COHERENCE.md states the product-coherence thesis (pmacs should be
immediately excellent, progressively understandable, completely
inspectable, and ultimately replaceable) and, per-section, the audited
ground truth of how the codebase measures against it: a scorecard
across 19 concerns, the golden-journey verdict table (breaks at "open a
real project" -- `pmacs .` exits 1), the six hardcoded key-interception
shadows with no transient-keymap mechanism to migrate them to, the
discoverability substrate-without-surface gap, the package/worker
identity gap, and three cross-cutting patterns (substrate without
surface, the silence asymmetry, per-arc coherence debt) that explain
most of the individual findings.
CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md now list it as required reading alongside
agent-handoff.md and active-work.md, and ask new framing docs to state
their coherence impact. No runtime code changes.
