2026-07-14 — The lifeboat is built as a COVERAGE EXPERIMENT, not a feature

2026-07-14 — The lifeboat is built as a COVERAGE EXPERIMENT, not a feature (adr-35, itd-88/spc-3). Probe before pack: disembark probe <repo> produces a cross-repo coverage aggregate BEFORE a packer exists, because the brief's structure is an untested assumption and building the packer first assumes the answer. The headline number is the delta in section coverage between a rich-record repo and a git-only one — that is what the record is worth, and if half the brief is permanently blank everywhere, the structure is wrong and we learned it for one milestone instead of a phase. Phase 6's "depends on every prior substrate being native" rationale was checked against the BINARY and found mostly false (spec engine ships; reviews are committed markdown; backgrounding is a host affordance; the itd-2 host-delegation seam already ships twice — memory's --pages-json and intent review ingest --verdict-json). The ONE real dependency is data, not code: ~/.abcd/ does not exist, history.Capture is called by nothing, and Pass B's corpus cannot be obtained retroactively — the only permanent, compounding cost on the board, which is why the transcript hook ships ahead of any lifeboat code. Rejected: building the packer first (assumes the answer); amending adr-4 in place (two of its three operative claims change — a replacement, not a clarification).