The readings companion design document counts five disposition states over a four-row table and still describes a two-operand invocation

The readings companion design document counts five disposition states over a four-row table and still describes a two-operand invocation

The readings companion (v4) is the later of the two governing design documents and the one the shipped code follows wherever the two differ. Two of its own statements are wrong against its own tables and against the code.

The first is arithmetic. Section 4.3 announces a "Ratified vocabulary, five states, with availability varying by position", and ruling R7 repeats "five disposition states". The table under section 4.3 has four rows: accepted, rejected, declined and held. The code ships those four in internal/core/issueschema/reading.go and carries a comment recording the five-versus-four discrepancy as knowingly unresolved; the v0.7.0 changelog was corrected from "five" to "four" at the docs-currency gate. Nothing in the companion names a fifth state, and the decision log's 2026-08-30 entry records that the fifth stays unnamed. The count in the document is the defect.

The second is currency. Section 4.1 still states that "the operator supplies a position and a target state" and that the invocation carries no free text on that basis. adr-58 (2026-08-31) added a third operand, the scope, in a closed grammar, and restated the binding property as "no operand carries prose". The companion predates the ADR by two days and has not been amended.

Both are corrections to the document rather than to the code, and the document lives outside the repository, so this record is the pointer: the next revision of the companion should read "four states" and carry the scope operand in section 4.1, and until it does a reader holding the document against the binary will find the binary wrong where it is the document. The governing framework's own pending amendments (the companion's section 12 plus adr-58 and ingest-time minting) are held separately and are not this record's.

Grounds

• deferred: the document lives outside the repository, so the record can only point at what it owes; the maintainer amends it