Workaround records the defect

The rule. When abcd itself breaks — an error, wrong or empty output, a missing or retired path, a surprising behaviour — and a manual workaround is taken to keep moving, the workaround is not complete until the underlying defect is recorded as a ledger issue (abcd capture). Working around it to unblock is fine; a silent workaround is not, because the workaround is the only trace the defect ever showed itself, and taking it without recording erases that trace. Recording the issue is the non-negotiable minimum — at least enough to investigate later.

Why. abcd improves only on recorded evidence; an unrecorded defect is invisible and is never fixed. A manual workaround is exactly the moment the system revealed a gap and the moment that signal is most likely to be lost — the immediate problem is unblocked, attention moves on, and the defect survives to bite the next user. Capturing it converts a private patch into a public, drainable work item, and (composing with fix-the-detector) into a candidate detector plus its acceptance corpus.

Bounds.

• Binds on defects in abcd — the binary, the plugin surface, the record's own tooling. Friction from the host harness, or an operator's own mistake (a mistyped command, a shell pipe that swallowed the output), is not an abcd defect: discern the source and capture only the abcd case, so the ledger stays signal, not noise.
• "Record" is the floor, not the ceiling. A one-line capture naming the failing behaviour and its site (file:line if known) is enough to move on; a genuine one-off gets a plain issue, a shared root cause gets the fix-the-detector treatment.
• Applies to any abcd use, not only formal reviews — and the /abcd:run loop captures the abcd defects it hits mid-run rather than only working around them.
• Composes with reality-is-filable (the ledger's taxonomy must be able to express the true broken state — an unfilable defect is itself a defect), and enforcement-claims-are-facts (a broken gate is recorded, never quietly bypassed).

Live instance. The 2026-07-12 dogfooding session moved forward on three workarounds and left a ledger trace for each: the always-latest binary wrapper worked around abcd having no dev/track-latest install mode → iss-75; memory-lint writing to the retired .abcd/logbook/ → iss-73; a duplicate iss-56 id → iss-74. The host-harness quirks hit the same session (a guard-hook blocking a gh call, an empty /plugin details) were deliberately not captured — not abcd defects.

Promotion. Principle now (entry rung). The enabling convention beneath it is the existing abcd capture ledger (exists). The discipline/tool rung above it is absent: a check that a session or run which took a workaround emitted a matching capture is hard to make fully mechanical, so the realistic MVP toward it is a run-loop self-report (the /abcd:run protocol asserts "defects hit → captured" in its handoff) or a review-checklist rule, before any gate.