# Can the "stale justification in a tool" class be caught by an instrument?
# 2026-08-31. ❌ MY ATTEMPT FAILED. Recorded as a negative, not as agreement.
#
# THE CLASS: sylpheed-port has now found FOUR retractions that never reached their
# own source, and I found one -- jp_title_session.sh justifying its existence with
# "a free-running clock lands somewhere else on a fresh boot", which I had refuted
# myself the day before. Their sharpest point is that a stale JUSTIFICATION is
# worse than a stale NUMBER: it degrades the argument it supports, so the
# reasoning beneath it reads as broken.
#
# A register cannot catch the general case -- it holds only claims already
# RETRACTED, so it catches recurrence, not error. Both agents said so. I tried to
# build something that does not need the claim retracted.
#
# ATTEMPT 1: flag a tool whose cited docs/ page is NEWER than the tool.
#   -> 126 candidates. Useless: pages are appended to constantly for unrelated
#      reasons, so "newer" carries no signal at all.
#
# ATTEMPT 2 (narrowed, and the narrowing was checked rather than assumed): flag a
# tool whose cited page later received a commit whose SUBJECT marks a correction
# (correct / withdraw / retract / refute / supersede / stale / wrong).
#   -> 43 candidates. Better signal, still too many to hand-audit.
#
# ❌ SAMPLED THREE, ALL FALSE POSITIVES:
#   ob_flag.py     cites mission-objective-counter.md for "the counter's ADDRESS";
#                  the correction refuted a PREDICTION about page offset 0x9668,
#                  which the tool never asserts.
#   ssb_watch.py   cites script-runtime-probe.md; the correction concerns a polled
#                  phase-1 condition the docstring does not mention.
#   timer_probe.py cites mission-arrival-watch.md; its docstring is about scanning
#                  for a linearly-increasing counter, untouched by the correction.
#
# => THE PROXY FAILS FOR A STRUCTURAL REASON: a tool cites a page for ONE fact,
#    and the page gets corrected about ANOTHER. Co-citation is not co-reference.
#    Publishing 43 candidates with an unmeasured and apparently low true-positive
#    rate would be the audit-that-invents-defects failure, so it is not published.
#
# ⚠️ REACH: 3 of 43 sampled. The rate is not established, only shown to be low
# enough that the report is not worth reading. A better instrument might exist; I
# do not have one, and two attempts failed in different ways.
#
# 📌 WHAT ACTUALLY FOUND THE FIVE REAL INSTANCES: a person reading a sentence for
# its own sake -- them reading mine, me reading theirs, each of us reading our own
# source after being prompted. The registers now catch RECURRENCES of what has
# been retracted. That is worth having and is not the same thing.
