ops-warden/docs/layer-declaration-precedence.md
tegwick baf53602ca Revert the npm field, re-measure coverage, and hold the layer divergence
Five inbox items worked, none of which changed a credential value or moved a
secret.

whynot-design-npm-publish: field reverted npm_token -> NPM_AUTH_TOKEN and the
path confirmed, on railiance-platform's attended, read-only, no-value field
enumeration (their docs/evidence/2026-09-10-npm-lane-field-resolution.json).
Exactly one field is present at the governed path. The 2026-09-09 change was
adopted from a coordination message and would have failed at the WP-0037-T03
rotation. The ungoverned second location is recorded as an explicit non-lane,
not deleted and not tidied away.

pep-stance coverage: published figures were stale by eight lanes (unknown
18->20, not_applicable 12->15) while resolved stayed at 3 — the denominator
moved, the classification did not. Caught by the test that asserts the published
block equals what report_coverage.py measures. tests/test_workload_join.py held
the same stale counts; both now measure the same populations.

rapp-qonto-keycape-client: blocker character updated — authority exists and is
unexercised by owner decision ("not yet", offer open), which is not the same as
no authority existing. Reopen triggers are events, never elapsed time.

flex-auth -> access-engine rename (WARDEN-IN-0003): access-engine added to the
policy-check lane's keywords so routing resolves under both names from today.
owner_repo deliberately not flipped — policy.py sends it as resource.system on
every /v1/check, and FLEX-DEC-2026-013 keeps runtime names as flex-auth.

layer declaration: INTENT.md says Staff, layer.yaml says staff, section 11 does
not say which governs. Neither changed; gate-house holds the ruling. Position in
docs/layer-declaration-precedence.md, wait in WARDEN-WP-0034-T06, and a comment
in layer.yaml telling the next session not to "fix" it — the divergence is the
evidence the ruling is made against.

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
2026-09-21 02:16:33 +02:00

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Markdown

# Which of ops-warden's two layer declarations governs — unruled, and not ours to rule
**Status: open, waiting on gate-house. ops-warden will not change either file
until the ruling lands.** Route: `WARDEN-WP-0034-T06`.
## The fact
ops-warden carries both forms §11 of `security-layer-model` permits, and they
state different values:
| File | Value |
| --- | --- |
| `INTENT.md` frontmatter | `layer: Staff` |
| `layer.yaml` | `layer: staff` |
§11 accepts either form and does not say which governs when both exist and
disagree. A conformance run reading `INTENT.md` and a run reading `layer.yaml`
reach different answers for this repository, and **both are following the
standard**. That is the finding.
## What this is not
It is not a disagreement with anybody else. flex-auth's first published B1
(2026-09-20) reported that the estate spells `layer:` three ways *across*
repositories and that ops-warden was among the repositories that would fail a
validator on casing. flex-auth withdrew that on 2026-09-21: it came from a shell
pipeline that took the first `^layer:` match per repository across two files
without recording which file it came from, so it reported one value where there
were two. They rebuilt it as `tools/survey_layer_declarations.go` with a receipt
(`flex-auth docs/evidence/2026-09-21-layer-declaration-survey.json`), and running
it falsified the finding it was built to reproduce.
Nine of nine repositories carrying both forms do exactly what ops-warden does.
The split is *within* each repository and universal, not careless.
It is also not a typo. Either spelling is defensible: the custodian's
estate-wide sweep records that §3's own table capitalises, which makes the nine
lower-casing `layer.yaml` files the divergent ones against the standard's
spelling — and separately that §3 and §4 disagree inside the standard itself
(`Engines` in §3's table, `Engine` in §4's catalog rows). Neither of those is
settled either.
## ops-warden's position
1. **We are not aligning the two files on our own initiative.** Two questions
are open at gate-house — which form governs, and whether the §3 vocabulary is
case-sensitive — and they have different answers. Aligning now means picking
one, and picking one before the ruling is ops-warden authoring a ruling it
does not own, in the same move §11 forbids when it says a layer stated *about*
a repository by another repository is not a declaration.
2. **A unilateral fix would also destroy the evidence.** The finding is
*observable* precisely because nine repositories exhibit it. A repository
that quietly normalises its own files makes the estate look more conformant
than it is and shrinks the population the ruling is being made against.
3. **Neither value is in doubt.** ops-warden is Staff, declared in its own voice
in `ADR-0010`, and no reading of either file makes it anything else. What is
in doubt is only which file a mechanical check should read. No behaviour of
this repository depends on the answer.
4. **When the ruling lands**, whichever form it names, ops-warden changes the
other file to match in one commit, together with a regression test asserting
the two agree — so the next divergence is caught rather than surveyed.
## Why this page exists rather than an inbox thread
gate-house's own observation, recorded against ops-warden in another lane: a
correction that only matters months from now is badly housed in a message
thread, because a correction we merely read is one we can only get right by
remembering. A later session asking "why do these two files disagree, shall I
just fix it?" needs to find this page, not reconstruct the reasoning.
## References
- `net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.8.md` §3, §11 (proposed)
- `the-custodian/docs/assessments/2026-09-21-layer-declaration-boundaries.md`
— estate-wide view; questions 1, 2 and 3 are the ones that reach this page
- flex-auth message `719b3e9e` (correction), `docs/conformance/boundaries-review.md`
- `docs/adr/ADR-0010-ops-warden-is-staff.md` — the declaration itself
- `WARDEN-WP-0034-T06` — the live record of the wait