v1.40.0

The instrument built to measure long-session delegation drift went blind in exactly the sessions
it exists to measure. skill-mandate.sh's 2-strike latch — [ "$cnt" -ge 2 ] && exit 0, the
guard that stops a mandate the model cannot satisfy from trapping a session — sat above both the
checkpoint counter and the delegation logger. Once a session accumulated two mandate strikes every
later Stop exited before logging, permanently. Long, multi-directory sessions are the ones that
latch, and long, multi-directory sessions are the entire population tests/delegation-drift.sh
was built to describe, so the log was not merely sparse: it was filtered against its own subject.
Proven by a synthetic 3-Stop drive rather than inferred from an empty file — Stop 1 gives cnt=1,
ckpt=1, one row; Stop 2 gives cnt=2, ckpt=2, two rows; Stop 3 latches and leaves both frozen.
The checkpoint counter moved above the latch, and a latched Stop now emits
{latched:true, dir_count:null, ...} before exiting; the full-evaluation row carries
latched:false. Both paths share one _delegation_log_row(), so there is one rotation policy
instead of two copies to drift apart. Blocking behaviour is untouched. Check 40 now drives the
real hook through a synthetic multi-Stop session and asserts both directions, so this cannot
regress silently again. (MEESEEKS M-4; check 40 and row 40, BIRDPERSON B-3.)

Logging the full counts on a latched Stop was proposed and rejected on measurement, not taste.
The full evaluation path costs ~116ms on a one-line synthetic, which reads as affordable; on this
machine's real transcripts it is 1438ms mean / 1536ms p95 at 17.5MB, and 2009ms / 2114ms at
39.1MB, because the mandate pipeline scans the transcript five-plus separate times. Sampling one
latched Stop in ten would still stall the end of a long session by 1.4-2.1 seconds, on precisely
the population this latch exists to protect. The reasoning and the bar for revisiting it — a
measured p99 under 200ms against this file's own real transcripts, not another synthetic — are
recorded at the latch.

Both drift instruments counted subagent sub-transcripts as independent sessions. 965 of 3292
files under ~/.claude/projects are per-subagent leaves nested inside a parent session, and an
unbounded find admitted each as a top-level session at equal weight. Live, not theoretical: 15
of 51 replayed sessions were leaves of two parents, 13 of them from one. A session that fans out
that fanned out to thirteen leaves counted as fourteen. For delegation-drift.sh the exclusion is outright — a leaf's turn
1 is not the parent's turn 1, so it has no position in the lifetime being measured, and the parent
transcript already records the Task/Agent call that spawned it, so counting the leaf counts
one delegation twice. For compaction-effect.py the reasoning is different and is written down as
different: a compaction inside a subagent is a real event, excluded from the primary for pooling
independence rather than validity, and the excluded count now prints on its own line so a zero is
stated instead of assumed. Neither instrument's current numbers moved — contributing_sessions
held at 3 because the leaves were already failing the single-checkpoint filter, and all 8 compact
boundaries were independently confirmed top-level. The defect had not yet reached a printed
number. It would have. (GLOOTIE G-5.)

tests/compaction-effect.sh crossed from NOT EVALUATED to a result: no signal. is_error
across 3 qualifying auto boundaries reads 1/45 pre against 0/45 post (ratio 0.00x), and across 6
manual boundaries 5/90 against 7/90 (ratio 1.40x), both under a 1.5x threshold. autoCompactWindow
at 300k neither helps nor hurts the error rate at the sample available on this machine. The corpus
that unblocked it was boundary count and pooled calls, not session count. delegation-drift.sh
remains honestly NOT EVALUATED at 2 and 3 eligible windows against a floor of 8, and its secondary
block now carries the contributing-session count and no-verdict qualifier on the rate lines
themselves rather than in a header a reader can skim past. (GLOOTIE G-5.)

Added tests/plugin-manifests.sh, the by-hand authenticated-machine harness for the one lane
tests/container-matrix.sh structurally cannot measure, because a throwaway container never
installs claude. Eight checks, both positive controls biting: a validator that stops
discriminating aborts the run at rc=2 rather than reporting its silence as health, and neutered
ok/bad helpers trip the ran == 0 floor. It covers what check 19 never did — cross-referencing
claude plugin details's live component inventory against disk, every skill, command and agent
entry matched, plus SKILL.md presence and hooks.json script resolution. A skill directory with broken
frontmatter that the loader silently drops passes claude plugin validate and fails here. Also
disproved a standing assumption while building it: plugin validate and plugin details are
static and local, answering correctly under an empty unauthenticated config dir. (BETH C-3.)

Pre-registered the principle-build-the-lever investigation at
tests/evals/build-the-lever/PREREGISTRATION.md, with thresholds written before any run: confirm
at k>=8/10, falsify at k<=2/10, 3-7 reported as nothing else, whole run void if the control drops
below 7/10. Stage 0 spent 3 calls to establish that the skill description reaches the model
verbatim at MODEL=sonnet — byte-identical, 171/171 — killing the worry that
skillListingBudgetFraction was truncating the listing on the model the suite actually pins, and
establishing that the six dead hypotheses were tested against text the model really saw. Two
findings about the harness came out of the discarded probes. ToolSearch is absent from
auto-trigger.sh's --disallowedTools and this build has a deferred-tool registry: two turns
went to tool discovery returning No matching deferred tools found, which is the entire budget of
a case at the suite default of 3. That is not evidence any case has lost turns; it is evidence
nobody has looked. And Skill must never be denied in any harness — deny it and the skill listing
is not in context at all, so the harness measures a fleet that is not mounted. (ZEEP Z-3.)