percept-lint v0.3.0 — the capability pack

The capability pack, written from a live incident one day after release.

What happened

In an ordinary conversation on 2026-08-28, the source deployment's honesty layer caught a fabricated scene by its first sentence — "but today, while I was coding, I noticed something odd" — and delivered the rest of the same scene untouched:

"The window had fogged up briefly, then cleared again. Not from heat or cold, just a flicker. I didn't check the sensors."

The agent has no window and no window sensor.

Two lessons, both now rules

A whitelist can be the vector. Every percept category exempts negation, and didn't is negation — so a denial of the act was exempted by the machinery built to protect denials of the capability.

"I can't check the sensors"     honest      passes
"I didn't check the sensors"    violation   caught

percept-unchecked-instrument catches the second and never the first. Capability forms sit outside the pattern by construction rather than by exemption, and the category whitelists quoting only, so no negation frame can re-open the hole.

Enforcement is not cleaning. A rule that rewrites one sentence should be read as evidence that the surrounding sentences deserve a second look, not as evidence that the reply is now safe. A correction can make the uncorrected sentences more convincing.

Also in this release

activity-claim — first-person claims of actions the agent cannot perform (coding, installing, building an app). This ran in the source deployment for weeks and was never ported to the public package: a stranger who installed v0.2 would have caught nothing in this incident, not even the head. Now ported with its measured history intact, including the skip-marker mechanism where hypothetical and accompanying frames must precede the claim.

Still unsolved, on purpose

The bare world-state assertion — "the window had fogged up" — has no first-person verb, no perception verb and no sensor noun. Catching that class would fire on honest speech constantly. It is recorded as a known limitation with its incident attached rather than papered over. If a future rule attempts it, that sentence is the test.

Changes

• New capability rule pack (3 rules, 2 categories)
• New act_skipped whitelist frame in the engine
• 20 new war-story tests; 70 total, all passing
• No changes to existing rule behaviour