Invariant 2 says a missing or misbehaving adapter falls back to the native path and abcd never blocks; the reading chapter says a cold-reading dispatch whose provider cannot be reached exits 2 with nothing ingested.

Invariant 2 says a missing or misbehaving adapter falls back to the native path and abcd never blocks; the reading chapter says a cold-reading dispatch whose provider cannot be reached exits 2 with nothing ingested.

A premise contradiction (severity minor) found by the cross-document consistency pass.

• End A: .abcd/development/brief/02-constraints/03-invariants.md:11 — "A missing or misbehaving adapter degrades to the native path; abcd never blocks on an absent tool."
• End B: .abcd/development/brief/04-surfaces/23-reading.md:377 — "a provider that could not be reached, a run id outside the run-id grammar, a run no assembly parked, and a dispatch that also names an output each exit 2 with nothing ingested."

03-invariants makes fallback non-negotiable: a missing or misbehaving adapter degrades to the native path, and abcd never blocks on an absent tool. 23-reading routes a position to a provider, which is an opt-in oracle adapter. When that provider could not be reached, the dispatch exits 2 with nothing ingested instead of falling back to the host-delegated harness, and only an explicit host-decides override keeps the run on the harness. An unreachable configured provider therefore blocks the reading instead of degrading.

Evidence: .abcd/work/reviews/2026-10-26-consistency/00-summary.md, finding 65.

Grounds

• declined: Closed in the 2026-10-27 triage (dcn-2610271112330536): the two ends do not conflict when read in full. The exit 2 is the hand-back to the host path, not an end of the reading, and commands/reading.md says the unreachable provider resolves to the harness. The chapter sentence omits the fallback clause.