Development record

2026-08-16 — the assessment vocabulary settled at a maintainer grill and filed as adr-40 (proposed): **four buckets — lint / review / audit / gate — separated by what each compares**, not by determinism, not by trigger. The rule was already half-recorded (05-internals/01-agents.md rules the two verdict families disjoint: "reviews assess a change, criterion verdicts assess a promise vs reality") and three shipped surfaces contradict it — `intent review` emits family 2 so it is an audit, `abcd audit` is deterministic rule-checking so it is a lint (and it consumed the `/abcd:audit` name 02-constraints/04-naming.md reserves for itd-16), and `disembark oracle` emits family 1 while the brief calls its output an audit. Grill rulings: **one surface performs exactly one act** (multi-act surfaces split at design time — cheap, because every multi-act surface abcd has is unbuilt, so they are specified rather than refactored); the buckets are a **closed list extended by PR, not a criterion** (an autonomous run given a criterion interprets it; a table lookup matches or fails); `intent ready` survives as the fourth bucket **gate** because it names a decision rather than a comparison, preserving itd-94's exit-code contract; determinism is orthogonal (itd-16's hash-chain check is a deterministic *audit*; itd-85's conformance check is a *lint* however built); automatic-vs-manual never enters a verb name (the trigger is the facilitator's, per itd-97); the oracle is the model-access seam beneath review and audit, never a bucket. **Clean break, no aliases** — pre-1.0.0, `--impact breaking` drives version derivation (iss-171 precedent), users re-download; an alias would additionally collide with the documentation discipline's ban on change-narration, leaving an undocumented silent forward. The role mapping is the operational reason the split earns its cost: product thinker reads `audit` and essentially nothing else, which makes itd-99's "never hand a product thinker a technical decision" mechanically checkable. Same grill corrected a wrong finding: iss-246 was filed claiming abcd's record documents a surface far larger than the binary with no gate catching it; **false** — the `Status` column in 04-surfaces/README.md is machine-checked by `surface_coverage` (iss-35), the brief carries ~100 inline `design target` markers, and adr-5 makes the brief aspirational by design. The real defect is narrower: `surface_coverage` is blind *inside* a row, so six of twenty rows read `shipped` then qualify themselves in prose, and documents outside the registry cite those sub-verbs as live (all three citing **predecessor-store** spec ids spc-29/spc-30, whose prose survived the migration to the native store). Fix per adr-40 §6: sub-verb tables carrying two facts per verb — bucket and existence — with `surface_coverage` extended to registered cobra sub-commands, one table serving both disciplines. Also established: the twelve-step record walk completes at ten steps; step 2 (`capture promote`) has no verb and step 12 (`capture resolve`) cannot write `resolved_by`, so **walkability is sequenced before coherence** — renaming ~90 files across a process nobody can walk is polish before function. Plan at plans/2026-08-16-process-coherence-and-walkability.md; six intents to plan, none plannable unattended. Rejected: one polymorphic `review <id>` verb (merges the disjoint families, erases the role signal), classifying acts rather than surfaces (makes the bucket a statement of intent rather than a guarantee, and hands product thinkers lint findings), three buckets without `gate` (forces `intent ready` to become `intent lint`), and adding `verify`/`validate` (itd-109's verification suite is a packaging of lints and audits, not a fifth kind).