[finding] the docs-audit union-read prose hard-codes the anchor lag as "532 keys" in two places — measured 604 four days later

[huangyiirene]

Filed unassigned from the #14612 dev seat (PR #16199) as an out-of-scope observation. Not a live defect: no gate reads these numbers, and both sentences are otherwise correct.

What was found

Two pieces of prose state the anchor-vs-ratchet lag as a bare number, with no revision or date attached, so a reader takes it as current:

• scripts/docs-audit/README.md — "measured on this tree it lagged the ratchet by 532 keys"
• scripts/docs-audit/affected-docs.mjs, the AUTHORABLE_KEY_SUFFIX_RE docblock — "Measured on this tree it lagged the live ratchet by 532 keys" and "an exact-match lookup would silently drop all 103 of them"

Re-measured at origin/main d5d8d50db on 2026-09-06, four days after #14612 recorded 532:

figure	as written	measured at d5d8d50db
keys in the live ratchet and not in the anchor (annotation stripped)	532	604
annotated ([RETIRED]-class) keys the ratchet carries	103	206
shard files under packages/spec/authorable-surface/ (per #14612's triage comment)	11	14

check:authorable-surface prints the live delta on every run, which is the non-rotting form of the same statement.

Why it is only a finding

Nothing reads these numbers — they are explanatory prose beside a rule whose pins are behavioural (data/Object:editMode present in the ratchet and absent from the anchor; the [RETIRED] strip), and those pins re-measure themselves on every --self-test. The claim the numbers support — that the lag is real, load-bearing and growing — is not only still true, it is more true. What rots is the reader's ability to trust the sentence.

This is the same defect class as the card it came from, one level up: #14612 landed a warning about a stale artifact and deliberately stated no count for exactly this reason. The two live counterexamples sit in the file that card now names as the reference consumer.

Possible dispositions (for triage)

• Replace both numbers with the shape that cannot rot — name check:authorable-surface as the thing that prints the current delta, the way PR docs(spec): lead the deletion-gate anchor description with what it must NOT be used for #16199's prose does.
• Or keep the numbers and pin them to their measurement: "532 keys at <some rev>, 2026-09-02", which stays true forever and reads as history.
• Or leave them: they are illustrative, and the argument survives any value greater than zero.

⛔ Not to be fixed by re-measuring and writing today's number in: that reproduces the defect with a fresher figure.

Refs: #14612 (the ruling this was found under) / PR #16199 · #13713 / PR #14607 (where the 532 was first measured).