At every refusal, emit what the tool knows

The rule. When abcd refuses, the refusal carries what the tool already holds about the thing it is refusing: the allowed values it validated against, the value it was given, and the condition it checked. A refusal that names only the offending input makes the operator rediscover what the tool knew at the moment it said no.

Why. An autonomous run in a managed repository on 2026-09-09/10 found the centre sound and the failures at the edges. The record store, the folder-as-status model and the verbs that move records held under 27 parallel branches with no merge conflict, and the defects that run did find shared one shape: abcd possessed exactly the information the operator needed, at exactly the moment it refused, and emitted a refusal without it. It rejected a --category while holding the enum it rejected it against; it asked the host for a delivered range it had held at spec close; it named an include path without the condition it was checking. The claim was graded and adopted by the product thinker on 2026-09-23 (iss-2609100509531349). If it holds, the class has one remedy rather than many, and that remedy also closes the instances nobody has hit yet.

Breaches on record. Each is an open finding of this shape:

• iss-2608290810037524: an unrecognised --source value is refused without the accepted values.
• iss-2609100506265392: the audit request asks the host for a range the tool held at spec close.
• iss-2608270559313719: launch --dry-run names the include file but not the condition, how to create one, or whether this repository needs one.
• iss-2609100508570527: capture does not say that the record it wrote is untracked.
• iss-2609100508566033: abcd does not name its own adjacent capabilities.

Bounds.

• It governs what abcd already knows. A refusal is not an obligation to go and find out more; it is an obligation not to withhold.
• It never loosens a refusal. The refusal stands, and only its message grows.
• A secret, or a private name the banlist guards, is never echoed back because it was the refused value. What the tool knows is emitted within the privacy rules, not around them.
• The allowed set is named from its one canonical definition, never from a second copy written into the message, so the message cannot drift from the check.

Promotion. A test pattern that drives each refusal path and asserts that the message carries the allowed set, the given value and the checked condition, together with a lint that finds refusal paths without such a test, would promote this to a discipline. Related: guards-prove-themselves (a refusal is tested), unrecognized-input-never-writes (what is refused).