KATABATIC :: the gate ledger

The case-law rule

rule Every new scar becomes a gate or a rule within one session of being understood. No defect is ever merely fixed. That is how the ledger grows, and it is the only way it is permitted to grow. One exception exists, marked below, and it was added from foresight on purpose.

The fifteen release gates

These run on every release of a built corpus. Numbers are real sequence: a release walks them in order and the last two of the build set are pending by design until humans close them.

#	gate	what it proves
1	manifest completeness	the course or site manifest carries every required block
2	novel entity provenance	every invented name is declared build-authored, not traced
3	copyright class	every source carries a class; unknown is a hard stop
4	link coverage	zero dead internal links
5	blank count assertions	counted things match their declared counts
6	escape key verification	keyed puzzles verify against their own math
7	fingerprint vs manifest	measured inventory equals declared inventory
8	zygotic conformance	canonical folder names unchanged; display names may theme, paths never do
9	binary sweep and size	no stray binaries, tree under budget; the report is computed, never a constant
10	wholesomeness	lexicon sweep over every page
11	locks collision	nothing outside the declared blast radius was written
12	authored use	other people's work transforms only with their yes
13	scope conformance / human sign-off	pending by design until the content authority reads it; a green here without a human is a lie
14	council sign-off	cold-context review, fresh eyes only; the builder never closes this on its own work
15	the strike point	the ethics litany; the one foresight gate; see its page

The four scar-gates of one hard day

Four gates entered the ledger in a single session. None is theoretical; each block below names its scar first, because the scar is the authority.

G0 :: capability precheck scar: a lesson on complex fractions reached the gate after the whole week was authored, and the engine had no render path for it. rule: before authoring, match the source's constructs against the engine's render vocabulary. A boundary found on day one is a proposal; a boundary found at the gate is a lost session.

G-CITE :: tool truth scar: a design specification was narrated from an empty tool result, sourced from a memory summary, presented as a read. The operator believed it, because it was mostly right. Mostly right is worse than wrong. rule: every claim about a document's contents traces to a tool result in the current transcript. Empty search plus confident description is fabrication, not recall.

G-STATE :: single writer scar: two copies of the state file, same date, both headed "the single truth," silently divergent on an engine version, week labels, two closed decisions, and twenty pool items. Caught by the operator's eye, by no gate. rule: the state file carries revision and parent revision. An unrecognized parent is a stop and a merge, never an overwrite.

G-BRAND :: token contract scar: nine live visual lineages, six incompatible vocabularies for the same seven slots. The token named ink was the background in one skin and the text in four others; a bulk reskin would have inverted a teacher's deck and nobody would have known until it hit a projector. rule: one token file per lineage; both renders emit from it; contrast is measured on the output, never asserted in the input. The panel on this station's front door is that gate, running on this site.

Two more, from the machine side of the keyboard

G16 :: the suite must not mutate the build scar: a validator imported a generator, the generator emitted files on import, and the suite silently rebuilt the thing it was judging. It passed run one and failed run two. rule: hash the whole tree before and after the gate suite; fail loudly if a single byte moved. Last gate to run, first one to trust.

G-EPHEMERAL :: the build tree is not a store scar: a hold note, a deploy runbook, and a handoff brief were generated into the build tree; a clean rebuild ate all three, silently. The build's idempotency, the property that made it trustworthy, destroyed the human's paperwork. rule: human-facing artifacts live outside the build tree, in a path no clean step touches. If a rebuild can delete it, it was never a deliverable.