The operating skill delegates facts (stage status, IPs) to the repo by design, so
Stage-2-merged/D-120/etc. need no skill edit. But two things are the skill's own
domain and were missing:

- The new INVARIANT: branch-per-stage + MERGE AT STAGE CLOSE (merge commit,
  operator-gated, retire the branch, next stage off post-merge main). Added to the
  VR1 deploy loop as part of a stage's definition-of-done. Precedent: Stage 2 -> PR #1.
- A DOCFIX-195 pointer on the IPAM routing row: during VR1 the WORKING apex is
  office1-netbox (netbox.baldurkeep.com is a read-only v1 reference, write-back
  deferred). This exact ambiguity cost time early this session.

repo-lint 0 fail (L8 guide<->skill coupling pins clientdocs, not this skill -- unaffected).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015WgVrZE2ryY9aXP7JiBuwj