Verdicts are provenance-blind; disposition is not
A verdict (the cache saying a replay is honest, the drift gate saying generated output matches source, a diagnostic, a CI result) judges the work. No verdict conditions on who or what produced the change: cache keys hash content, the drift gate compares bytes, diagnostics read the tree. Whether a change was typed by hand or generated is invisible to every gate, on purpose, because good software is the only defensible standard at the tool layer, and a bar that moves with the byline is theater in both directions: extra suspicion for one author, unearned trust for another.
Disposition is the opposite case. Accepting a proposal, sending a review, landing a change: these are accountability, and accountability needs a true name. That is why authorship is stamped from the transport a write arrived on, never from what the writer claims about itself (the mechanism described under Agents propose, humans dispose). The blindness half is structural today and stated here so that a proposal to break it, a gate keyed on how code was written, has to argue with this page first.
Enforced by
- Cache keys hash content, the drift gate compares bytes, and diagnostics read the tree; none of them takes an author as input.
- Exactly one code path grades a write by who is acting, and naming it keeps
the rule checkable.
gradeLeasedWritereads the lease ledger to decide whether a worker is editing outside the paths its lease declared. That is a concurrency-ownership question in the guard (who owns this file right now) rather than a judgment about the work, and it reaches no cache key, no drift comparison, and no diagnostic. Its uncertainties (no ledger, no live lease, a file that will not parse) fail open with at most an advisory.
Good
The gate reads the bytes; the record of who landed them reads the transport.
magus affected ci
git log -1 --format='%an <%ae>'
Bad
rules:
- if: commit.trailers contains "Co-Authored-By: Claude"
then: require_extra_review
The bar moves with the byline. A trailer is whatever the writer typed, so the rule both insults honest work and waves through anything that leaves it out.