2026-07-15 (M2 gate — maintainer-approved) — The lifeboat coverage experiment's

2026-07-15 (M2 gate — maintainer-approved) — The lifeboat coverage experiment's cross-repo readout is in. Corpus (private repos anonymised): abcd-cli (git+conventions+abcd-native, 21/2/0 grounded/partial/blank), test repo 1 and test repo 2 (abcd-native scaffolding but no authored brief, 4/8/11 and 2/6/15), test repo 3 (git+conventions, no abcd, 3→4/8/11), and a git-only floor (0/2/21). Headline finding: scaffolding is not a record — test repos 1 and 2 carry .abcd/ directories yet ground barely more than the record-less test repo 3, because their .abcd/development/ has no brief/, no ADRs, no issue ledger; the native adapter is honest and grounds only authored prose. The brief structure holds (excluding the dogfood repo, 9 of 23 sections are blank across the messy corpus, not half). Decisions: (1) product/personas is demoted to a human-answered question in the lifeboat brief — the corpus confirms the M0 prediction that it is not derivable from a repository. (2) The other 8 always-blank sections stay in the brief but split: product/mental-model, delivery/verification-matrix, delivery/out-of-scope become human-answered questions; evidence/what-didnt, evidence/open-questions, constraints/naming, glossary, internals are blank more from thin adapters than genuine non-derivability and get adapter work before M3 decides (iss-98, iss-99, iss-100). (3) The dependency-manifest adapter under-detected Python/ Ruby/PHP packaging (test repo 3's pyproject.toml+uv.lock read as blank) — fixed now, so test repo 3's constraints/dependencies grounds. M3 (the packer) builds to this list: grounded/partial sections extracted-and-cited, the human-question sections surfaced as the blanks-with-questions the coverage report already produces.