The operator's slack knob was interpolated raw into $((...)) under set -u:
'300s'/'5m' -> 'value too great', 'abc' -> 'unbound variable' — all FATAL to
the poll, falsifying the PR's own 'poll never fails' invariant, and a negative
value silently inverted the guard into deny-all. Now resolved once into a
local, validated ^[0-9]{1,9}$, loud fallback to 300 on mismatch. New D13
group: '300s'/'abc'/negative all fall back and KEEP valid metadata; a valid
tightened knob (0) still rejects a future ts. Manifest states the skew
guarantee explicitly: a surviving snapshot_ts is attested only to within SLACK
seconds of the DETECTOR's clock — bounded negative age at render is possible;
treat age<=0 as effectively-current, never proof of freshness.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NsKce8iZuSuRnu3gVMCBKB
Adapter emits snapshot sha/ts out-of-band on fd 3 so a changing value never enters the delta-gate hash. Detector validates advisorily (sha regex, epoch sanity before arithmetic, future-skew slack); malformed metadata is dropped loudly and never gates the wake. Digest renders snapshot_sha/snapshot_ts plus a git-show re-verify hint. Adapters that never write fd 3 are byte-identical.
Reviewed-by: Mos (design, independent)
Reviewed-by: mos-dt (artifact, hardening §2)
Co-authored-by: mos-dt-0 <[email protected]>
jason.woltjeandMos