Enforcement claims are facts

The rule. A document may describe a gate, check, or regeneration step only if that mechanism demonstrably runs. A planned check is recorded as an intent, never written in present tense. When a gate is removed or never lands, every description of it goes in the same change.

Why. A phantom gate is worse than no gate: readers who believe a check exists stop compensating with the vigilance they would otherwise apply, so the false claim actively degrades quality rather than merely overstating it. This was the most-repeated defect class in the 2026-07-08 full-record review — a CLI-reference freshness check described in docs/reference/ that exists nowhere, lint families marked "Delivered" that internal/core/lint does not implement, and a gofmt gate attributed to make preflight that preflight does not run.

The proxy gate. The same harm arrives with the reassuring signal intact. A gate is evidence only for the property it measures over the subjects it measures, and a reader credits it with the property they care about across the subjects they assume. So a gate that runs and reports green while it measures a proxy for the claim (right subjects, wrong property), or measures the right property over a set narrowed by an exclusion (right property, wrong subjects), withdraws vigilance more thoroughly than a phantom gate does, because nothing about it invites a second look. Two consequences follow. A status field or a checked form is a claim, not evidence of the thing it names. And an exemption from a gate is an enforcement claim in negative form: something must be able to fail when the exclusion stops being earned, and a test asserting that it is still earned must itself be able to fail. The worked instances are in iss-2608230847432286 (a verified mark that proved only that cited ids resolve; a sub-verb sweep that exempted the two verbs where an unwanted write costs most, guarded by a test that could not fail). The class is gates and the claims made about them: a sample that happens to omit its own counterexamples, where nobody asserted a check, is outside it (product thinker, 2026-09-23).

Instance of a general rule. This is a special case of itd-195, adopted 2026-08-31: a claim about how the code behaves is executable, or it is not made. Stub pointer only — the relationship is recorded, not yet worked through.

Bounds.

• This is stricter than the general present-tense docs rule: an enforcement claim is load-bearing in a way ordinary description is not, because it changes reader behaviour.
• Aspiration is welcome — as a roadmap or intent entry with its unshipped status explicit, never as description.

Promotion. A record-lint rule that cross-checks named gates (Makefile targets, workflow steps, lint codes) against their definitions would promote this to a discipline; none exists yet.