Dig report
Built and Never Fired
Complete, finished things — a placeholder, a spike, a smoke test, a whole tested gate — that were never once put to use.
In this report · 4 finds
- the gate:drift compat no-opNever activated
- Spike: does a bot comment wake a subscribed session?Never activated
- CI gate smoke test (close without merging)Never activated
- the removed-mechanism-noun gate (PR #477)Never activated
Not everything in a midden is broken. This site gathers four finds that reached completion and then never fired — the never-activated grade, a grade apart from wear and decay, because these things did not decay so much as never begin. They come from three different seasons, and read in order they are a thin, honest record of how much a fast platform builds that it never needs.
the Routing Excavation · 4 Jul 2026 – 9 Jul 2026
the gate:drift compat no-op
commit 9ecd4b5 · package.jsonoutlived its needassessed 16 Jul 2026
A one-line script whose entire body was an echo explaining why it did nothing: had already removed the artifact that could , but the human-only CI step still called `pnpm :drift`. It held that door for some six hours before the step, and it, were deleted together.
“ADR-0014: the routing map is generated at build time from the manifests; there is no committed artifact to drift. Compat no-op until the L0 drift step is removed from gate.yml (issue #97).”package.json, gate:drift no-op
the Spike Ashfall · 10 Jul 2026 – 11 Jul 2026
Spike: does a bot comment wake a subscribed session?
PR #277 · closedbuilt to be discardedassessed 16 Jul 2026
Thirty-three lines that posted a simulated gate-green comment without ever consulting the gate. The control was the finding: a genuinely green run woke nobody, while the fake one — provoked by an empty commit pushed purely to trigger a synchronize event — arrived as a wake event. Closed thirteen minutes after opening.
“This spike (doorbell-spike.yml) is throwaway and is not merged.”PR #277 description
the Spike Ashfall · 10 Jul 2026 – 11 Jul 2026
CI gate smoke test (close without merging)
PR #330 · closedbuilt to be discardedassessed 16 Jul 2026
Five lines of markdown whose entire content was an instruction to close the pull request carrying it. It worked: the gate reported green two and a half minutes later, confirming the billing stop had lifted once the repo went public, and the pull request was closed at four minutes.
“Please close without merging and I'll delete the branch — this is only here to trigger CI.”PR #330 description
remainsthe five lines, in full
the Plainer Cut · 14 Jul 2026 – 24 Jul 2026
the removed-mechanism-noun gate (PR #477)
PR #477 · closedclosed by ownerassessed 29 Jul 2026
A grep gate for retired mechanism names lingering in live prose: 135 lines, nine unit tests, and a config listing exactly one retired noun — SessionEnd, with three sanctioned homes. Whole-word matched so it would not trip over SessionEndpoint, scoped to live docs outside layers, and wired into validate:content so no workflow change was needed. It was proven with a break-then-fix against a scratch doc written to fail it, and the safety gate reported green at 11:51; twenty seconds later the owner closed it with a one-word verdict, overengineering, and an admission that he had missed it when the solution was designed. The check it performs has never once run against the tree it was built to guard.
“Cheap docs-drift check (issue #442, split off #439’s audit-docs sweep): a removed/renamed mechanism noun ... tends to keep being *mentioned* in prose long after the mechanism it names has moved on”scripts/check-docs-drift.ts, header (PR #477)
remainsthe check, finished and never runthe nine tests, all passing