Four tests outside the scanner package guard bounded work with a tight wall-clock ceiling, the shape that made the scanner's cost guards fail gates under machine load: internal/core/reading/project_test.go (10s near line 89 and 5s near line 112), internal/core/guard/speculate_bound_test.go (3s near line 108, the tightest) and internal/core/guard/brace_test.go (5s near line 190). Each should assert a load-independent count of work, as the scanner's guards now do, or carry a ceiling generous enough that load cannot trip it. Found by the gallop lane's sibling sweep.

Four tests outside the scanner package guard bounded work with a tight wall-clock ceiling, the shape that made the scanner's cost guards fail gates under machine load: internal/core/reading/project_test.go (10s near line 89 and 5s near line 112), internal/core/guard/speculate_bound_test.go (3s near line 108, the tightest) and internal/core/guard/brace_test.go (5s near line 190). Each should assert a load-independent count of work, as the scanner's guards now do, or carry a ceiling generous enough that load cannot trip it. Found by the gallop lane's sibling sweep.

Grounds

• pursued: a gate run on a loaded machine no longer fails these four guards on linear code, while a quadratic regression still charges its seconds; one of them failing on a busy machine with no code change would show it wrong