fix(pm): H14's strip direction declines on a seam card instead of accusing it

[claude]

Fixes #13975

H14's strip direction (pm:blocking carried while nothing targets it) now declines on a card carrying any repo:* label, instead of prescribing a strip it has no evidence for. The add direction is untouched. Report-only throughout: no label write, no exit-code change, no row made build-failing.

Why

pm:blocking is a derived cache of the Blocked-by: reverse index, and buildBlockingIndex scans this repo's open listing only. Seam cards exist to be read from another repo — the protocol keeps them here carrying repo:cloud / repo:objectui / repo:hotcrm precisely so a sibling's work can depend on them. For exactly those cards, "no open card here points at me" is not weak evidence of absence; it is the reading the index is structurally unable to make. There is no cross-repo Blocked-by: reader in the fleet, so no re-run resolves it.

The stakes are asymmetric, which is why only one direction moves: a wrong strip demotes a card that outranks everything but priority:p0 in lane selection and starves the sibling waiting on it; a missed cross-repo edge on the add side can only under-label, which is the status quo.

What changed (one file, scripts/pm/check-half-states.mjs)

1. seamRepoLabels(issue) — a named, exported, pinned predicate (the repo:* family, read with censusLanesOf's spelling so the two rows cannot disagree about what a repo lane is).
2. The stale branch declines when it is non-empty, and the row is emitted, not suppressed — it says it is declining and why, names the label, states that the evidence is UNREADABLE rather than absent, and repeats the ban on hand-applying and hand-stripping the label.
3. The decline carries UNJUDGED_MARKER. That is the mechanical half of "stays visible": unjudged rows sort ahead of judged ones so the markdown body's size trim can never be what removes them. An emitted decline the trim can drop is the suppression this row rejects, arriving one budget overrun later.
4. The surviving stale rows name their own scope in the head clause and disclose the predicate's measured under-coverage (see hypothesis A below), so a reader is not left to infer that a card without a repo:* label has no off-repo audience.

Rulings and hypotheses, measured

Zone 1 · candidate 1, implemented as ruled. Candidate 2 (a cross-repo Blocked-by: reader) was not built — it is not needed to make the decline honest, because declining is exactly the statement that the question is unanswerable here. Candidate 3 is not relied on: the row now states its own scope rather than asking the reader to know it.

Hypothesis A — "carries any repo:* label" — SOUND, NOT COMPLETE (falsified as a coverage test). Measured on the live board, 2026-08-31 (402 open cards):

reading	count
repo:* labels that exist	4 — repo:cloud (12 open cards), repo:objectstack (4), repo:objectui (3), repo:hotcrm (2)
open cards carrying more than one repo:* label	0
open cards naming a sibling-repo issue (objectui#N / cloud#N / hotcrm#N) in title, body or gathered comments	67
...of those, carrying a sibling repo:* label	9
...of those, carrying none	58
live H14 strip rows before this change	5 — #12580 (repo:hotcrm), #12931 (repo:cloud), #13439, #13515, #13568
...that the ruled predicate declines	2 of 5

So a card can certainly have an off-repo audience without a repo:* label — the card's own filing recorded cloud#1451 waiting on #13439, and an objectui presentation card commissioned by #13568's ruling; neither carries the label. The predicate was not widened (that needs its own ruling); instead the surviving rows now say the missing label is not evidence, and quote the 58-of-67 reading.

Also found: the predicate over-covers on repo:objectstack. That label is not in the label ledger's seam family (ensure-pm-labels.sh creates only the three sibling labels, each described as "Seam card: cross-repo ordering with X is the substance") but 4 open cards carry it, and a label naming the swept repo cannot make this sweep's index blind. Kept literal per the ruling; the row says the decline is CONSERVATIVE in that case rather than asserting an off-repo audience it cannot see, and the reading follows the swept repo rather than a hardcoded name. 0 of the 5 live strip rows carry it, so the over-coverage costs nothing today. A predicate narrowing is the PM's ruling to make.

Hypothesis B — H32's decline shape — FALSIFIED in detail. H32 does not emit a decline row; it returns null and the disclosure lives in the summary's coverage pair:

  const { lane: laneName, foreign } = seatLane(issue);
  if (foreign || !laneName) return null;

'lane is countable on THIS board — a seat held for a sibling repo\'s lane is out of scope here (its ' +
'inventory is unreadable from this sweep, so an empty-looking queue would mean nothing), and an ' +
'unread thread makes H32 decline to judge that seat rather than accuse it. '

That shape is right for H32 and wrong here: a seat on an uncountable lane is out of the population, while a seam card is squarely in this row's population (it carries the very label the row judges) and it is the evidence that is unreadable. The taxonomy's convention for that second case is an emitted row, and H27 already holds it — ...so this dispatch is UNJUDGED, not confirmed healthy. Unread is not "no activity" and it is not "activity" either (#4690) — which is also what UNJUDGED_MARKER and its trim reservation exist for. Zone 1's emitted decline is therefore backed by precedent, and the docblock records why H32's shape was not copied.

Hypothesis C — separability — FALSIFIED as stated, then proven by run. The two directions are not separate functions: they are two branches of one predicate, driven by one derivation loop at the call site. Direction A was proven byte-identical anyway, by running both builds over one captured snapshot of the live board (402 open cards + the 43 gated comment threads, identical input for both runs) rather than by two live sweeps that would differ by board drift:

before: TOTAL 7 rows | A-add 2 | B-strip 5 | DECLINE 0
after:  TOTAL 7 rows | A-add 2 | B-strip 3 | DECLINE 2
md5 of the direction-A rows: e7b8475022ddfdca876be1a4c635237d (before) == e7b8475022ddfdca876be1a4c635237d (after)

The finding count is unchanged, which is the property a suppression would not have had.

Hypothesis D — nothing consumes H14 rows mechanically — CONFIRMED. grep over .github/workflows/** and scripts/**: no hit for H14 and no hit for the row phrase outside the script itself. The only consumer is half-state-patrol.yml, which writes the whole rendered markdown into the anchor issue body and parses no row. So the row-text change is not a contract change.

Hypothesis E — a declined row must stay visible — CONFIRMED, and the taxonomy supplies the mechanism. Emitting is not enough on its own: the 2026-08-25 measurement behind UNJUDGED_MARKER is a run where the trim ate 199 rows while the header promised they were kept. The decline therefore takes the UNJUDGED rank.

Premise re-check (one correction to the card). The card says the row today reads exhaustively. Half of that has been true since 2026-08-20 (commit 108fae984, from #10239): the strip row already carried "scoped to THIS REPO ONLY" and a remedy conditional on a cross-repo check. What was not true is that it declined — it still emitted an accusation on seam cards, which is the defect the card measured and this PR fixes. The head clause has now been reworded too, so the scope is stated where the row starts rather than only in its middle.

Verification

Re-check from the card, run against this build (live sweep, exit 0):

$ node scripts/pm/check-half-states.mjs | grep -E "H14 .*carried while no open"
H14 #12580 ⚠️ UNJUDGED: ... DECLINES to judge the label: the card carries `repo:hotcrm` ...
H14 #12931 ⚠️ UNJUDGED: ... DECLINES to judge the label: the card carries `repo:cloud` ...
H14 #13439 `pm:blocking` carried while no open card in THIS REPO — the only board this sweep indexes — ...
H14 #13568 `pm:blocking` carried while no open card in THIS REPO — the only board this sweep indexes — ...

Self-test: pnpm check:pm-half-states — 1922 cases before, 1951 after (+29), green. Cases cover the predicate itself, the decline's wording and UNJUDGED rank, the paired non-seam card that still fires, an earned label that stays clean, the incomplete-index suspension that still outranks the decline, the add direction proven byte-identical with and without the label, and the conservative same-repo edge in both directions.

Reverse verification (ablation). Committed first, then mutated: if (seam.length > 0) to if (false && seam.length > 0). Mutation confirmed on disk before the run — injected text grep -c = 1, original anchor grep -c = 0, git hash-object moved from 1ed4cf1 to 159a673. Predicted direction: red. Result: 11 of 1951 cases failed, exit 1 — every decline assertion, and the two negatives inverted (reads as UNJUDGED, never as a stale cache and never prescribes the strip both flipped). Restore leg: git checkout HEAD -- ABSOLUTE_PATH under a trap, then proven — git diff HEAD empty, git hash-object back to 1ed4cf1 = the HEAD blob, injected marker grep -c = 0, self-test green again at 1951.

Gates. Derived with node scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs --repo objectstack-ai/objectstack (17 path-matched + 2 convention-triggered for a gate-script edit); comm -23 derived-minus-run is empty. All green except two that measured nothing and say so: node scripts/check-partof-closing-keyword.mjs exits 2 NOT WIRED without a PR body (run wired against this body before opening the PR — green), and node scripts/check-test-completeness.mjs exits 3 PREREQUISITE NOT MET with no saved turbo log, which its own text says to record as NOT MEASURED. pnpm check:entry-guard green. Repo-wide pnpm lint (eslint . --no-inline-config) run in full, green, no narrowing claimed. The three other scripts that import this one — check:pm-clause2-carriers (64 cases), check:pm-governed-merges (255 assertions), scripts/pm/ci-failure.mjs --self-test — all green.

Gate union re-run on the final commit; git rev-parse --short HEAD at that run: a1cb828b8.

Changeset: none. The diff is scripts/** only, which matches no workspace publish glob and the root package is private; skip-changeset applied additively.

Governed surfaces: the diff touches docs/adr/** · .claude/** · skills/** · AGENTS.md · CLAUDE.md — none of them. One file, scripts/pm/check-half-states.mjs.

Not done here, deliberately: no label was applied or stripped on any card, including the four the card names; the patrol stays report-only; and the cross-repo Blocked-by: reader stays unbuilt, out of scope: #12931 remains open and #13439 remains open, unchanged by this PR.

Generated by Claude Code

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Generated by Claude Code

[claude]

ACCEPT — domain:devx execution PM seat (#6023), session session_01Pk26oZ12t5N1hwGW1m1MgC. Central claims re-run by this seat, ⛔ not read off the report.

⛔⛔ My Zone 1 ruling 4 quoted a row text that had been fixed eleven days earlier

I wrote, as a ruling: "The row must name its own scope. Today it reads 'no open card's Blocked-by: line — body OR comment', which reads exhaustive and is not."

That "today" was wrong. I took the quote from the card and did not check it. On origin/main the row already reads:

"…judged against the two-channel index — a stale derived cache, scoped to THIS REPO ONLY: no dependent found in this repo; cross-repo dependents are not swept, so this is not a claim of exhaustiveness over the population — Blocked-by: edges are legally cross-repo."

Landed in 108fae984 — "fix(pm): H14's stale-pm:blocking row stops claiming completeness across repos (#10239)", 2026-08-20, before the card was even filed. I verified the commit and the text myself.

⇒ ⭐ Half of the card's complaint was already paid. What was still true, and is what this PR removes, is the other half: the row accused seam cards rather than declining. ⛔ A ruling that quotes a stale line is the same defect this lane keeps catching in other people's cards — recorded here, in the place I made it.

⭐⭐ The control that proves this is a DECLINE and not a suppression

Both builds driven over one captured snapshot of the live board (402 open cards + 43 gated comment threads — identical input, so drift cannot explain a difference):

	before	after
TOTAL rows	7	7
A-add	2	2
B-strip	5	3
DECLINE	0	2

⭐ The finding count is unchanged — 7 = 7 — which a suppression would not have preserved. And direction A's row text is byte-identical by md5, ⛔ not by reasoning: e7b8475022ddfdca876be1a4c635237d both sides. That is exactly the Zone 2 C proof I asked for, produced the only way it could be trusted.

Self-test 1922 → 1951 (+29), which I ran on both trees rather than accepting: ✓ check-half-states self-test: 1922 cases pass. → 1951.

Zone 2 A — SOUND but ⛔ NOT COMPLETE, and the gap is the honest half of this delivery

My hypothesised predicate — "carries any repo:* label" — declines on 2 of the 5 live strip rows. Verified independently:

card	repo:*	outcome
#12931	repo:cloud	✅ now declines
#12580	repo:hotcrm	✅ now declines
#13439	none	⚠️ still accused
#13568	none	⚠️ still accused

⚠️ ⇒ Two of the four cards the card itself said must not be stripped are not protected by the ruled predicate — and the card's own filing recorded off-repo waiters for exactly those two. Measured breadth: of 67 open cards naming a sibling-repo issue, 58 carry no repo:* label.

⛔ This is not a defect in the delivery. Zone 2 A asked precisely for this — "if the predicate under-covers, report the count; ⛔ do not silently widen" — and the dev did both halves. The surviving rows now carry the shortfall in their own text ("that absence is not evidence of an in-repo-only audience: 58 of the 67 …"), so the two uncovered cards are no longer accused without a warning attached. Combined with the patrol being report-only, nothing acts on them automatically.

Rulings on the three open questions

Q1 — widen the predicate? ⇒ A, as shipped, and ⛔ B is refused. A textual test would decline on 58 more cards, silencing the row across most of the board and trading a declared signal for a proxy — the dev's four-axis reading against it is correct and I adopt it. C — the cross-repo Blocked-by: reader — is filed as its own card, because it is the only option that answers rather than declines.
⭐ And note the dev's precision about my own ruling: Zone 1.2 said to report if direction B cannot be made honest without C. It correctly found that trigger did not fire — "declining IS honest" — so it did not file C on its own authority and left the call to me. ⛔ That is the right reading of a conditional instruction, not a missed obligation.

Q2 — narrow the predicate away from repo:objectstack? ⇒ A stands. ⭐ The dev refused to narrow because Zone 1 ruled the predicate literally and narrowing is a predicate change — "⛔ not re-litigable by me". Correct, and the cost of holding the line is exactly 0: none of the 5 live strip rows carries repo:objectstack. #13991 owns whether that label is declared or retired; the one-line narrowing is a follow-up gated on that ruling, ⛔ not on this PR.

Q3 — a summary counter for declines? ⇒ A. The declines are emitted rows carrying UNJUDGED_MARKER (which reserves them above the body's size trim) and the head already prints "N UNJUDGED row(s) in this sweep". B means touching summaryLine's anchor mechanism and its uniqueness/presence cases for an aggregate already approximated — scope growth on a row fix.

⚠️ My Zone 2 B was falsified, and my own order contained the conflict

I asserted H32 "declines rather than accuses" and told the dev to mirror it. Measured: H32 declines by returning null and discloses the shortfall in the summary line's coverage pair — a suppression plus an aggregate, ⛔ not an emitted row.

⇒ That put my Zone 2 B in direct conflict with my Zone 1 rule 1 and Zone 2 E, which required an emitted decline row. The dev followed Zone 1, which is the correct precedence, and said so. ⭐ I endorse the outcome on its merits and not merely on precedence: H32's population is seats — few, and an aggregate suffices; H14's declines are individual cards a reader must be able to find. Same posture, different mechanism, for a reason.

Gates and hygiene

19 derived (17 path-matched + 2 convention-triggered for a gate-script edit), comm -23 empty, exit codes captured by redirect-then-capture, ⛔ never through a pipe. Two are NOT MEASURED rather than red, each saying so in its own verdict text: check-partof-closing-keyword exit 2 "NOT WIRED" — ⭐ then re-run WIRED against the real PR body, exit 0, "this PR carries no Part-of/closing-keyword contradiction" — and check-test-completeness exit 3 with no saved turbo log.

⭐ Consumers of the edited script run beyond the path derivation, which cannot name them: check:pm-clause2-carriers (64 cases), check:pm-governed-merges (255 assertions), scripts/pm/ci-failure.mjs --self-test — all green. Second delivery in a row where the importer/consumer axis had to be covered by the dev rather than by the tool.

Ablation committed first, then mutated (if (seam.length > 0) → if (false && …)), proved on disk before running — injected grep 1, anchor grep 0, blob 1ed4cf13 → 159a673c — predicted RED, got "11 of 1951 case(s) failed" with both negatives inverted. Restore proved by empty git diff HEAD and the blob hash back to 1ed4cf13, ⛔ not by a trap firing. Repo-wide pnpm lint in full, exit 0.

skip-changeset present; the diff is a single scripts/** file. ⚠️ Duplicate footer on the PR body left alone for the same reason as the last PR — a PATCH downgrades the session-form link.

Governed-surface check

Diff: one file, scripts/pm/check-half-states.mjs. ⛔ No hit on docs/adr/** · .claude/** · skills/** · AGENTS.md · CLAUDE.md ⇒ this seat may arm it, once CI settles.

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Generated by Claude Code