Recurring drift class: prose borrows a principle's authority for behaviour adjacent to but outside its letter. Three instances caught by fresh-context reviewers across the 2026-08-22/23 research notes: loud-staging cited for run-outcome reporting, loud-staging cited for runtime endpoint fallback, evaluator-outside-the-loop cited for reviewer freshness (its letter governs gate ownership). Only detector today is the SOTA-protocol's repo-fidelity review lens, which is genre-scoped; candidate detector is a standing principle-citation check in the reviewer agents' checklists (semantic, so a reviewer item rather than a deterministic lint).

Recurring drift class: prose borrows a principle's authority for behaviour adjacent to but outside its letter. Three instances caught by fresh-context reviewers across the 2026-08-22/23 research notes: loud-staging cited for run-outcome reporting, loud-staging cited for runtime endpoint fallback, evaluator-outside-the-loop cited for reviewer freshness (its letter governs gate ownership). Only detector today is the SOTA-protocol's repo-fidelity review lens, which is genre-scoped; candidate detector is a standing principle-citation check in the reviewer agents' checklists (semantic, so a reviewer item rather than a deterministic lint).

Remedy grounds (2026-09-29)

• Three instances in two days of research notes meet recurrence-is-signal, and the check is semantic, so a reviewer item is the right rung rather than a lint.
• No outside-practice check: the question is whether an internal checklist grows by one line.
• Rejected: a deterministic lint, which cannot read a principle's letter against the behaviour it is cited for.