internal/core/reading/manifest.go documents that two assemblies of one repository state at one commit produce manifests differing in run_id and in nothing else. Nothing asserts it. spc-65 scopes the manifest to two weaker properties (no timestamp-shaped key or scalar, item paths in lexicographic order) and excludes it from the byte comparison, so a nondeterminism confined to the manifest — a changed content hash, an item recorded at a different field — is invisible to the amnesia eval. The cheap closure is a manifest comparison modulo run_id in the same eval.

internal/core/reading/manifest.go documents that two assemblies of one repository state at one commit produce manifests differing in run_id and in nothing else. Nothing asserts it. spc-65 scopes the manifest to two weaker properties (no timestamp-shaped key or scalar, item paths in lexicographic order) and excludes it from the byte comparison, so a nondeterminism confined to the manifest — a changed content hash, an item recorded at a different field — is invisible to the amnesia eval. The cheap closure is a manifest comparison modulo run_id in the same eval.

Corrected on 2026-08-31 by the itd-187 fidelity audit, which found this record overstates its own gap. The manifest's run-to-run stability IS held: internal/core/reading/manifest_test.go:161 compares two manifests of one state with the run identifier blanked and fails if they differ in anything else, so a per-run content hash turns that test red even though it passes the whole cold-reading lane. What is true is narrower and still worth having: the property is asserted in the assembler's own package rather than in the eval that claims amnesia, and the eval's distinct contribution there is the two-path dimension the package test cannot see, since it runs both assemblies in one directory. A record that overstates a gap is the same defect as one that understates it, pointing the other way.

Grounds

• pursued: a manifest nondeterminism confined to the manifest now fails the cold-reading eval lane; shown wrong if a mutation of a manifest field other than run_id passes TestAssembledInputIsByteIdenticalAcrossRuns