A refuted alternative is offered, not required

[sameera]

As a delivery lead approving a decision record, I want each refuted alternative to be something the record chose to add rather than a slot it had to fill, so that I can tell a real trade-off from a manufactured one and remove the manufactured ones cheaply.

Acceptance Criteria

• Given a decision entry drafted with no viable alternative, when the entry is read, then it carries no refuted-alternative line and no placeholder standing in for one.
• Given a drafted record, when a refuted alternative's stated reason for losing names no trade-off, then that alternative is reported to the reviewer as a non-blocking observation.
• Given a drafted record at its pre-filing checkpoint, when the reviewer reads it, then every refuted alternative appears in one numbered list, each naming the decision it belongs to.
• Given that list, when the reviewer names items to remove, then those alternatives are gone from the record body before the record sub-issue is created or updated.
• Given a filed record body, when it is read, then no observation marker and no placeholder token from the draft appears in it.

Notes

The provenance rule does not reach this. A refuted alternative is the model's own by construction, so labelling it inferred discriminates nothing. The question that discriminates is viability — whether a competent engineer might genuinely have chosen it — and that is a judgment, not a count or a comparison. It therefore gets the treatment this epic already decided for its one other judgment rule, mechanism-naming: prevented at drafting time, reported as a non-blocking observation, decided by the reviewer.

The standing placeholder is this epic's own observed failure in a second template. The record template carries - **Refuted alternative:** {{...}} as a fixed line under every decision, with the permission to omit it sitting in an adjacent comment, while the template's filling rules say to replace every placeholder. A heading's presence beating an instruction placed near it is the same mechanism that produced the personas table.

The decision-record stage has no pre-filing checkpoint today. Its approval gate runs after the sub-issue is already filed, and offers only approve-now or leave-open — there is no point at which the body can be reduced. The command already refers to a "Phase 3.5 gate" that no phase defines; this story is where that reference acquires a phase. The list and the selection reuse the numbered-prose and named-selection shape decided for the epic digest, and the final criterion reuses the derived-body cleanliness assertion rather than restating it.

Size: M. Story type: user.