Part 1 of making UPG-100 a reusable pattern (Driver via repo; dx-shepherd UPGPAT). Any project list —
7000 / 4700 / 3000 / 2000 / 700 — will be zoned by an agent who did not write this code. Zoning is human
judgement (geography first, balanced with language), so a gate cannot decide whether a zoning is GOOD. It
can decide whether it still matches what the author SAID, which turns "did I zone this right?" from a
browser question into an exit code.
★ EVERY OBVIOUS RULE I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN FAILED THE REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION. Measured against the live
28 zones and 2,107 records BEFORE writing the assertions, which is the only reason they are right:
"every group in exactly one zone" → 112 groups are in two. 110 are the DEAF BLOC, and that is
design-approved (legend-tree.js:151, slice 08): an affinity bloc's
members also live in a geographic zone. So the rule is "at most one
GEOGRAPHIC zone", with bloc zones declared as a second partition.
"no group is unzoned" → 11 are, all JPN/CHN/MNG, plausibly deliberate. A gate cannot tell a
deliberate exclusion from a silent drop; only a declaration can.
"no two zones overlap" → 3 non-bloc overlaps exist, because "Scattered / Diaspora"
(country_codes AND,CCK,GUF,USA) overlaps the regions it scatters
across.
A gate that fails on the only correct example of the thing it checks teaches people to disable it.
⚠ AND THE GATE FOUND A THIRD OVERLAP MY OWN HAND ANALYSIS HAD MISSED: deaf-cocos-islanders, in both
oceania-indonesia and uncovered-scatter. I had filtered out every A017 group as "the design-approved deaf
double-count" — but its TWO GEOGRAPHIC claims (CCK is in both zones' country lists) are a SEPARATE fact
from its bloc membership. Conflating them is exactly what A2's bloc/geographic split exists to prevent,
and the gate was right where I was wrong. Best argument for it existing.
THE FIVE ASSERTIONS, and two would have caught this cycle's real defects before a browser did:
A1 no zone resolves to zero groups ← `deaf` + the 5 wagf zones were in exactly this state, found
only by generating all 28 and reading the log
A2 at most one GEOGRAPHIC zone/group ← blocs declared; found the overlap above
A3 orphan set EQUALS the declared set ← and a RESOLVED orphan fails too, deliberately: leaving a
now-zoned group listed means the next real drop passes
silently. An unmaintained declaration stops being evidence.
A4 every selector type is supported ← the evaluator THROWS on an unknown type, at render time, on one
zone's page; better as a build-time failure on the whole set
A5 no zone over the declared budget ← a wildly oversized zone is usually a selector matching too much
DECLARATIONS pre-filled with today's actuals and marked PENDING DRIVER, per UPGPAT: the 11 orphans and
the 3 overlaps are recorded so the gate is green on arrival and any CHANGE fails. Both are in
DRIVER-DECISIONS-DIGEST and neither membership was touched.
VERIFIED: --self-test PASSes 12 cases, each assertion firing on a violation AND staying quiet on the
declared exception (including the negative control that A2's bloc exemption is doing the work). Poison
test on REAL data: removing ainu-japan from the declaration makes A3 fail with that slug, so a green run
is meaningful rather than vacuous.
⚠ AND A package.json MISTAKE WORTH RECORDING. My first insertion put all three keys into the //scripts
DOC block, because re.finditer over the whole file matched check:zone-census there (//scripts comes later
in the file) — producing duplicate keys that json.load silently resolved last-wins, so the script COUNT
WENT DOWN and `npm run check:zoning-declared` reported "Missing script". Fixed by scoping each insertion
to its own block span. The diff is now exactly 3 added lines and reorders nothing: an earlier attempt that
re-serialised the sorted object moved gospel's check:embed-contract and check:engine-contract, which is
not mine to reshuffle in a shared file.
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