v1.5.3 — a live false GREEN closed, and two of our own claims withdrawn

This release ships more retractions than features, and that is the point. Every number below was executed; the ones that did not survive are struck out rather than defended.

The defect that mattered — a green over unreviewed work

An unresolvable baseline_sha could ship a substantiated-looking green. No attacker required: a deleted branch or a pruned worktree is enough.

difftool.capture never raises and degrades silently — every _tracked_at probe fails, so the whole tracked-modification channel is dropped and diff.patch contains none of the coder's edits to tracked files. It is not empty, though, if the coder also created one new file, so empty_diff_defect stays silent. git_tree_has_baseline fails at the same moment, so out_of_scope_defects is fed [] and the S3(a) control switches off too — while runcheck still executes the modified tree. Six lenses then review a diff holding none of the work.

honest baseline        -> 321 B, contains the coder's edit
unresolvable baseline  -> 146 B, contains none of it, and empty_diff_defect stays silent

This violated THE ONE GUARANTEE and was pre-existing — recorded nowhere until now.

The fix uses information the program already had: git_tree_has_baseline was already computed downstream, purely to gate out_of_scope_defects. It is now consulted where the evidence is taken. No new blocking predicate, no new gate condition, no new terminal, no new function, and scripts/verdict.py untouched — blob 57062e71, byte-identical across six releases.

The guard's condition is narrow on purpose: a two-clause version aborted the documented non-git sandbox lane, where capture produces complete evidence — it manufactured a RED on honest work, which this project ranks as worse than the bug it closes.

Two of our own claims, withdrawn

• Phase 0 — packet by reference, −14.3% cost-weighted. FALSIFIED. Built, run 12× across three targets with same-plugin control pairs, measured +4.0%. The dispatch change ships and works; it simply does not buy what it was built to buy. The whole −24%…−29% resident-bytes cost programme is withdrawn with it: 95.17% of input is cache-read, so removing resident bytes removes the cheapest token class while adding full-price turns.
• The blocking-predicate diagnosis. FALSIFIED by its own committed test — observed 2 of 10, both fires declared as priors before the corpus existed. The second, independent measure points the other way: code diff bytes rank-order the injections exactly (32,139→0 < 39,130→1 < 62,667→7) while predicate delta is anti-ranked.

Reviewed adversarially — and the review caught the fixes too

Two blind judges, three rounds. Terminal state APPROVED, zero CRITICAL from either final judge. The two scoped re-judgments found three real defects in the fixes above, each also closed here — including a pin that passed on its own explanatory prose three separate times.

Rule adopted: pin the call site, or pin nothing.

Open, and named rather than implied

H2 (pre-existing user dirt fires the out-of-scope lens) is designed but deferred, with a 1,276-line six-lens-challenged plan in the repo. R1 (the run's own build output) is real but narrower than we first claimed — --exclude-standard honours .gitignore, so re-measured end to end it is 2 defects, not 7. No ordering between H2 and R1 is claimed. S3: the run mode is undefined. Audit items S1/S2/S6/S8/S11–S13 and S15–S17 remain open.

Full record: docs/superpowers/plans/2026-07-27-honest-red-workstream.md