Rule the six §11 declaration questions, and hold the v0.8 flip on them

access-engine's boundaries review (FLEX-WP-0030, B1 corrected 2026-09-21) and
the custodian's estate-wide sweep put six §11 interpretation questions here.
All six are questions about what §11 means, and gate-house authors §11.

GH-DEC-2026-017 — the layer declaration. INTENT.md governs and a sidecar is a
derived artifact that must agree; a disagreement between the two forms is a
finding in its own right and is reported rather than resolved away. The §3
vocabulary is case-insensitive for comparison and closed, and it has FOUR
tokens: access-engine's validator omits Taxonomy, so railiance-master is
conforming and the validator carries the defect. informed-decision's `surface`
is not a layer; its own file already reasons to Staff. Both off-vocabulary
repositories are outside §4 and §11 does not grade them. A declaration carries
no standard version — and that field is the reference form's, not one
repository's habit. gate-house declares Staff in INTENT.md frontmatter in this
commit; the prose line was never a declaration under the paragraph this
repository wrote.

GH-DEC-2026-018 — access-engine is a source of evidence for the decision
record, against its own interest and as it asked. Custody is never source:
collapse them and §9.6 is incoherent. It owes a declaration, has none, and is
non-conforming on §11 today; the right register is a declared gap with a date.
The class inventory stays access-engine's to publish — §11's prohibition on
inferring class binds a ruling as hard as a runner. Under it, §11 names a §4
property §4 does not carry, which is the finding under the finding, and the
clause is gate-house's own A2 from twelve days ago.

GH-DEC-2026-019 — the v0.8 acceptance flip stays held and these join the
existing hold rather than a follow-on amendment. The round closed by finding
that every substantive finding against v0.8 was a correct rule satisfiable
without doing what it requires; §11 is now that failure pointed at §11.
Bounded by three stated closing conditions. v0.7 stays accepted and in force,
so the hold costs documentation currency and nothing else — stated as the
reason it is affordable, not as an argument that holds are free.

A candidate property is recorded and deliberately not numbered A-18: a
conformance check each repository runs only against its own files cannot
establish an estate property. One instance, and no repository bearing a cost
under it has argued it yet.

Amendments A9–A13 drafted; GH-IN-0003 and GH-WP-0004 carry the round.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 63291@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 8bd77868-ca68-4f49-bb1e-d539ecc0d703

INTENT.md

@@ -1,3 +1,41 @@
+---
+# NetKingdom security layer declaration — §11.
+#
+# This is the declaration. The prose "**Layer:** Staff" below is not, and has not
+# been since §11 required a machine-readable form; it is exactly what §11's
+# declaration-form paragraph says does not count, written by the repository that
+# wrote the paragraph. Raised by access-engine (FLEX-WP-0030, B2) and ruled in
+# GH-DEC-2026-017 §6.
+#
+# No layer.yaml accompanies this file, by GH-DEC-2026-017 §1: INTENT.md governs
+# and a sidecar is a derived artifact. No standard version appears here, by
+# GH-DEC-2026-017 §5: the declared layer is a standing property and does not
+# change when the standard is revised. Version-scoped state belongs in the
+# derived conformance record.
+layer: Staff
+role: —
+repository: gate-house
+declared_by: INTENT.md
+declared_at: "2026-09-21"
+ruling: GH-DEC-2026-017
+# §5 — Staff MUST NOT hold a direct Tooling client. Empty is a claim, not an
+# omission: gate-house holds no OpenBao, key-cape or cluster client. Its
+# artifacts are specifications, decisions, workplans and tasks.
+tooling_contacts: []
+# §11 — non-Tooling clients recorded so the check is total.
+non_tooling_clients:
+  - target: state-hub
+    layer: not-catalogued
+    rationale: >-
+      Work records, intakes, decisions and progress events. Outside §5 by the
+      v0.5 scope rule — "Tooling-layer system" means a §4 Tooling row, and
+      state-hub is not one. Recorded, not policed.
+declared_shapes:
+  "5.1": []
+  "5.2": []
+  "5.3": []
+---
+
 # Gate House — INTENT
 
 **Repository:** `gate-house`