2026-08-31 — The cold-reading evals' CI job is NOT added to the branch

2026-08-31 — The cold-reading evals' CI job is NOT added to the branch ruleset's required-check list yet, and the sequencing is the decision rather than the delay. The job and its make target exist only on experiment/cold-reading; neither is on main, which was checked rather than assumed. A required status check blocks a pull request until that context reports, and a context no workflow on the base branch produces never reports — so arming cold-reading-evals on the active main protection ruleset before the workflow reaches main would wedge every merge to main, including the very pull request that would deliver the workflow. The order is therefore: merge the workstream to main first, confirm the job runs and reports its context on a real pull request, and only then add it to the live ruleset and to the committed mirror at .abcd/work/rulesets/main-protection.json in one change. Rejected: updating the mirror now to record the intent, because a mirror asserting a required check that is not required is a false record of exactly the kind this phase spent the day removing, and it would read as done. Until the arming lands, itd-186's always-run lane runs on every pull request and gates none of them, which is a green for work that did happen but binds nothing — the weaker half of the failure spc-64 was written against. Tracked at iss-2608311051046981.