The two instances already in "Checks that were kind once" were correct
when written and decayed. The third was wrong on its first commit, and it
arrived by a different route: the check and the tree's failure to pass it
land in the same change, so the softening writes itself.
Concretely — the Clippy step had never run (no component in the
toolchain), and the tree is not clippy-clean, so fixing the step and
turning it red are the same commit. The first draft paired the fix with
`continue-on-error: true` and a comment promising removal once the debt
was paid: an expiry date nobody set, in the shape #12's closing line had
already ruled out for rustfmt. Reverted on reading it.
Adds the distinction, a table separating decay from dirty authorship, and
an earlier tell than the mechanical test:
If you are writing the softening in the same commit as the check,
the thing you want is an issue, not a flag.
The mechanical test is unchanged and still correct; this only catches the
same failure sooner, at the keyboard rather than at review.
Refs #12, #13
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01McNbzUeq1KRBWs4G6X2YVj