mathias
40405cd95a
"That list only shrinks" was asserted in the commit message, the script header, the pending file's own header, the test header, and the issue comment. It was enforced nowhere. A traceability probe falsified it in one run: extract the commit to a temp tree, add a skill with no `## Escalation` section, append its name to bin/escalation-pending.txt — gate returns 0. The list could grow silently and forever. "Self-cleaning" was true; "only shrinks" was a social convention wearing a mechanism's clothes, and this repo has spent a day on what those cost. The gate now diffs the pending list against the version committed at HEAD and fails on any added entry, naming it. Where the comparison is impossible — not a git checkout — it says so rather than passing silently, because a ratchet that cannot be verified must not look like one that was. Four new cases: unchanged list, shrinking list, growing list, and the unverifiable case. Refs #37 Bump-Type: patch