The handoff was comprehensive as a document and unreachable as a
bootstrap. An agent starting cold on a new machine reads CLAUDE.md
automatically; it would have to be told to open spec/HANDOFF_2026-08-07.md,
and the rules this work actually ran on lived only in conversation and
in an agent memory directory that git does not carry.
So the method is now a tracked file and the handoff is the state it
assumes. CLAUDE.md carries what an agent must not learn by discovering
it: contracts are frozen after ratification and defects are reported
rather than patched in place; the touch table is the staging allowlist,
with the two files that keep escaping it named; mutation-first, and a
compile error is not a test failure; verify subagent claims by re-running,
because agents here have misattributed failures and guarded the wrong
path; never git add -A, never reset/checkout/stash against a tree another
session may share; never cargo fmt --all, since it crosses into spikes/
through path dependencies; xelatex not pdflatex; the green baseline; and
the live no-canonical-base constraint that makes correct refusals look
like bugs until P13-S27 lands.
The handoff gains §0a pointing at it, and saying plainly what an agent
does not inherit — the memory directory and the conversation — so a thin
inheritance is stated rather than papered over.
The editor/T4 track's half of these rules is recorded as observed from
its contracts; that session should review it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QjsEnYhm1gPpf6ii2iFxFV
Levi Neuwirth
49b512b314