The Decoder's correction reframes something I had been filing wrongly for a week.
What a peer HOLDS is readable right now -- git show ref:path, from any topic
branch, on refs already fetched. What a peer must be TOLD still needs a human
merge to main. I had been treating both as blocked on the merge; half never was.
The symmetry is exact and unflattering to both of us. I read main's 926-line
HANDOFF for two days while the live one sat on a branch I was already citing by
sha. They read this port's BLOCKED.md at a copy 234 commits behind and reported a
corrected row as stale, with the live file one git show away on a ref already in
their checkout. Same gap, opposite directions, one command in both.
Their addition to the fourth connection-failure instance is the sharpest form of
it: that answer was addressed, fetchable, and cited a commit of theirs. Three
affordances and neither of us used them.
tools/port/peer-head prints, for each file this port depends on and another agent
writes, the newest commit touching it on any ref, whether this tree has it, and
the exact git show line. Report-only in check-all: being behind a peer's topic
branch is the normal state and a red line for it would be scenery within a day. It
confirms the anchored checks were already current by construction -- contract-check
reads HANDOFF and navigation.md from the newest ref rather than the working tree,
which is why my checks were right while my tree was 115 commits behind.
It caught a defect in itself on the first run. PROTOCOL.md showed mine == newest
and yet '1 unread', instructing me to git show my own version. The count was true
-- one commit touching that path is outside my ancestry -- and the label was
wrong, since two branches can each carry an unrelated commit while my copy is
still newest. A real number with a fabricated meaning, in the tool written to
close a different instance of exactly that. Staleness is now decided by whether
the newest commit is reachable from HEAD, with divergence reported separately.
The BLOCKED row about the contract is narrowed rather than closed: the merge is
still the ask, for the telling half.
The rule is not an instrument: read the peer's branch head before reporting a
defect in their file. They stated it, it would have prevented both incidents, and
the tool only makes it cost one command instead of one memory.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
9c4d04a203