This gate keeps the AGGREGATE honest — a prose status makes every open-count wrong
while each card still READS correctly, so the error hides in the total. That matters
to this loop directly: every tick starts by reading status counts to pick a card.
MEASURED across 633 cards: EIGHT distinct status values are in use and EVERY ONE IS
A SINGLE WORD. No prose remains anywhere in the field — which is exactly what the
original 130-card migration achieved. The nine cards this gate was failing carried
legitimate TERMINAL states the enum simply predated: superseded (5), deferred (2),
decided, verified-already-true.
★ REWRITING THEM TO "done" WOULD HAVE DESTROYED REAL DISTINCTIONS to satisfy a list.
A SUPERSEDED card was replaced by another; a DEFERRED one was consciously postponed;
neither was finished. Losing that information to make a checker green is the
opposite of what this gate is for.
OPEN vs CLOSED is the property that matters, and all four additions are CLOSED:
open = todo + doing + in-progress (66), closed = done + these four (507),
blocked (60).
MUTATION-TESTED BOTH WAYS, so widening did not weaken it: a prose status
("done — reconciled against main, see notes") still FAILS by name — the original
defect — AND an unagreed one-word status ("wontfix") ALSO fails, so the set stays
CLOSED rather than becoming "any single word".
Wired into gates:post (32 -> 33) after confirming it reads only backlog JSON. The
doc that quotes gates:post is re-transcribed in the same commit.
Build: 7/7 pre, 23/23 bundles, 33/33 post, exit 0.
Cards were being written with explanatory statuses -- "done — reconciled: …",
"blocked — Steps 1+3 DONE and re-verified…", "ready". The prose is valuable
and several of those strings carry measurements, but it made status
unqueryable: every count used status !== 'done', which is FALSE for
"done — reconciled: …", so finished cards kept counting as open.
Measured across the three phase backlogs: 130 of 395 cards carried a prose
status and 71 of those were already done. Reported open was 176 against a real
105. The P0 figure quoted every tick was 21; it was 14.
That is worse than an off-by-N because a backlog is a decision instrument. It
answers "what is left" and "is the rest human-gated", and inflating the open
count makes a drained board look stalled, which pushes toward manufacturing
work instead of holding honestly. The error also hides: every card reads
correctly to a human, because the prose says exactly what is true. Only the
aggregate is wrong.
Migration preserved every explanation in fields.status_detail -- 130 of 130,
none lost -- and normalised status to the enum. Six cards whose head-word was
not in the map were left alone and resolved by hand against reality rather than
guessed, since a wrong normalisation hides a card instead of counting it.
The gate does not require status_detail. Most cards need no explanation and
demanding one turns a real check into paperwork satisfied with filler.
Negative-tested: restoring one prose status fails by name and prints it.
