The ratchet that would make a fidelity verdict binding waits on a corpus of real verdicts, because there are none. A baseline ratchet is how this repository already converts an advisory signal into a red gate: today's failures are baselined, a new one fails, and a fixed one invites a shrink. Applied to the intent audit it would make a newly failed acceptance criterion fail a gate rather than sit in prose. It is deliberately split out of the intent that gives a failed verdict a tracked record, and sequenced behind it, because a ratchet baselines whatever number it finds and no intent has been audited even once: seeding it now would baseline a number nobody has looked at. It also needs the audit's position relative to the merge settled first, since a ratchet on a post-merge verdict fails the next unrelated change rather than the one that caused the failure, and it needs its blocking behaviour declared for both facilitator modes.

The ratchet that would make a fidelity verdict binding waits on a corpus of real verdicts, because there are none. A baseline ratchet is how this repository already converts an advisory signal into a red gate: today's failures are baselined, a new one fails, and a fixed one invites a shrink. Applied to the intent audit it would make a newly failed acceptance criterion fail a gate rather than sit in prose. It is deliberately split out of the intent that gives a failed verdict a tracked record, and sequenced behind it, because a ratchet baselines whatever number it finds and no intent has been audited even once: seeding it now would baseline a number nobody has looked at. It also needs the audit's position relative to the merge settled first, since a ratchet on a post-merge verdict fails the next unrelated change rather than the one that caused the failure, and it needs its blocking behaviour declared for both facilitator modes.

Remedy grounds (2026-09-29)

Why: ruling BT3 (2026-09-29) already chose one shared shrink-only baseline for warn rules, so the verdict ratchet reuses it instead of adding a second mechanism. SOTA check: betterer keeps a committed results file, fails when a result gets worse, updates it when better, and in CI mode fails on any difference from the committed file (https://phenomnomnominal.github.io/betterer/docs/running-betterer, read 2026-09-29). Rejected: seeding the baseline now, which would baseline a number nobody has read, as the record says.