Govreview 2a — the causal clusters stop contradicting their own entries

[Polichinel]

Phase 2a of the governance consistency review. 8 findings, 5 of the review's 9 contradictions — all in one document, all one root cause.

The finding

The register's conventions call the cluster list "the single authority" on grouping. Five of twelve clusters listed entries as open whose own headers say RESOLVED:

cluster	listed open	actually
immutability enforcement	C-66	RESOLVED 18 Aug
the freeze as a root cause	C-57, C-66	RESOLVED 18 Aug
summarize-estimator coherence	C-57	RESOLVED 18 Aug
verification-completeness	C-74, C-79, C-80	RESOLVED
unchecked completeness claims	C-85, C-77, C-80	RESOLVED
doc↔code topology drift	C-86	RESOLVED

C-74 is the damning one. It resolved 2026-07-31 — seventeen days before the clusters' own stated review date of 2026-08-17. The last manual review didn't catch an entry closed a fortnight earlier. Manual review of a self-describing list is not a control.

The preamble committed the failure it warns about

"that list is the single authority and this preamble deliberately does not restate it (it drifted when it did)."

…then restated it in the next clause, listing C-57, C-66, C-74 and C-75 as open. All four resolved.

The copy is deleted, not corrected — correcting it rebuilds the thing that drifted.

Check 14

Holds cluster membership against entry status. Brace convention normalised so the check can stay simple — five different forms were in use across twelve clusters, which is why nothing had ever checked this.

Mutation-tested four ways, all firing. The one that matters: an open entry resolving without its cluster being updated — the real-world case, five times over.

The Source: vocabulary was fiction

Ten permitted values were listed. Six appeared in no entry at all. Six of the most-used real sources weren't in the list. A convention describing a practice nobody followed; it now lists what is used.

validate_docs.sh   PASSED (14 checks)
check_doc_refs.py  PASSED · check_arch_tree.py PASSED
ruff / pytest --cov 100%

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