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
GodopuandClaude Opus 5
803ba43884