**The absorption was incomplete, and the two holes were Stage 0's.**
`docs/agent-handoff.md` §6 still called Stage 0 "READY FOR PR (not yet
opened)" and the ledger's Stage 0 lane still handed out branch-recovery
instructions and called itself pre-PR --- for work that merged as #236.
A merged lane that still says "checkout the branch" sends a reader to a
tip that no longer moves. Both rewritten; the recovery lines are removed
rather than updated, because there is nothing left to recover.
**A LANE CANNOT REMOVE ITSELF AT MERGE, and saying so was wrong in a way
that would have shipped.** GitHub merges the tree as it stands, so
"removed at merge" would have landed the words *PR #238 OPEN* on `main`
--- a lane advertising an open PR that closed in the same commit. It
stays while the PR is under review, because an open PR without a lane is
the #171 defect, and **a final pre-merge commit on this branch takes it
out**. That obligation is now written into the lane itself.
**Q#GA5 was recorded backwards.** The P2 row said P2 was "gated by the
GUI arc reaching Stage 4b". The ruling is the reverse: **P2 is blocked
by nothing and may start now**; when the arc reaches Stage 4b, P2 must
already have started, and **no later GUI stage begins** until it has an
approved framing and an opened lane. The gate is on STARTING P2, not on
finishing it, and it binds the GUI arc rather than P2. Corrected in both
the P2 row and the GUI row, which had inherited the same inversion.
**`9a26ac8` was the previous last-EXERCISED anchor, not the previous
declared FLOOR** --- that was `e67ad07`, and the two had drifted apart.
Checking the exercised anchor in the floor's place verifies the wrong
claim, so the check is re-run and re-stated against `e67ad07` and
`d038f71`; `9a26ac8` is retained only under its own correct label.
**1-pre did not ADD the idle-Escape local quit.** The docs said "no
behaviour change" and then called the Escape quit a "1-pre change" and
"the one thing 1-pre added" --- which contradict each other and the
diff. It is **pre-existing behaviour that 1-pre preserved and isolated**
behind an `EventOutcome` return; **1a removes it**. Fixed in both files.
**§1a called the board current at `d038f71` while most of it dates from
2026-08-01**, and P5 still described #217 as a held PR although it had
merged. The board is now labelled **MIXED-ANCHOR and explicitly not
current as a whole**, with the drift named as evidence and a pointer to
`git log --first-parent`; the P5 row is corrected. Refreshing the rest
is a separate pass, deliberately not folded into a GUI absorption.
**The exact-head accounting was wrong --- one commit and 34 lines, when
it was two and 38 --- and the fix is to stop counting.** A count goes
stale on the very next commit, including the one carrying the fix, which
is how it broke in the first place. Both the lane and the PR body now
state the standing property instead: every commit after the gated tree
is markdown-only, checkable with `git diff --name-only 502308d..HEAD`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016bqGA6s9tTUFzYpbeW3tai
Levi Neuwirth
6d6942e068