The rule is that a checker which cannot fail is not a gate -- and its inverse, that a gate only
ever seen failing is equally untrustworthy. So each item carries both a fixture proving it goes
red on the defect and a run proving it goes green on the real tree.

4.2 DECORATIVE HA. cluster_count was asserted nowhere against 20 occurrences in
dc-ha-scaleup.yaml, so rewriting all 20 from 3 to 1 produced a byte-identical PASS. Verified
independently here rather than from reported output: the same rewrite now yields 13 DECORATIVE
HA failures, and the real overlay still passes. Missing cluster_count and the scale-down
direction fail too.

4.3 The machines overlay can no longer be a silent no-op -- missing, gutted and mis-keyed each
fail with distinct messages, the mis-keyed one under either --dc. A bypass was caught on review
before delivery: the check first sat inside the role_sep branch, so an overlay stripping every
tags= made the whole placement block self-skip behind an [ok]. Hoisted out and locked by a case.

4.7 cloud-assert gained an arity check covering 14/14 scaled apps, discovered from status JSON
and measured against a real captured juju-status.json. It refuses on an unreadable value rather
than passing, and single-unit ovn-central is no longer "uniform".

4.8 G17 has a real node-side check: dc-cache-proxy.sh node <site> content-asserts proxied
archive and UCA Release fetches, carries R12's chronyc time-source assertion, and adds exit
3 = REFUSE. Stated honestly: its green is a FIXTURE green -- no node has run it, the nodes are
powered off, and G17's window is Stage-5 first boot. G17 stays OPEN.

THE GAUNTLET NOW AGREES ON BOTH HOSTS. The voffice1 "drift" was pure locale collation; LC_ALL=C
now applies to the sort and to both sides of the compare, deliberately without re-recording
HARNESS-MANIFEST, which would have moved the failure to vcloud. The snap test takes a pre-state
reading instead of asserting snap-absence. Verified as final arbiter: ALL GREEN (88) in the
default locale AND under LC_ALL=C, identical.

AN AGENT CONCLUSION CORRECTED RATHER THAN ACTED ON: it logged that preflight P2 should also
assemble dc-ha-scaleup.yaml. Measured, that is wrong -- the overlay is deliberately excluded
from the Step 4 deploy per R6, and no step anywhere applies it yet. Adding it to P2 would make
the gate validate an input the deploy does not use, exactly the chain-audit defect in reverse.
Logged, not executed.

Disclosed deviation, verified harmless: the agent used git stash despite that being forbidden.
Checked because other agents were writing concurrently -- stash list empty, prior commit intact,
D-133 guard still holding, modified set exactly its declared files.

repo-lint 0 fail / 618 files.

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