Every comment that invoked a 'law' (50 word-boundary sites across 28
tracked files) now states what is going on and why, in terms that
transfer to any project: gate twins drift until one side greenlights
what the other refuses; a tag re-points while a digest pins; a
restrictive engine behavior belongs to the runtime that imposed it and
must be re-tested, not inherited; a speculative head is tensors in the
file, not a flag; snapshot links dangle where the container resolves
them; exit 0 is a clean stop to systemd, so a self-exiting daemon on
on-failure goes dark reporting success. Event narratives and dates are
gone from these comments; the mechanics carry the argument.
Behavior-identical: bash -n, py_compile, yaml parse, full bats suite
408/408 green. One symbol rename rides along (stack script local
scale_law -> scale_contract, with its log text).
The hand-written image/ck/tokenizer gates are require_image, require_bytes and
require_dir_files from scripts/lib/llm-gates.sh. The serve seam is unchanged
and still green (its podman stub now models `podman image exists`, the
primitive the gate uses). Behaviour preserved: every refusal names the
artifact, the endpoint and the fetch script.
The serve scripts and the deployer each hand-wrote the same missing/truncated
artifact gates; the 2026-10-01 crash-loop was those twins disagreeing
mid-cutover. scripts/lib/llm-gates.sh is the single place the refusal lives:
require_file / require_bytes / require_min_mib / require_dir_files /
require_image, each returning 1 and naming the endpoint, the artifact and the
remedy. New seam tests/llm_gates.bats pins the contract at the arguments-in /
status-and-stderr-out boundary.
Frank