Reproduced first, in isolation with the exact note() from preflight.sh:27 --
sub-gate exits 127 (command not found), 126 (not executable), 130 (interrupted)
and 3 (undefined) ALL left "PREFLIGHT: PASS -- clear to add-model / deploy".
This is the gate that authorises the deploy.

rc=2 handled PER GATE rather than blanket-remapped, because R15's stated
rationale is only partly right on measurement: repo-lint and pre-flight-checks
both DOCUMENT rc2 as a legitimate warning, while provider-bundle-check and
creds-matrix use it only for could-not-evaluate. A blanket 2->FAIL would have
turned the standing L1 legacy-ASCII warn into a deploy blocker. channel_assert
uses 2 for BOTH meanings, so it is ambiguous in the checker and kept WARN; its
missing-PyYAML root cause is caught by P2 anyway, which shares it and is strict.
Flagged rather than guessed -- fixing that belongs in channel_assert.py.

Harness 16/16 (was 10): T11-T13 lock the fail-open cases, T14/T15 lock
could-not-evaluate -> FAIL, and T16 locks the non-over-correction (P1 rc=2 stays
WARN). Gauntlet ALL GREEN (82). Real-repo preflight still exits 1 for the same
known reasons with no new failure classes fired.

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