An absence is deleted before it is rewritten
v0.37.0 named the absence residue and told the writer to say what the
object does instead. Applied to the author's two manuscripts, that action
had a failure mode of its own: a positive rewrite that only restates what
the neighbouring sentences already carry (downstream of detection reached
five occurrences in one paper; a statistic "reads position in catalog
coordinates" in an appendix whose method section had said so). The ruling
now in the rule's action, the paper skill's self-check, the de-ai skill's
residue bullet, and the standard's L4 bullet: judge the sentence in context
and delete the clause first; rewrite only what the page does not yet say;
keep a physical fact, a scope limit, or a conceded limitation as it stands.
The second sweep over the two manuscripts cut 17 such clauses or sentences
that the first sweep had rewritten, and the Pass-3 gate of rewrite_reward
then did what §6 says it does: the dropped negation marker is a missing
invariant, reported on 4 of 7 changed Letter paragraphs and
38 of 54 pipeline-paper paragraphs, every one the absence clause
itself or its companion (\ref, because, a math token inside the deleted
clause), and one tokenizer artifact (CDM- read as an acronym). The action
text says so, and the disposition is recorded beside the finding rather than
the negation restored (§23.4a). No detector changed; one test reads the new
action. 523 tests in 27 files.