The gate does not re-decide anything. Phase 2a already decides, fail-closed and
against contract-pinned vectors; this supplies real evidence to that decision and
commits only if three independent gates agree: the global switch is on, the
backend has observed evidence that it reaches a quiescent state, and the job
itself opted in. Default is off.
The backend allowlist is evidence-based rather than optimistic. Inferring
"finished" from stillness requires stillness to have been observed, and only
three of six backends have that. An operator may narrow the list; a name that
was never observed is dropped rather than trusted, so it cannot be widened by
configuration.
Everything else holds. An unreadable manifest, a report rewritten after
finalization, missing evidence for a declared side effect, a policy that raises:
all refuse. "Could not decide" is never "done". A late explicit terminal wins,
because the boundary refuses the inferred one -- that is the boundary working,
not an error in the gate.
Notification intent is committed in the same atomic write as the state, so a
crash between committing and publishing leaves a record that still says the
world has not been told. Recovery re-sends; duplicates are already dropped by
sequence. A failed send deliberately leaves the intent pending, because an
unsent notification that looks sent is worse than one that is retried.
Two fixes this surfaced. Settling used a request that terminal records refuse,
which made an owed notification impossible to ever settle; settling is now a
status-free bookkeeping request, valid in any state. And the phase 2a guard
against shell references was matching hashlib.sha256 as a substring, so it now
requires a word boundary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UrDNJkHmm18uu7n7JwV5Qd
The agent declares that its work is finished; the reader re-derives the hash
from the file rather than trusting the number in the declaration. A manifest the
watcher wrote itself would attest only that the watcher saw a stable file, which
is the self-certifying evidence shape rejected earlier in this issue.
Finalizing promotes a staged report by atomic rename before writing the
manifest, so a reader cannot observe a half-written report as final. Rewriting
the report afterwards invalidates the declaration immediately, because the
recomputed hash no longer matches -- a new body needs a new finalization.
A job that declared side effects must show evidence for every one of them.
Partial evidence is treated as none: the work is not known to be complete.
publish_event gains --finalize-report, --side-effect and --attempt-id, and does
the finalization before publishing. A `completed` event whose report is still
being written would invite exactly the partial adoption the contract forbids, so
a failure there fails the publish.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UrDNJkHmm18uu7n7JwV5Qd
Pins what the system refuses to do today, so nothing added later can weaken it
quietly. X-01 records the property the whole phase leans on: a job with no
completion manifest is already held, which is why an agent that declares nothing
stays on the explicit path without a single new branch.
X-03 and X-04 record the layering decision and its evidence. The engine compares
an expected attempt against a record field that does not exist, falling back to
the loop-iteration counter, which means something else. So auto-completion does
not use that guard; the attempt check stays where attempt identity actually
lives, comparing observed evidence against the dispatch record. X-03 will fail
if a record ever starts carrying an attempt id, which is the moment to revisit
the decision.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UrDNJkHmm18uu7n7JwV5Qd
GodopuandClaude Opus 5