Bring the handoff package current through pull request 617

[dcellison]

What this does

The handoff package described the repository as it stood at pull request #580. It now describes it at #617, and it carries what a model picking up News from Nowhere chapter 4 needs before drafting a line.

The record

README.md gains the 27 July arc. The maintainer's front-to-back book read produced six reviewed pull requests, and everything it found belonged to one defect class: a statement true when written that quietly stopped being true when something else grew. The lexicon figure, the shelf's size, the primer's length, a riddle placed by a position it no longer held, an inventory promising completeness. The same paragraph records the attenuator ruling that closed the conflation sweep's last item, and the citation-drift check as assessed and declined, with a note not to raise it again unprompted.

Two rules join the working contract

The manual is a standalone document. Reader-facing manual text carries no repository paths, no vocabulary field names, and no tooling instructions, because a reader has never seen a stored entry and cannot open documents/, vocabulary/, scripts/, or canon from the website. The contract lists what the site does publish and says to drop the pointer where nothing published covers the point.

Exact repository counts stay out of prose. Nothing checks them, so they go stale silently and stay wrong for months. Use a round lower bound, measure before writing even that, and keep an exact figure only where the arithmetic is the content. A number attached to a past event is a record rather than a status.

Corrected figures

current_state.md reads 1,287 lexicon entries, 1,153 content words, and 892 base content words, all measured rather than carried forward. The shelf is described as seventeen works with four original Phi compositions, replacing a sentence that still said one original and predated the three essays.

The chapter 4 briefing

A new section under the corpus state sets out what the next model needs and what it must not assume. The module-vocabulary ruling for the novel is unsettled, with the proposal on record that future people speak core vocabulary while the narrator's old-world descriptions may reach module words. That question lands immediately in a market chapter, so it goes to the maintainer before drafting, not after. The verification that chapters 1 through 3 survived the four-syllable migration sweep is also still owed.

The rest is documented rather than remembered: the transmutation guide at .claude/skills/transmute/SKILL.md and the instruction to read all three existing chapters end to end, since the conventions are written down but the register is only in the chapters; the four-line block with its morris: citation checked against the complete witness; the seven ratified names, each verified as in use in the merged chapters; the ratified dissolution of Morris's gender sorting as the book's largest deliberate loss; the standing instruction that coining is expected rather than rationed; and the editorial contract in site/news_from_nowhere_editorial.json whose declared counts the renderer verifies.

Verification

Every figure was measured against the live repository: the lexicon split by directory, the shelf composition from texts/catalogue.json, chapter 4's source length from the stored witness, and each ratified name by counting its occurrences in the merged chapters. No stale 1,286, 1,152, or one-original sentence remains anywhere in the package.

Validator run standalone: 1,287 entries, 0 errors, 0 warnings. The site builds. The phonetic neighbor baseline regenerates with no diff.