Session handoff — 2026-09-04

Written mid-train because a stop was anticipated. Everything below is committed and pushed; nothing is half-applied in a working tree.

Where the work stands

Train	State	Vehicle
Crash recovery	✅ shipped	#156–#164
A — FCC runs its own framework	✅ shipped	#165
B — research: specification, not engine	✅ shipped (6 Finds)	#165
C1 — truth + hygiene	✅ shipped	#167
C2 — gates	✅ shipped	#168
D — partner requests	⏸ backlog	#166
E — reboot rehearsal	⬜ not started	—

Session closed 2026-09-05 04:35 UTC — clean boundary, nothing half-applied

0 open PRs. 2 open issues, both deliberate (#162 PHOENIX gates, #166 Train D backlog). main green on every workflow; make governance-gates passes.

⚠️ If a reboot happens before the next session

Train E was NOT done — so this reboot is unrehearsed and there is no make prereboot-shutdown. Nothing was quiesced deliberately. That is a known, accepted gap, not an oversight, and the next session's first job is to see what actually broke and fix the runbook from evidence rather than from theory.

On return, verify BY EFFECT (never by is-active — see §0):

make runner-status                      # expect 8/8 online; if 0, see §5
systemctl --user list-timers 'fcc-*'    # a NEXT time is the proof a timer is armed
make backup-verify                      # digest anchor vs /mnt/e
git fsck --no-dangling                  # Rule 0: no build before fsck passes

Then the content scan that git status cannot do for you — the 2026-09-04 lesson, and the single most likely thing a reboot repeats:

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'case "{}" in *.png|*.jpg|*.pdf|*.sqlite|*.gz) exit 0;; esac
  python3 -c "import sys;d=open(sys.argv[1],\"rb\").read();print(sys.argv[1]) if b chr(0) in d else None" "{}"' 2>/dev/null

(or simply re-run the scan recorded in the #167 commit message — 3,721 files, seconds.)

To resume

Next train is E — reboot rehearsal. Write scripts/prereboot_shutdown.sh + make prereboot-shutdown, ordered and then verified by effect: quiesce the taker first (stop runners so no job dies mid-run), then serving surfaces, then checkpoint, then verify. Model on RC's scripts/prereboot_shutdown.sh and CTO's scripts/cadence/prereboot_backup.sh. FCC's runbook §7 is still prose; both peers have executables. Then amend the runbook with whatever this reboot actually got wrong.

Open decisions — operator's, not mine

• The enforcement layer. FCC asserts constitutional enforcement it does not perform. The claim withdrawal and the capability are separable; recommendation is to withdraw the claim now and scope the capability separately, starting with the schema fix. Full measurement in BACKLOG.md § "Open decision" and FCC_SPECIFICATION_AS_SAFETY_RESEARCH.
• The 45 vertical constitutions — deferred earlier; six of them are the energy personas, which PAOM's runtime rejects today.
• #162 — PHOENIX quality-gate adoption.

What this session learned that the runbook now carries

• git status clean is not evidence the working tree matches HEAD. A crash rewrote a file's content without changing its length; git's stat cache never re-hashed it. 245 NUL bytes sat in a tracked test file through an entire recovery.
• git checkout -- <file> cannot repair that — it is a no-op against a stale stat cache. rm first.
• Scan content, not status: 3,721 tracked text files, seconds to run, one casualty found.

Two mistakes I made, both corrected in-branch

• Checked out a whole vite.config.ts from a 3-month-old branch when I wanted one hunk, and reverted the v2.1.1 gateway-proxy fix. Rebuilt from origin/main, +4/−0.
• Claimed a test-setup fix moved the suite 407→408. It did not — the file already had the fix; that run was flake. Corrected in the commit log rather than amended away.

Both are the same lesson: do not take a file from a stale branch to get a hunk.

State of the tree

main green on all workflows. 8/8 runners online. Backup timer and runner-watch armed. Latest verified figures: 15,647 tests / 98% line coverage (Python), 408/408 (frontend), mkdocs --strict 0 warnings.