Two operator decisions, both taking the recommendation.

GATE SHAPE: local-only blocking, remote operator-run. preflight P5 now runs
creds-matrix.py --tier2 -- tier 1 STATIC plus tier 2 LOCAL, hermetic (no ssh,
no sudo). It already catches SEC-021's three dc0 on-disk absences without
leaving the jumphost. The remote half stays an operator-run check at
DC-standup close and stage close.

Wiring --remote --privileged into the deploy gate would let a host outage, a
NOPASSWD change, or a MAAS snap refresh turn the gate red for reasons that
are not about credentials, and a gate that fails environmentally is one
people learn to bypass. The repo already made this call once
(run-tests-all.sh:7-8, "different cadence"), and preflight already shows the
failure mode: P4 reads "MAAS unreachable" because it runs on vcloud while
MAAS lives on the headend.

STAGE INPUT: --pending-stage replaced by creds-manifests/stages-reached, a
machine-readable projection of CURRENT-STATE, coupled by new repo-lint L12
(the L10 pattern). A hand-typed gate parameter can be widened silently, and
GA-R1 puts status in CURRENT-STATE alone. A drifted projection would make the
gate defer REAL absences -- a false green.

Exhaustive both ways: an unclassified mint-stage is a hard FAIL, a
classified-but-unused one is a stale-declaration FAIL. That caught `stage4`
immediately -- Stage 4 is open and executing but mints no credential.

Self-inflicted break caught by the existing harness: I first renamed L10's
message to "L10/L12", breaking five cases that grep the established L10 id.
Reverted -- new rules get their own message id, they do not rebrand old ones.

Harnesses: creds-matrix 52 -> 56, repo-lint 45 -> 47, preflight 10.
Gauntlet ALL GREEN (80), repo-lint 0-fail, baseline unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HvCyrwvYTTcDYnRErfMsNf