rev-974 blocked RM-03: pr-merge.sh still ships --skip-queue-guard at five sites
including a worked example. It proved this rather than reading it — stubbed the guard to
exit 99, ran a real fixture merge with the flag, and observed the guard never called,
provider payload created, 'merged successfully', exit 0.
Disqualifying because RM-03 repairs a mandatory gate that has never been able to fail;
shipping that repair with a documented bypass means the gate merely requires one flag
instead of zero, and every merge-side CANNOT_ASSERT/HOLD semantic is skipped. L0 bars
equivalent skip switches, and the merge-gate role doc names this exact hazard about
force_merge — adjacent to the field you came to edit, at the moment you are most
motivated to reach for it.
Generalizable: repairing a gate is incomplete while any supported path skips it. The
failure changes from 'cannot block' to 'can be told not to' — the same outcome one
keystroke later. Removing the bypass is part of the repair.
Everything else passed independently, including the 160 KiB stdin transport where #1023
regressed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
