The delivery-gate definition was incomplete from setup — the merge-gate verdict step
was missing because the gates were restated from memory rather than referenced, and the
omission propagated into every worker brief since.
Then it recurred inside the correction: the correcting message was itself a restatement
and dropped five things, including a security precondition (an unminted gate seat fails
open to the owner's admin account — the #3084 breach mechanism) and a citation to a file
that does not exist.
D-26 is the definitive case because every condition favoured success: attention maximal,
actor knew the rule best, subject was the rule itself. A rule its own enforcer cannot
follow while enforcing it is not a discipline — it is a requirement for a mechanism.
MISSION.md and KICKSTART.md now reference fleet/roles.local/merge-gate.md and
fleet/roles/validator.md and state only the gate ORDER. Every reference resolves; a
dangling pointer is worse than a restatement.
Precondition independently verified: merge-gate token is least-privilege,
pull=True push=False admin=False — structurally cannot merge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
