RFC 003 §3.3 clause 3 clears an ask only on "no event OF YOURS", and the skill
states the consequence outright: "there is nothing anyone can do about it from
the other end". That asymmetry is deliberate and mostly right — owed-ness is a
statement about the RECIPIENT's accountability. It is wrong in exactly one case:
the requester retracting its own ask.
MEASURED COST. pi@mbp-m1-2020 withdrew a v1.8.13 rollout ask to pi@tor-ms22 at
seq 119 — terminal `superseded`, same correlation_id, metadata.closes naming the
thread, body "DO NOT SPEND A MINUTE ON v1.8.13" — and recorded it as done. It had
no effect: seq 119's from_agent is mbp, so it could never satisfy a join that
only inspects tor-ms22's own events. tor-ms22's next wake-up, 8h later and on the
first boot of the image shipping this very derivation, still listed the ask as
owed, 41h old, for a release it never installed. The failure is invisible from
the sender's side, which is why it went unnoticed for 41h.
WHY AN EXPLICIT MARKER RATHER THAN "ANY TERMINAL EVENT FROM THE REQUESTER".
This file's standing rule is that every failure stays on the noisy-but-visible
side: a resurfacing item costs one turn of human correction, a suppressed
unanswered ask is silent and permanent. Under the naive rule a requester
appending `applied` for its own bookkeeping — on the correlation, addressed to
me, before I ever replied — would silently delete a real obligation. So release
must be STATED: metadata.withdraws (canonical) or metadata.closes (already this
fleet's de-facto marker), whose value must NAME the ask — its correlation_id or
its event id. Prose does not count.
Five further guards, each pinned by a mutation test: only the original requester;
addressed to this device exactly, never '*'; terminal status; strictly after the
ask by hlc; and joined by ack_of or correlation_id.
This does NOT break the fixed point in §9.2. That section rejects letting
terminal directed events into the owed set, because then every closure mints a
fresh obligation. That is about CANDIDATES; this adds a CLEARER. A withdrawal is
terminal, so it can never be a candidate, and the asserting shape (open) and the
clearing shape (terminal) stay disjoint.
Also fixed here, because the new rule depends on the same windowing: the `mine`
query used event_list's DEFAULT `asc` order with limit 100, i.e. the OLDEST 100
events this device ever wrote. Once a device passes 100 authored events its most
RECENT replies fall out of the join window and every ask it just answered
resurfaces as owed. Latent, not theoretical — tor-ms22 was at ~20. Both windows
are now anchored at the newest end with order: "desc".
Verification: scripts/test-owed-withdrawal.sh, 17 assertions over VERBATIM
fixtures from the real log (seq 112/119/120/122). It extracts the predicates from
mempalace.ts by brace matching and runs the SHIPPED text rather than a pasted
copy — this repo has already paid for a divergent second copy. Sensitivity
proven by four mutations: removing the marker requirement flips exactly the 3
marker assertions, and disabling the third-party / broadcast / ordering guards
each flip exactly their own. Control passes.
joakimp
e2b060a940