The 90-day --stale-days default on `warden route gaps` was not a loose threshold,
it was an inert one: the delegation register was created 2026-08-15, so it could
not have fired before November. It was inherited from the catalog pointer cadence
and applied to a claim with a completely different half-life.
Two changes. DEFAULT_BLOCKER_STALE_DAYS = 14 now governs interim blockers, while
DEFAULT_STALE_DAYS = 90 keeps governing pointer freshness -- "is this the right
owner and page" is quarterly, "has the owner answered" is not. 14 is calibrated
on blockers that actually cost something: ten days for the secrets-engine lanes,
one for RISK-F-0001, roughly fifty for FLEX-WP-0007.
The second change matters more. `reviewed` records when someone touched an entry,
which is indistinguishable from re-checking it -- six lanes read as freshly
reviewed today because I typed in them. `verified:` now says how the claim was
established, and asked-and-waiting explicitly does NOT count: that is the state
the secrets-engine blocker sat in for ten days while looking current. A lane in
that state is stale at zero days old, and key-cape-oidc-login proves it works.
8 of 14 interim lanes are honestly marked unverified rather than given a fresh
date they did not earn.
--fail-on-stale exits 3 for a cron or gate. No CI test on age: a date-triggered
failure breaks the build for whoever commits next instead of whoever owns the
blocker. The CI test is structural -- every interim lane must record how it was
verified -- so it fails on the commit that introduces the omission.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tegwick
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