receipts gate process integrity, not maintainability: candidate principle surfaced by the 2026-07 software-factories critique (primary observation: RL rewards fast oracles — tests pass in seconds — while bad architecture's cost function is measured in months, so maintainability has no fast oracle and models are not penalised for eroding it). Consequence for abcd: no receipt or deterministic gate can certify design quality; that verdict stays human (verifier-selects-gates-decide), and the maintainer merge on every PR is load-bearing, not ceremony. Candidate homes: a principle file or a brief mental-model line; adoption is the maintainer's call.

receipts gate process integrity, not maintainability: candidate principle surfaced by the 2026-07 software-factories critique (primary observation: RL rewards fast oracles — tests pass in seconds — while bad architecture's cost function is measured in months, so maintainability has no fast oracle and models are not penalised for eroding it). Consequence for abcd: no receipt or deterministic gate can certify design quality; that verdict stays human (verifier-selects-gates-decide), and the maintainer merge on every PR is load-bearing, not ceremony. Candidate homes: a principle file or a brief mental-model line; adoption is the maintainer's call.

Remedy grounds (2026-09-29)

• The candidate is the gate-side corollary of verifier-selects-gates-decide (gates admit, humans judge what no gate can), so a Bounds line there adds no new file, in line with less-but-better; a separate principle stays open to the ruling.
• No outside-practice check: the question is where an internal rule lives, not what the field does.
• Rejected: a receipt or lint that scores maintainability, which the record's own premise (no fast oracle for design quality) rules out.