The load gate opened a whole make preflight at load 17.8 on ten cores, under the 20 threshold, yet three packages (internal/core/claim, internal/core/implement/loop, internal/surface/cli) then hit the twenty-minute test timeout, because the other sessions' ungated stages kept the load near the threshold for the whole run

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• dcn-26102719225024802026-10-27 — Majors ruling for the next cut, product thinker, 27 October 2026, on abcd-78's recommendations for the 17 hand-captured majors since v0.15.1. Fix before the cut: the eight recommended fixes (iss-2610251555094324, iss-2610241537197997, iss-2610241414124940, iss-2610241911052191, iss-2610241240133009, iss-2610241133284600, iss-2610241239492159, iss-2610241519088123) and five recommended for deferral that the product thinker chose to fix instead: the short install command in the docs (iss-2610240827243654), a worktree per session (iss-2610240859590333), clearing lapsed holds everywhere (iss-2610241107191205), the reflect criteria (iss-2610241431221889) and the measured home-folder receipt (iss-2610241551259104). Deferred one cycle: iss-2610241228359748, iss-2610240932215918, iss-2610241613191748. Amended and closed: iss-2610241427397332 (itd-3's obsolete criteria). The 69 consistency-pass majors are ruled on branch decisions/interview-2026-10-27.
• dcn-26102907410943042026-10-29 — Declined part of iss-2610241414124940's remedy: once a run holds a slot, the gate does not switch to judging capacity by the slot count alone and keeps its load limit. Grounds, the timeout evidence of the two records: on 2026-10-24, with several preflights' test stages admitted together at a load near 20 on 10 cores, six packages hit their 20-minute per-binary timeouts in one run, so admitting more than one at a time made all of them fail (iss-2610241414124940); and the gate opened a whole run at load 17.8 on 10 cores, under its limit, after which three packages (claim, implement/loop, surface/cli) hit the 20-minute timeout because the load stayed near the threshold for the whole run (iss-2610241911052191). Admitting by slots past the load would admit more runs into exactly that load. The starvation that part answered came from queued runs' ungated stages feeding the load they waited on, which whole-run admission removes (itd-2610262127138979): a queued run now does no work. The idle-slot part of the same remedy is carried by iss-2610262155232329. The same record's 2026-10-25 evidence points the other way from slot-only admission too: a run admitted alone at load 8.5 on 10 cores still timed out three packages while the machine's on-access scanner used one to two cores, a cost the load average does not show, so the load is if anything an optimistic signal there; admission on measured headroom is the draft itd-2610262141001890.
• dcn-26102911322235522026-10-29 — iss-2610241911052191 takes the issue's second remedy, a per-binary test timeout scaled with the load as -p is, not admission on projected headroom (draft itd-2610262141001890). Each test stage's go test -timeout is the Makefile's 40m base while the one-minute load is at most one runnable per online core and twice it past that, two values only because go test hashes -timeout into its cache key and a budget moving with each reading would rerun every cached package on a busy machine, read once as the stage starts by `cmd/test-parallelism -timeout <base>` (machineload.GoTestTimeout, implement.PreflightTimeout). On a CI runner, or where the machine cannot be read, it is the base, so CI's race steps and the local race lane keep one declared budget. The cap of two keeps both stages inside land's four-hour run bound with room for the gates and eval lanes; a bad base is refused loudly, so the stage fails rather than running with go test's 10m default.
• iss-2610262155232329A load-gate slot held by a run that has stopped using the machine is never released: a holder that hangs or idles keeps its slot until its own timeout, and every other waiter waits behind it (part of the remedy of iss-2610241414124940, split out of itd-2610262127138979 at its planning on 2026-10-26, because whole-run admission does not decide it). Admitting a run on the headroom it will need rather than the load at one instant (part of iss-2610241911052191) moves with it to the adaptive count, itd-2610262141001890.
• itd-2610262127138979A preflight waits for its turn as one whole run