Implements #5's decision. The hard part was #37's, not #5's: which skills need an escalation rule? A hardcoded list rots, sniffing the prose for "does this write anything" is unfalsifiable, and a frontmatter flag is the option #5 rejected wearing a hat. So there is no acting set. Every skill answers the question, and a read-only one answers it in a line. That turns an absence into a claim someone can disagree with, which is the whole point — "this skill never hands back" is a design decision worth stating, and today it was indistinguishable from nobody having thought about it. Eleven written here, all advisory or read-only, where the honest answer is short and the value is in being specific rather than generic. `cognitive-load` stops when the metric disagrees with the people reading the code, because that is evidence about the metric. `test-design` stops when the tests are fine and the design under test is what makes them awkward. `code-review` stops when the diff is big enough that a review would be a skim, and says so rather than producing confident coverage of a fraction. The remaining thirty are the acting set — writes, dispatches, credentials, releases — and each needs a rule someone thought about rather than a rote paragraph, so they sit in bin/escalation-pending.txt. That list only shrinks, and it is self-cleaning: a listed skill that HAS a section fails the gate, so an exemption cannot outlive its reason. Mutation-verified both ways. Six test cases including the stale-entry case, because an exemption for a skill that no longer exists is how a gate quietly stops covering something. Refs #37, closes the mechanism half Bump-Type: minor