New section 3a records the whole path from an assistant producing something to it existing in Gitea. It has been explained conversationally to every new assistant for months and was written in no document, which is the reason it is now here. Section 0 claims this document describes how work gets done; the part it did not describe was how work actually arrives.
3a covers: nothing but the operator writes, because the assistant reads Gitea read-only and the operator is the only party with write access anywhere in the chain. Three command groups rather than one, because section 4 requires a suite result the assistant has actually seen before a commit exists. The shell-free idioms - make -C, git -C, runuser - because pct exec runs no shell. Commit messages parsed by the host shell before pct sees them, so repeated -m flags and no dollar sign, backtick or exclamation mark. Which failures are passes, because an operator who cannot tell success from failure cannot report usefully.
3a also records the amendment rule: do not ship a rewritten file to change a few passages of a large one. Ship an anchored script that validates every anchor matches exactly once and writes nothing if any does not. This commit was made that way. A rewrite regenerates the document from the assistant reading of it and a transcription error is silent - the same hazard as rewriting HANDOFF.md in place, one level down.
Section 4: the oracle check and git status are one check, not two (F-033). And the two interpreters are deliberate - verify-oracle runs python3 because make_fixtures.py imports nothing outside the standard library, test runs venv/bin/python because the suite imports mechcomp, Shapely and pytest. Neither is a mistake to be tidied into consistency.
Section 8: the reading order was missing HANDOFF.md for three weeks while HANDOFF section 0 carried a different order missing ENVIRONMENT.md. Two lists, neither complete, each looking authoritative. Both now name DIVERGENCES.md. The authority ladder gains the rule underneath it: a document that describes something yields to the thing it describes, a document that prescribes something does not. That dissolves the apparent contradiction with deploy/README.md, which is correct to claim the repository wins for the files it owns.
Section 8 also qualifies promote-the-deviation. It applies to facts about a host, not to a requirement the code has not met. A REQ is never lowered to match what was built; the gap is recorded in DIVERGENCES.md and the correction is owed by the code. A specification that agrees with whatever exists specifies nothing.
Section 10 described 18 AUG: repository at its seed commit, port not started, 3 passed and 236 skipped. It now states that it no longer records a commit, a version or a test count, because git rev-parse, git describe and make test report those and every attempt to hold them current in prose went stale.
Suite 643 passed, oracle intact at 113 accepted and 10 rejected. Documentation only.
TheRON
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