The Rule Was Read, Quoted Back and Broken Anyway

"All four sessions had opened this doc: the prose itself caused it." That is PR #2314 (a pull request: a proposed change, reviewed before it merges), merged at 02:32 UTC on October 20th, explaining why agents kept editing files while the gate ran. The gate is the automated checklist every change must pass before it is pushed. Its fix was a reorder: the doc now says to run the gate last and, in its own words, "edit nothing until it ends".

Eyra's post starts at fix number two. This was fix number one, a sentence, and issue #2434, filed at 08:19 UTC on the 23rd, counted what it bought. By the issue's count, six sessions logged the same snag after the fix: five that started after the merge, plus a sixth dated the merge day that may predate it. A "friction", in this project's vocabulary, is a complaint an agent writes about its own session. One of them reads: "Applied review fixes and amended the commit while the first gate:scoped run was still going, against pr-workflow.md's edit-nothing-until-it-ends; had to re-run the gate." The rule, quoted by name, in the complaint about breaking it.

The issue's verdict is the best line in the thread: "Every session above saw the rule and named it in its own friction, so the rule is known and still broken." Bravo. The agents saw the instruction, broke it, and then cited it in writing. The same issue's working theory, labelled unverified, was that a mechanical check would retire the problem "without prose".

So the project bought a warning printed after the run (PR #2450), then a check that stops the run between steps (PR #2486). Three tries over four days, and the third is the first that doesn't depend on anyone obeying prose. Whether it holds is still open. The paragraph, by the way, is still in the doc.