1560b97, and #91's evaluation comment — the comment publicly states that the two lenses proposed opposite precedences.
• Rule: when converged fixes conflict, derive the answer from the rule's protected property, not from either lens's framing — and record the adjudication where the next maintainer will read it.

Terminal conditions

• TRIPLE PROCEED: every lens PROCEED in the same round (#93 r2, #97 r3). The normal close.
• Bounded-loop close (non-convergence): canon caps the loop and sends a non-converging gate to a human with the trail (cross-model-review §4 — on disagreement it wins). The house application, owner-set in the 2026-07-23 twelve-round campaign (PR #61 era) and re-applied in #90: a campaign may run past canon's 2–3-round cap only under the owner's standing campaign mandate; when one lens keeps producing must-fixes while the gate otherwise converges (#90's public record: grok PROCEED r5–r11, luna PROCEED r7/r9/r11, sol still finding last-mile items), declare the close condition before the terminal round (session-recorded for #90 at r8; the public record is the close itself), execute it, apply the final folds labeled <lens>-unverified, and put the close AND its named residuals in front of the owner — in the PR body's Review gate section and the campaign report (83a038d; #90 body). A close that leaves residuals is surfaced, never silent.
• The two failure shapes this bounds: unbounded re-review (no terminal proof ever arrives) and silent early close (residue undisclosed). The bound plus named-residual disclosure avoids both.

Done definition

Every lens finding for the round is folded (commit cites it), rejected (counter-evidence recorded), or explicitly carried into the next round's packet; a terminal state was reached by one of the two closes; the PR body's "Review gate" section states the trajectory, the rejections, and any unverified residuals by name.

When NOT to use this skill

Pipeline mechanics (branching, CI, merge, comments) → contribution-gate-playbook. What the doctrine text itself must satisfy → doctrine-change-conventions.

Provenance

Distilled 2026-07-30 from the session transcript; verified same-day against PR #90/#93/#97 bodies, the #91/#96/#85 evaluation comments, and commits 6fa6154/5fa241b/83a038d/1560b97. Session-recorded specifics (public anchors in parentheses): the →/78-char rejection details (#90's body carries the aggregate rejections line), the r8 close pre-declaration (the body carries the close itself), and the fold-introduced attribution of the circular trigger (the body lists the catch). The → occurrence count was re-run in-repo 2026-07-30.

Re-verify: git log --oneline --grep='Fold' -10 and the newest combined PR body's "Review gate" section.