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>
Static comparison of ops-warden's catalog against the policy file: 8 high-risk
lanes with concrete KV paths are not denied, four of which were already graded
high before the 2026-08-19 regrade, so the divergence is pre-existing.
ops-warden's CLI layer only protects the ops-warden path; the OpenBao policy is
what protects a direct bao kv get, which is the actual 2026-07-16 vector.
Not confirmed against the live OpenBao — ops-warden's token is expired, so the
deployed policy may differ from the file. Stated as such.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
