Adaptive check cadence: the interval is earned, not assigned

Operator ruling 2026-08-20. Severity no longer sets the review interval.
A check that comes back clean climbs one rung — instant, 1h, 8h, 24h,
48h, 96h, 7d, 14d, 1mo, 1q — and anything wrong drops straight back to
instant. A quarter is the ceiling. The operator may defer an instant
finding to a stated date; that is the only other way off the bottom rung.

The rung is the point: it says how stable the estate has been on that
matter, which is information severity does not carry. Volatile things get
attention automatically; quiet things stop consuming it; neither
judgement has to be made by a person who might be busy.

Escalation trigger 5 rebased onto the ladder — fourteen days at the
bottom rung, whether that is failing checks or no checks.

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

findings/README.md

@@ -1,7 +1,14 @@
 # Filing a finding
 
 One file per finding: `findings/RISK-F-NNNN-<slug>.md`, YAML front-matter,
-then prose. Next id is one past the highest here.
+then prose.
+
+**Ids are allocated by `risk-nexus`.** Take the next id past the highest you
+can see and file — that is the right thing to do — but if two reporters take
+the same one, the earlier commit keeps it and the newcomer is renumbered here,
+with the original id recorded as `filed_as`. This happened on 2026-08-20
+(`RISK-F-0009`, filed as `RISK-F-0004`), which is why it is written down. Do
+not renumber your own finding after filing; the register does it and tells you.
 
 ## What the reporter fills in
 
@@ -24,8 +31,14 @@ related: [RISK-F-0001]        # optional
 
 `severity`, `severity_at_production`, `impact`, `likelihood`,
 `fidelity_modifier`, `production_rescore`, `disclosure`, `embargo_*`,
-`escalation*`, `constraint*`, `last_reviewed`, `review_by`, `graded_by`,
-`ruling`.
+`escalation*`, `constraint*`, `last_checked`, `next_check`, `cadence`,
+`clean_streak`, `graded_by`, `ruling`.
+
+`cadence` is the check-frequency rung, and it is earned rather than assigned:
+a clean check climbs one rung (`instant` → `1h` → `8h` → `24h` → `48h` → `96h`
+→ `7d` → `14d` → `1mo` → `1q`), and anything moving drops it straight back to
+`instant`. So the rung on your finding is a public statement about how settled
+the matter has been — which is why it is not yours to set.
 
 Setting them yourself is not an error to be corrected — it is a boundary this
 repo would rather keep. The reporter says what is true; this repo says how bad