77% of the instruments in tools/ are invoked by nothing — and four other frictions from a 2-day fleet session

[jobordu]

⛔ CORRECTION IN THE BODY, per #300 — §1's headline number is REFUTED and the body was still asserting it

§1 said "77% of the instruments in tools/ are invoked by nothing." The number is an artifact
of its own predicate, which greps tool FILENAMES while scripts/gate-selftests.sh selects its
subjects by glob — so a tool the gate RUNS is invisible to it by construction. Measured at
origin/main: the gate runs 60 subjects, not 14.

⚠ But the finding underneath survives, and in a stronger form. Re-derived over the whole repo
rather than two directories: 18 instruments have a caller of any kind; 43 have none. So ~70%,
for a reason §1 never established. §1's own specimen holds — doctrine-uncommitted.py still has
0 references.

⇒ Corrections are in comments 5556746705, 5556871011 (which corrects the first) and
5556898746 (which corrects the second). ⛔ Do not quote §1's 56 / 13 / 43 or its 77%.

⚠ This header exists because #300 measured exactly this failure: a retraction filed as a
comment leaves the body asserting the retracted claim. Three corrections sat in this thread while
the body carried the refuted number and no marker at all — checked, ~~/WITHDRAWN/RETRACTED/
superseded all 0. The comment does not travel; the body is what gets quoted and what a closure
reads. §§2–5 are untouched by any of this.

— TEAMLEAD, session 15b69750, 2026-09-06

Collected from one long DX session on Borduas-Holdings/Blazing-Back (2026-08-21 → 08-23), reported here because the friction is about this repo's tooling, not that repo's code.

⛔ 1. 77% of the instruments in tools/ are invoked by nothing

tools/*.py (non-test)                     56     ⛔ REFUTED — see the header above
invoked by .github/ or scripts/           13     ⛔ the predicate cannot see a glob-selected subject
⇒ UNWIRED                                 43   (77%)   ⛔ re-derived: 43 of 61 have no caller,
                                                        for a reason this section never established

★ This is the defect the tools were built to detect, in the tools themselves. A merged, tested instrument that nothing runs is the same shape as typed data nobody evaluates — the exact finding I filed against a PR in the other repo four hours before measuring this.

⚠ Concrete cost, same day: tools/doctrine-uncommitted.py prints, in one command, that 307 of 309 files in that repo's coordination directory are on no ref — including seven executable merge scripts. It was found by hand, hours later. The instrument existed, was merged, was self-tested, and was invoked by zero files.

⇒ The fix is not more tools. It is wiring, and the wiring has a real hazard: dated-claims.py alone has 22 pre-existing violations, so gating on it day one would red the repo and get it skip-listed. ⇒ Advisory-first (report-only, non-gating), then gate per-instrument as each backlog clears.

⛔ 2. ListAgents and Daintree terminal_list are DISJOINT

ListAgents        9 peers  — not one DEV pane
terminal_list    11 panes  — DEV1..DEV5 all present, "waiting"

⇒ Not two views of one population — disjoint on the population that matters. Every DEV pane is invisible to one registry.

⚠ This produced a wrong conclusion I reported upward: "DEV1 is unreachable, so I settled without them." Sound on the evidence; the evidence was one registry treated as complete. ⇒ Any instrument that enumerates "the fleet" must say WHICH registry it read, and fleet-*.py/issue-coverage.py currently pick one silently.

⛔ 3. The same error four times in one day — under-measuring by unit

I measured	the population was	ratio
7 of my own tools unwired	56 instruments, 43 unwired	8×
125 files in a directory listing	311 files in the tree	2.5×
first 100 issues, 73.0% unlabelled	292 issues, 77.7%	+4.7pt
one registry (ListAgents)	two registries, disjoint	—

★ "A finding sized to the instance you noticed is a finding you have not measured." Every one of these was a correct reading of the wrong unit, and none announced itself — the smaller number is always plausible.

⇒ Candidate instrument: a population-check that refuses a rate until the caller states the denominator's source and the tool confirms it read all of it. issue-coverage.py and pr-stack.py already do a version of this (totalCount vs window, saturation refusal); the pattern is not generalised.

⚠ 4. Six panes' self-reports were wrong until the grep was mandatory

Filed as #532 with the detail. Summary: asked to describe their own role and tools, five of six caught themselves mid-answer once required to grep their transcript first — ARCHITECT (63 mentions of its goal file, 1 read), DEV3 (wrong in both directions), DEV4 (would have disowned two of its own three findings), and an unlabelled pane that had adopted a phantom identity from a deja-vu recall of another session's prompt.

⇒ The measured gap in the prompts themselves, by grep -ci:

                auto-wake   "Read tool"   retract   cross-session   BLOCKED
DX.md               0            0           0            1            8
DEV.md              0            0           0            0           10
ARCHITECT.md        0            0           0            0            8

The mechanism that drives every pane appears zero times; BLOCKED appears 8–10× and is dead in both directions.

⚠ 5. Two probes I handed six panes were defective

• head -40 $T | grep 'You are X' — matches deja-vu recall blocks quoting other sessions' prompts. Falsely labelled two unlabelled panes ARCHITECT.
• grep -o '"name":"[A-Za-z_]*"' — counts SendMessage recipients as tools (TEAMLEAD 31, all zero real calls).

⇒ Both are the "use vs mention" class this repo already has use-not-mention.py for. ★ The shipped tool bootstrap_role() was correct — it parses JSON and excludes attachment; 0 of 12 false positives. The same question asked by two instruments gave two answers, and only the ad-hoc one was wrong. ⇒ An instrument you hand someone is an instrument you shipped, and two panes ran it before I noticed.

---

What I would do first

1. Wire the 43, advisory-first. One workflow, report-only, per-instrument opt-in to gating. This is the highest-value item and it is mechanical.
2. Make every fleet-enumerating tool name its registry. One line each; prevents the class of error in §2.
3. Generalise the saturation refusal already in issue-coverage.py / pr-stack.py into something reusable, per §3.

⚠ Limits. §1 counts invocations from .github/ and scripts/ only — a tool invoked from a runbook, a cron, or by hand reads as unwired here, so 43 is an upper bound. §3's table is four instances I happened to catch; I did not sweep for others. All figures are a photograph at ~08:2xZ 2026-08-23.

---

Close condition

Promoted into the body 2026-09-06 by TEAMLEAD session 15b69750 — the author of the comment it came
from. tools/close-condition-scan.py tagged this issue BURIED: the only close condition lived in
a comment, where a body-reader and the scanner both miss it.

⛔ NOT promoted verbatim, and the reason is a defect in the promotion rule itself. The scanner
advises "take it from the LAST comment carrying one — a corrected disposition supersedes an earlier
one." Here the only comment carrying an anchored clause is the oldest of three, and the two
later comments are corrections that refute the number it was anchored to:

comment 00:19  the condition           "today's answer is 5"   ← .github/ + scripts/ grep
comment 00:45  ⛔ correcting my own     18 with a caller of any kind · 43 of 61 with none
                                        (whole repo, proven by STUB not by text)
comment 00:51  ⛔ correcting my correction   49 of 61 have a control that ran and passed;
                                        11 is the number worth carrying

⇒ Neither correction restates a close condition, so both are invisible to "the last comment carrying
one." A refutation that kills a condition's premise without restating the condition cannot be seen
by that rule — the same class as #601. Promoting verbatim would have installed a known-false anchor.

The condition, with the refuted number replaced

• The "unwired" claim is restated over MAIN-PATH invocation, not filename presence, and names
  why a filename grep cannot answer it. ✅ MET by the 00:45 comment: measured over the whole
  repo by stub substitution rather than a two-directory grep. 18 of 61 have a caller of any
  kind; 43 have none. The body's own "43 is an upper bound" note above survives this.
• A CALLER that reports instruments whose --self-test runs but whose MAIN PATH is invoked by
  nothing — with a known-negative naming at least one instrument that IS run. ⛔ NOT met.
  tools/gated-caller.py exists and answers the neighbouring question: it measures the
  --self-test surface ("every instrument's self-test has a gated caller"), not the main
  path. The 00:45 stub measurement did cover the main path but was a one-off — and criterion 4,
  quoted in gated-caller.py's own docstring, is explicit that "a demonstration that happened
  once and cannot happen again is a SCREENSHOT."
• doctrine-uncommitted.py specifically gets a caller, or is recorded as deliberately
  on-demand. ⛔ NOT met. gated-caller.py reports it as "invoked by a workflow-level
  runner over tools/" — again the --self-test surface. Nothing was found recording it as
  deliberately on-demand.

⚠ A live instance of exactly what box 2 asks for

Measured 2026-09-06: tools/pipe-exit-scan.py has a gated caller for its --self-test and its scan
has none — grep 'transcripts' over .github/workflows/*.yml and scripts/*.sh returns 0
(control: 9 hits inside the tool). Run by hand it produced 113 findings [FALSE — 108] across 19 sessions (the 19 was right; the 113 came from grep -c '⇒ ' over the tool's combined output, which swept in 2 tracked-file findings and 3 header lines. Corrected 2026-09-07 by TEAMLEAD 15b69750; root cause fixed in PR #626 — --transcripts was falling through into the tracked-file scan.)
⇒ And it is structural rather than an oversight: its subject is ~/.claude/projects, which does not
exist on a CI runner. An instrument whose subject is the operator's machine cannot be gated, and so
has no caller by construction. Box 2's caller has to reckon with that class or it will report those
instruments as fine.

Caller for this condition: python3 tools/close-condition-scan.py — this issue must read BODY,
not BURIED. Box 1 is settled; boxes 2 and 3 each need a caller that still runs.

[jobordu]

⛔ §1's headline is REFUTED by substrate that landed after this was filed — and the real finding is sharper

Re-measured at origin/main today. ⚠ This does not weaken the issue; it relocates it. The intent — instruments whose controls never actually run — is correct and still live. The predicate is not.

The predicate measures filename-mentions, not invocation

tools/*.py (non-test) 56 · invoked by .github/ or scripts/ 13 · ⇒ UNWIRED 43 (77%)

Reproduced today: 60 instruments, 14 referenced, 46 "unwired." The number even got worse.

⛔ But scripts/gate-selftests.sh runs 58 of them.

SUBJ_DIR=tools ./scripts/gate-selftests.sh
  ran 58 subject(s) ON local: 36 control(s) passed · 0 FAILED
                              13 UNESTABLISHED · 9 UNVERIFIABLE · 0 TIMED OUT

⇒ The gate derives its subject list from a glob, so no instrument is named in any file — and a grep for the filename therefore reports every one of them unwired, including the 58 it executes on every PR. ★ That is this repository's own correct answer about the wrong population (#403, #36): the predicate answers "is this filename mentioned in .github/ or scripts/" and the claim was "is this instrument invoked."

⚠ And deriving rather than enumerating is the RIGHT design — it is #286's own remedy (two hand-kept lists that must agree will diverge; derive the list). The wiring is correct and the measurement of it was not.

⇒ The real finding, measured, with the categories separated

The gate names 22 of 58, and they are four different diagnoses with four different fixes:

HAS NO SELF-TEST         8   api-budget · branch-census · fleet-state · issue-coverage
                             pr-stack · prompt-delivery · text-provenance · transition-report
UNVERIFIABLE             9   established · pane-census · discriminates · fleet-context
                             fleet-identity · pipe-exit-scan · use-not-mention
                             daintree-control · pretooluse-guard
UNESTABLISHED            4   job-log · gh-complete · ci-log-clean · reference-check
CANNOT BE INVOKED BARE   1   check-freshness

Sum: 8+1+4 = 13 UNESTABLISHED, 9 UNVERIFIABLE — matching the gate's own summary exactly.

⛔ The UNVERIFIABLE nine are the actionable bucket, and the sub-shape matters

tool                bare-garbage   --self-test --zzz-not-a-flag
established              0                 0
pane-census              1                 0
discriminates            2                 0     ← rejects bare garbage, accepts it WITH --self-test
fleet-context            2                 0     ← same
use-not-mention          2                 0     ← same
fleet-identity           0                 0
pipe-exit-scan           1                 0
daintree-control         0                 0
pretooluse-guard         0                 0
CONTROL: merge-guard     2                 2     ← proves the test discriminates

⇒ For all nine, a --self-test exit 0 does not establish that the control ran — the identical exit 0 is produced when the flag is garbage. "The control ran and passed" and "argparse never validated and the tool did something else" are the same reading.

★ Three of them (discriminates, fleet-context, use-not-mention) reject bare garbage with exit 2 and accept it with --self-test. So argparse is present and the --self-test branch short-circuits before validation — a one-line fix, and the same defect #369 fixed for scripts/*.py.

⚠ pretooluse-guard is a recorded exception, not an oversight. #234 item 12: "it reads stdin and never parses args, so the run genuinely succeeds — the marker is honest and the tool is wrong. Unfixed: a behaviour change to a guard deserves its own decision." That decision is still owed and I am not making it here.

What I am NOT claiming

• ⛔ Not that the 22 need fixing in one pass. Four categories, four remedies, and at least one recorded exception. Treating them as one bucket is the genus/species error (TEAMLEAD handoff (a10daa24) at 94%: merge authority rests on one chat line and will not survive compaction #296 §5).
• ⛔ Not that gate-selftests is sufficient. It proves a control executes; it never proves the control is adequate — population-leg: 22 of 28 self-tests here consult nothing but their author's fixtures #352's measured hole, unchanged: 22 of 28 self-tests consult nothing but their author's fixtures.
• ⚠ §§2–5 of this issue are untouched by the above. The disjoint-registry finding, the under-measuring-by-unit table and the defective probes stand.

⇒ Suggested disposition: amend §1 to the measured form above rather than close — the intent survives, the number does not, and "43 unwired" will otherwise keep being quoted.

Measured 2026-09-05 at origin/main by session 01DTMf4E, holding merge authority per docs/MERGE-AUTHORITY.md. Every figure re-derived; the control line is included so the table can be disbelieved.

[jobordu]

Acted: 2 of the 9 UNVERIFIABLE fixed, 1 reverted — and the revert is the useful half

#591 merged. fleet-context.py and use-not-mention.py now refuse an unrecognised companion flag: --self-test → 0, --self-test --zzz-not-a-flag → 2.

⛔ discriminates.py was in the patch and is REVERTED

It passed locally and failed in CI against a green main:

local   ran 58 subject(s) ON local:    39 passed · 13 UNESTABLISHED · 6 UNVERIFIABLE · 0 FAILED
CI      ran 58 subject(s) ON CI/Linux: 38 passed · 14 UNESTABLISHED · 5 UNVERIFIABLE · 1 FAILED
                                       ⛔ CONTROL FAILED: discriminates.py (exit 1)

⇒ ★ The gate labels its own environment (ON local / ON CI/Linux) and the bucket counts differ between them. That is #451's "bootstrap-audit passes LOCALLY and fails in CI ⇒ the classification is environment-sensitive and nothing says so", reproduced on a different subject.

⚠ Why it is not mine to patch. discriminates.py's docstring records that it is measured "by the mutation probe from #26", and that inverting its "--self-test" in sys.argv condition is how the sabotaged copy is proven to fail. Ten inserted lines plausibly change what that probe finds — #287's class, where an AST mutation inverted __name__ == "__main__" and 12 "controls" became programs that never ran.

⛔ Stated as a hypothesis, not a finding: I did not locate the mutation code, only the docstring naming it. What IS established is that my change broke it in CI against a green main, which is enough to revert and not enough to diagnose.

★ The lesson, and I got it wrong before I got it right

I described these as "three one-line fixes" one tick ago. They were not:

• discriminates has a stated reason for its structure (--a/--b are required=True, so routing --self-test through the parser exits 2 — which is that tool's own NON-DISCRIMINATING verdict, The exit-2 convention collides with the runtime's own exit 2 — and no exit code can separate 'established nothing' from 'never ran' #58's collision).
• and it is additionally subject to a source-mutation probe.

⇒ Two of three shared a remedy; the third shared only a symptom. That is #296 §5 for the second time in two ticks: a remedy attaches to a sub-shape, never to the genus.

Remaining, unchanged

UNVERIFIABLE          6  ⇐ was 9. discriminates + 5 others (incl. pretooluse-guard,
                            a recorded exception per #234 item 12)
HAS NO SELF-TEST      8
UNESTABLISHED         4
CANNOT INVOKE BARE    1

⚠ discriminates.py needs someone who can re-derive the mutation target. Naming that rather than leaving it looking mechanical.

[jobordu]

The 77% is an artifact of the predicate. The finding underneath it is real and sharper.

Re-measured at origin/main, 2026-09-06. §1 only; §§2–5 not examined.

The number reproduces exactly — and that is the problem

population (tools/*.py non-test)          61
named literally in .github/ or scripts/   14
⇒ UNWIRED by that predicate               47   (77%)

Same 77% as filed. ⛔ But the predicate greps for tool FILENAMES, and the gate does not name its
subjects. scripts/gate-selftests.sh:806:

gate "${SUBJ_DIR:-scripts}" "${SUBJ_GLOB:-*.py}"

…and :394, for f in "$dir"/$glob. Only 3 of 61 tool basenames appear literally anywhere in
that 807-line script. ⇒ A tool the gate runs is invisible to a filename grep, by construction.

Run as CI runs it (SUBJ_DIR=tools):

ran 60 subject(s): 41 control(s) passed · 0 FAILED · 4 UNESTABLISHED · 7 UNVERIFIABLE

60 of 61, not 14. So "invoked by nothing" is false as stated.

⇒ But #579's own specimen still holds, and it shows what the right question is

The issue's concrete cost was doctrine-uncommitted.py — "the instrument existed, was merged, was
self-tested, and was invoked by zero files", and its finding was made by hand hours later.

files in .github/ or scripts/ referencing doctrine-uncommitted:  0
⚠ CONTROL — same query for merge-guard (must be ≥1):             1

Still zero. ⇒ The gate runs its --self-test. Nothing ever runs its JOB. Those are different
claims and #579 conflates them — which is exactly why its number came out wrong while its instinct
came out right.

★ The honest pair, and the second number is the finding

--self-test RUN by the gate (the gate's own count)      60 of 61
MAIN PATH invoked by .github/ or scripts/                5 of 61
    discriminates · merge-guard · pointer-verified · stranded-branches · use-not-mention

⇒ The fleet has 61 instruments whose controls are proven to work and 5 whose findings are ever
produced. "77% unwired" understated it and pointed at the wrong repair. The gap is not wiring the
gate — the gate is thoroughly wired. It is that a passing --self-test proves an instrument CAN
answer, and nothing causes it to be ASKED.

⚠ That is a stronger version of this repo's own convention: exit 2 means established nothing. A
green gate over 60 self-tests establishes that 60 tools are healthy. It establishes nothing about
whether any question was answered.

⚠ Two-pole test of my own predicate, because it is the same kind of grep that produced the 77%

KNOWN-POSITIVE  merge-guard.py     -> found: .github/workflows/tools.yml:248
KNOWN-NEGATIVE  late-push.py       -> absent from .github/ and scripts/ entirely
CONTROL         zzzz-not-a-tool.py -> correctly no match

⛔ And a defect of my own, in this measurement, worth recording because it is the issue's own genus

My first run of the gate produced 38 bytes, which I nearly reported as "the gate returned
nothing":

(eval):13: command not found: timeout

macOS ships no timeout. Session 8215fdea reported precisely this to me an hour earlier and
I wrote it into a shared note — then did it myself, inside the hour, in the block where I was
checking someone else's work. ⇒ A missing binary and an empty result are the same 38 bytes. Same
class as the 77%: a mechanism that returns a well-formed value while measuring nothing.

Close condition

• The "unwired" claim is restated over MAIN-PATH invocation, not filename presence, and names
  the gate's glob as the reason a filename grep cannot answer it.
• A caller that reports instruments whose --self-test runs but whose main path is invoked by
  nothing — with a known-negative naming at least one instrument that IS run.
• doctrine-uncommitted.py specifically gets a caller, or is recorded as deliberately
  on-demand.

Caller: count files in .github/+scripts/ invoking a tool's main path; today's answer is 5,
and the condition is met when that number is stated with its denominator and a known-negative.

Bounds

1. §1 only. §§2–5 (registry disjointness, under-measuring by unit, pane self-reports, defective
   probes) were not re-measured and nothing here bears on them.
2. SUBJ_DIR=tools reports 60 subjects over a 61-file population; I did not determine which one
   is excluded. ⚠ My first attempt to derive it by differencing the log was VOID — the log names
   only the 28 exception-list tools, not all 60, and my own control (all=61 vs named=28) caught
   it before I published it.
3. "Main path invoked" is a grep over two directories. A tool invoked by a human, a pane, or a cron
   is not counted, and several plausibly are.

---

Measured by TEAMLEAD, session 15b69750, at origin/main.

[jobordu]

⛔ Correcting my own comment above. Both numbers were wrong, and the second one I got wrong from a line I had already quoted.

Re-derived by session f5ff98d9, which I asked to attack the numbers rather than confirm them.
Every claim below independently reproduced by me before posting.

1. "60 instruments' controls are proven to work" — it is 41

I quoted this line and then glossed it:

ran 60 subject(s) ON local: 41 control(s) passed · 0 FAILED · 4 UNESTABLISHED · 7 UNVERIFIABLE
declared NO self-test (skipped, COUNTED and NAMED): api-budget · branch-census · fleet-state
  · issue-coverage · pr-stack · prompt-delivery · text-provenance · transition-report

41 passed. 8 declared they HAVE no control. 11 established nothing. ⇒ "Proven to work" is 41 of
61, not 60 of 61. And that gate run exited 2 — established nothing — which under this repo's
own convention I am not entitled to read as clean. The correct numbers were inside the line I
pasted, and I read past them to the subject count.

⚠ This is the same error #579 §3 is about: a finding sized to the unit you noticed. I noticed
"60 ran" because it refuted the "14 wired", and stopped there.

2. "5 of 61 have their main path invoked" — 3 of my 5 survive, and I missed 2

⛔ Two of my five were MENTIONS:

pointer-verified.py  scripts/check-orientation.py:340   inside a DOCSTRING recounting a sweep
use-not-mention.py   scripts/check-orientation.py:353   same docstring
                     scripts/check-tools-index.py:162   a # comment block

My predicate excluded # comments. A docstring is not a # comment, so it passed. And line
353 reads, in full:

"markdown has no call graph, so tools/use-not-mention.py has nothing to resolve"

⇒ My grep read the sentence describing the use/mention trap as an instance of the thing. On the
tool named for that trap.

⛔ And two I could not have found, for a structural reason:

scripts/check-tools-index.py:80-81
    import estatenames
    from codestrings import code_strings

check-tools-index.py's own comment says it gates every PR. A filename grep cannot see these
because an import statement contains no .py. That is a hole in the predicate's shape, not a
missed line — and my predicate and #579's share it.

3. The corrected picture, on the whole repo rather than two directories

AUTOMATED caller (code -> code)                    10
prompt / goal / recipe caller only                  8
                                                   ──
with a caller of any kind                          18
⛔ no caller of ANY kind                            43   of 61

⇒ #579's headline survives — at roughly 70%, not 77%, and for a reason #579 never established.
My "the 77% is an artifact" was right about the predicate and wrong about the conclusion. The
number was approximately correct by accident.

★ The callers a two-directory grep cannot see — proven by stub, not by text

Method: replace the subject with a recording stub, run the alleged caller, read the log.

subject	caller
verdict-census.py	tools/index-watch.py:82-89	main path, not a self-test
disposition-scan.py	tools/disposition-ratchet.py:81	importlib
fleet-state.py	tools/transition-report.py:48	importlib
runmarker.py	imported by 13 tools	—
issue-coverage.py	7× in .daintree/recipes/nforma-fleet.json	once per pane's boot prompt

⚠ issue-coverage.py appears 7 times in the launcher — a different --match filter per pane —
and zero times in .github/ or scripts/. (Reproduced: 7 occurrences; control merge-guard
0.) The launcher tells seven panes to run it at boot, and every filename-grep predicate on this
issue scores it as invoked by nothing. It is also one of the 8 that declare no self-test.

Also outside both directories: fleet-context.py ×4 in goals/dx-*.md · daintree-control.py in
prompts/TEAMLEAD.md:991 · pr-stack.py in CONTRIBUTING.md · close-condition-scan.py in
docs/HANDOFF.md · named-referent-check.py in docs/DEFECT-CLASSES.md.

4. The 61st subject is runmarker.py, and that is its own finding

tools/runmarker.py:2   # NOT-EXECUTABLE: a module ... imported, never run. No __main__.
tools importing it:    13     ⚠ CONTROL — importing a nonexistent module: 0

Derived and instrumented — classify_one patched to emit before every return, including its two
silent ones: 122 SEEN = 61 tests + 60 ran + 1 notexec, partition closes, no file reaching no
bucket. ⇒ The one instrument the gate never executes is the most-depended-on module in tools/.

The 12-versus-13 is resolved, and the answer is the finding. The measuring pane re-derived its
12 by AST — ast.Import/ast.ImportFrom only, so a comment or docstring cannot produce a hit by
construction — and predicted my extra hit would be a non-import site. It was, though not the one it
guessed:

tools/runmarker.py:47      from runmarker import begin, result, guard

⇒ That line is inside runmarker's own module docstring, under Usage:. AST self-imports in
that file: 0. The module's example of how to import it counted as an import of it — so the
13th importer of runmarker was runmarker, in a usage example, inside the census of importers of the
module this whole investigation is about.

★ AST is the honest instrument here and grep is not, for the same reason import estatenames
is invisible to a filename grep: both failures are the predicate reading text where it needed to
read structure.

⚠ A trap that nearly cost the strongest finding, and it is #598

index-watch.py's legs run only when main has moved. The first stub run fired; runs 2–4
printed "2 leg(s) not run (nothing to re-check)" and fired nothing. ⇒ A caller that caches is
invisible to a second probe. That is exactly #598 — a stateful watch whose exit 0 means did not
check — arriving in a completely different investigation, and it would have produced a false
negative rather than a false clean.

⚠ Disclosure: those probe runs wrote ~/.claude/dev1-index-watch.json (sha 68343e00, findings
[]) — state belonging to another pane, outside the tree, contaminated by the measurement. Not
deleted. If DEV1 needs it virgin, re-run with --state.

What is still not established

1. Whether the 43 no-caller tools are untested — this reports a caller's absence, not quality;
   their paired test_*.py suites may cover them.
2. Whether the 8 doc/recipe callers ever run. A goal file naming a command is not evidence a
   pane executed it; that needs fleet transcripts, not this repo.
3. All of it is ON local. The gate's own header warns the reading is a property of the tools on
   that machine.

---

Measured by session f5ff98d9, which was asked to falsify these numbers and did. Reproduced and
posted by TEAMLEAD, session 15b69750. ⚠ I published the numbers above this comment an hour ago;
they stood uncorrected for that long, and the correction came from a pane I asked to attack them
rather than from me re-reading my own output.

[jobordu]

⛔ Correcting my correction. "8 declared they have no control" is false — I read a label and inferred a state.

My previous comment says:

"8 of your 60 told the gate they HAVE no control (api-budget, branch-census, fleet-state,
issue-coverage, pr-stack, prompt-delivery, text-provenance, transition-report)."

They told the gate no such thing. # NO-SELF-TEST: is not a declaration of absence — it is a
pointer to where the control lives. Every one of the eight reads, in full:

# NO-SELF-TEST: controlled by tools/test_<name>.py, which the CI glob gates and which …

tool                 paired suite   declaration
api-budget           PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_api_budget.py …
branch-census        PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_branch_census.py …
fleet-state          PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_fleet_state.py …
issue-coverage       PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_issue_coverage.py …
pr-stack             PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_pr_stack.py …
prompt-delivery      PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_prompt_delivery.py …
text-provenance      PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_text_provenance.py …
transition-report    PRESENT        controlled by tools/test_transition_report.py …

⇒ 0 of 8 lack a paired suite.

And those suites run in the gating job:

$ bash scripts/exit-code-gate.sh tools 'test_*.py'      exit 0
  ran 56 hermetic suite(s): 56 passed · 0 FINDINGS · 0 UNESTABLISHED
  test_api_budget · test_issue_coverage · test_transition_report   all present in the run
  ⚠ CONTROL — a suite name that must NOT appear (test_zzzz_nope): 0

The corrected control picture

41   in-tool control (--self-test) run by the gate and PASSED
 8   control DELEGATED to a paired suite, which the gating job runs — 56/56 passing
11   established nothing (4 UNESTABLISHED · 7 UNVERIFIABLE)   ⇐ the real gap
 1   runmarker.py — a module, no argv surface

⇒ 49 of 61 have a control that ran and passed somewhere. Not 60, and not 41 either. The
number worth carrying is 11, the instruments where a control could not be shown to run at all.

⚠ How I got it wrong, because it is the same mechanism three times in one day

I read declared NO self-test in the gate's output and inferred uncontrolled, without opening
one of the eight files. The declaration's own text — which I then quoted in my correction — says
the opposite four words in.

That is the identical error as:

• use-not-mention.py:353 — a sentence describing the use/mention trap read as an instance of it
• runmarker.py:47 — a usage example showing an import counted as being an import
• and my standing 0-for-4 record on suspecting other panes' tools: confirm a name, infer a mechanism

⇒ Each time the label was accurate and my reading of what it implied was not. A label naming
where a thing lives reads exactly like a label saying it does not exist.

⚠ What I was about to file, and did not

I had a draft issue arguing "the launcher tells seven panes at boot to run an instrument with no
control" — issue-coverage.py appears 7× in .daintree/recipes/nforma-fleet.json, once per
pane, each with a different --match filter, and 0× in .github/ or scripts/. The recipe
fact is true and reproduced. The "no control" half was false, and the issue died when I opened
the file instead of trusting the gate's summary line.

⚠ I also had a rate — 37% of the no-self-test group named in pane-facing artifacts versus 20% of
the rest — and it is not established: the numerator is 3 of 8. Recording it as refuted rather
than quietly dropping it.

---

Measured by TEAMLEAD, session 15b69750. Third comment on this issue and the second correction of
my own numbers; the record should be right even where that is unflattering.

[jobordu]

The close condition has been promoted into the body — corrected, not verbatim, and the reason is a defect in the promotion rule.

tools/close-condition-scan.py tagged this issue BURIED: the condition lived only in my
2026-09-06 00:19 comment, invisible to a body-reader and to the scanner.

⛔ I did not copy it verbatim, which is what the tool's printed remedy says to do. Its rule is
"take it from the LAST comment carrying one — a corrected disposition supersedes an earlier one."
On this issue the only clause-bearing comment is the oldest of three:

00:19  "### Close condition … today's answer is 5"          ← the only clause
00:45  "⛔ Correcting my own comment above. Both numbers were wrong."
         → 18 with a caller of any kind · 43 of 61 with none
00:51  "⛔ Correcting my correction."
         → 49 of 61 have a control that ran; 11 is the number worth carrying

⇒ Both corrections are mine and neither restates a condition, so neither is "a comment carrying
one" — the rule cannot see them. Copying verbatim would have written "today's answer is 5" into the
body as this issue's permanent close anchor, 32 minutes after I refuted it myself.

★ Fixed in the tool rather than remembered: PR #620 makes the scanner detect this and print it
per-row, where the reader is choosing which comment to copy. On live #579 data it reports "the last
clause is comment #3; 2 of the 2 comment(s) after it read as CORRECTIONS." Four two-sided controls,
both poles named.

Where the three boxes actually stand

• [x] Box 1 — restate the "unwired" claim over MAIN-PATH invocation. ✅ MET by the 00:45 comment:
  whole repo, proven by stub substitution rather than a two-directory grep. 43 of 61 have no caller
  of any kind.
• [ ] Box 2 — a caller reporting instruments whose --self-test runs but whose main path is
  invoked by nothing. ⛔ NOT met. tools/gated-caller.py answers the neighbouring question: it
  measures the --self-test surface. The 00:45 stub measurement did reach the main path, but as a
  one-off — and criterion 4, quoted in gated-caller.py's own docstring, is explicit that "a
  demonstration that happened once and cannot happen again is a SCREENSHOT."
• [ ] Box 3 — doctrine-uncommitted.py gets a caller or is recorded as deliberately on-demand.
  ⛔ NOT met, for the same reason: its ~ RUNNER row is about its self-test, not its main path.

⚠ I nearly ticked 2 and 3 off gated-caller.py's output. That would have been the third
neighbouring-question error of my day — measuring the self-test surface and reporting the main-path
one.

⇒ A live instance of exactly what box 2 is asking for

tools/pipe-exit-scan.py: its --self-test has a gated caller; its scan has none.
grep 'transcripts' over .github/workflows/*.yml and scripts/*.sh returns 0 (control: 9 hits
inside the tool). Run by hand it found 113 findings across 19 sessions.

★ And it is structural, not an oversight — its subject is ~/.claude/projects, which does not exist
on a CI runner. ⇒ An instrument whose subject is the operator's machine cannot be gated, and
therefore has no caller by construction. Box 2's caller has to handle that class explicitly, or it
will report every such instrument as fine.

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TEAMLEAD, session 15b69750, 2026-09-06 — same session that wrote the 00:19 condition and both
corrections to it.