Development record

2026-08-02 — iss-38 (v0.5.0 item D): hand-maintained indexes are either DELETED or GATED, never corrected and left hand-kept, because a corrected list drifts again on the next commit and nobody notices the second time either (adr-5, derive don't store). The ledger named four stale indexes; three were real and one does not hold. (1) `intents/README.md` transcribed four lifecycle directories as ASCII trees and had fallen sixteen drafts, one promotion (itd-73, listed as a draft while living in `planned/`), two disciplines and two superseded intents behind, with a `shipped/` section still calling the directory empty over thirteen shipped intents — deleted, because the enumeration carried nothing the directory does not carry better, and what a filesystem cannot state (the kind taxonomy, the lifecycle contract, the bundle history) stays. (2) `commands/README.md` (fourteen verbs named, eighteen files present) and (3) `internal/README.md` (core described as "identity/version and the read-only status snapshot" while its own later bullets described twenty packages, and `adapter/scanner` filed under planned seams although it ships with its own pattern set, redactor and tests) keep short, high-value enumerations — so those ship WITH the detector rather than as a promise to remember. The new `index_drift` rule holds a marked region (`<!-- index: <id> -->`) to the directory it enumerates in one of two modes: `exact`, where listing and directory must agree both ways, and `absent`, where every listed path must still be missing — the planned-seams shape, whose drift is a seam that shipped. Scoping is an explicit marker plus a configured entry pattern rather than a markdown-list parser: one generic rule, no bespoke parser per README, and unrelated prose beside a list cannot fire it. It fails closed three ways (region gone while the config entry remains; region parsing to zero entries; malformed spec), so half-deleting an index is a finding rather than a silent disarm. (4) The fourth instance — "the repo README Layout omits `skills/` from the plugin surface" — was investigated and does NOT hold: there is no `skills/` directory, abcd ships zero skills deliberately (the three workflows once shaped as skills became commands, closing iss-61; `brief/05-internals/08-skills.md` states it), so the Layout section is correct by omission and was left untouched. Inventing a `skills/` reference to satisfy a finding would have written a falsehood into the record to close a ticket — the same disposition iss-37 reached on its one non-holding instance. CHANGELOG: an entry, unlike iss-34's test-only pass, and impact `additive` rather than `internal` — the rule lives in the shipped lint engine that `abcd docs lint` runs, so any abcd-managed repo gains it by declaring its own pairs in `.abcd/docs-lint.json`.