statecraft.
Catalog/spec-spine

080-an-unresolved-claim-is-not-stale

An unresolved claim exits as a validation failure

Lifecycle approvedImplementation completeVerification unknownQualification unknown

Spec 079 stopped `check` calling an unresolved claim "stale" and stopped it prescribing `spec-spine index`, a remedy that provably does not work. It deliberately left the exit code alone, because 069 3.1 pins "the exit code is unchanged: 2 when anything drifted" and adopters branch on it. The result is a verb whose prose says "this is not staleness" while its exit code says staleness, and exit 2 is the code an adopter's CLAUDE.md maps to "run spec-spine index". This spec moves an unresolved claim to exit 1, the validation code, by an `amends` edge on 086. A spec claiming a unit that does not resolve is a corpus that does not describe its tree, which is a validation failure and not a ledger that has fallen behind. No message changes: 098 already made every report line correct.

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Relationships

Claimed units

  • extends
    {
  "nature": "corrective",
  "spec": "062-one-name-one-freshness-verb",
  "unit": {
    "kind": "file",
    "path": "crates/spec-spine-cli/src/cmd_check.rs"
  }
}
  • extends
    {
  "nature": "corrective",
  "spec": "004-codebase-index",
  "unit": {
    "kind": "file",
    "path": "crates/spec-spine-cli/src/cmd_index.rs"
  }
}
  • extends
    {
  "nature": "additive",
  "spec": "079-a-blocking-claim-is-not-a-stale-shard",
  "unit": {
    "kind": "file",
    "path": "crates/spec-spine-cli/tests/cli.rs"
  }
}

Source headings

  1. 080: An unresolved claim exits as a validation failure
  2. 1. Purpose
  3. 1.1 The verb contradicts itself
  4. 1.2 Why the code matters more than it looks
  5. 1.3 Why this needs an amendment rather than a fix
  6. 2. Territory
  7. 3. Behavior
  8. 3.1 `check` spends 1 on an unresolved claim
  9. 3.2 `index check` spends 1 on the same fact
  10. 3.3 Nothing else moves
  11. 3.4 The acceptance is the reproduction
  12. 4. Out of scope
  13. 5. Resolved decisions
  14. Verification

Frozen anchors

No frozen anchors declared.