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The entrance card (pipeline_status.md) is the framework's hottest read — /lfe-boot, every re-orientation, any platform statusline — yet it was the one session-mutated file with no retention rule: the Archivist is told to update it at every close, but nothing ever rolls off, so an adopter's card slowly decays into an unbounded mission log (observed downstream at ~96,000 characters on a private production adopter before the contract landed there).
What's new
📇 A Retention Policy row for the entrance card (GOVERNANCE.md) — the card holds current state only: the current mission in the table cells plus at most 3 one-line pointers under ## 📜 Recent Missions; the cold home is the CHANGELOG lane the Archivist's own close step already writes (no new archive file); budget ≤ 12,000 chars hard / > 10,000 advisory, counted after CRLF normalization (framework defaults — project-tunable via the existing override idiom).
✂️ Archivist Hard Rule 8 + verify-then-trim (lfe-archivist SKILL, Step 6) — deletion gets a sanctioned, provable moment at every mission close: verify the CHANGELOG already holds the closing mission's narrative (append it FIRST if missing — trim only history the CHANGELOG already holds), write the new current-state cells, demote the prior mission to one pointer line, cap pointers at 3, confirm the budget.
🗂 Template card conformance — the Day-0 card ships with the contract stamp and an empty 📜 Recent Missions section; the welcome flow and blank-canvas experience are unchanged, and the template polices its own budget (3.5k of 12k).
📖 RETENTION_RUNBOOK — the card's row in the retention-files table, a step-by-step per-file procedure, and a new hard "what not to do": never trim card history the CHANGELOG lane does not already hold.
🔒 Atomic-Docs exemption becomes a closed list — README.md and LLM_AGENT_GUIDE.md only; additions require an ADR; the entrance card is explicitly not exempt.
Prose here, teeth downstream
Per the Discipline Gates doctrine, the agnostic core states this contract as a discipline; platform distributions mechanize it. Claude-LFE ships the same contract with a hard commit-time validator, a boot-time over-budget banner, and a write-time warn lane — see its v1.2.0, "The entrance card learns to forget."
Under the hood
Four files, +27/−2 — pure prose; adopter templates untouched (architecture-decisions.md remains your empty ledger, CONTEXT.md yours to fill). The two replaced lines are the old open-class Atomic-Docs exemption and the Cold-Tier-Pointer mandate line (which now carves out the card, whose cold-tier routing is the Recent-Missions header itself).