Revise R3, rule the human-approver question, and correct A-16 and A-17

Four returns arrived overnight, two of them corrections to rules
written yesterday. Both corrections are right.

A-16 GAINS A RIDER. informed-decision pointed out the rule is silent on
who writes the route marker, and the guarantee is only as good as that
party's independence from what the marker asserts. Its own instance is
the weak one: erased versus never-held is written by the party the
evidence is about, so A-16 there reduces to a self-attestation and
GH-DEC-2026-014 section 4 narrows it without removing it. Without the
rider A-16 becomes the thing it exists to prevent — a sound check read
as establishing a property it does not carry. The four instances are
now graded by marker independence rather than listed as equals.

A-17 GAINS A PRECONDITION. It asks which way a case fails, which is
unanswerable where the case cannot be seen. Their commitment-only path
had no failure direction at all as proposed: a reviewer got a blank,
indistinguishable from erased, withheld, lost and never held.
GH-DEC-2026-014 section 4 did not test the direction of failure, it
manufactured one — the right outcome reached without noticing it was a
different operation. So making the distinguishing case observable is a
precondition of applying A-17, not an outcome of it, and A-17 therefore
depends on A-16. Neither dependency was noticed when both were written
a day apart.

GH-DEC-2026-015 revises GH-DEC-2026-012 R3. approval-engine recommended
exactly the option we refused, informed-decision could not comply with
both, changed nothing, and raised it as a finding rather than choosing
— having previously offered to let approval-engine settle R3 and
declined to take that route twice.

Nesting is permitted for this pair. The cycle objection needed mutual
containment and approval-engine's digest structurally excludes
presentation material for an independent reason. But the decisive
ground is that the original ruling worked against its own rule: R3
forbade recomputing the other layer's digest from one's own vocabulary,
and co-reference by identifier left informed-decision canonicalizing
principal and target, two of the five fields in that digest. Nesting
removes the duplication; co-reference manages it. We reached for the
management option while stating the rule that recommends removal.

Conditioned on approval-engine making the exclusion normative and
tested rather than intentional, because the cycle cannot arise here is
a belief and the cycle may not arise here is a rule with an owner —
A-17's precondition applied to our own permission. The ordering
objection is withdrawn as mistaken and the withdrawal is recorded: a
cost accepted from the requester and never checked is how a wrong
reason survives into a ruling.

GH-DEC-2026-016 rules NC-03, which both repositories referred up and
neither benefits from. Where an approval is declared as discharging a
human-in-the-loop control, the approver must be a human principal and
approval-engine must refuse at bind time rather than record it.
Recording the principal type is the auditable half and stops nothing;
an approval control satisfiable by the same class of actor it exists to
check is theatre. Scoped to declared approvals, declared at issue and
never inferred, on approval-engine's own pdp_path shape. One surface
enforcing it is not the property being held — the guarantee would read
as human-approved unless someone used a different client.

Section 5 leaves what makes a principal human to the identity layer and
notes it inherits A-16: refusing a service principal while accepting an
unverified assertion of humanity moves the defect rather than closing
it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012viPor8WJNCbV64ipwewrm

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1754332@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 9c8ac536-ff5e-46a3-8ab1-a548bde25fc0

README.md

@@ -140,7 +140,11 @@ The last two are September 2026 and are repository-level, not estate doctrine. 1
 is why an `unknown` and an `absent` stance cell must be told apart in the record
 even though both fail closed, and why a decision envelope that looks authentic is
 not therefore attributable. 17 is why one request for transitional relief was
-granted and another declined in the same week. See `INTENT.md` § Core Rules.
+granted and another declined in the same week. Both were corrected within a day of
+being written, by the repository that bears their weakest instance: 16 holds only
+as far as the marker-writer is independent of what the marker asserts, and 17
+cannot be applied at all until the distinguishing case is observable. See
+`INTENT.md` § Core Rules.
 
 ## Agentic operating modes