check-cited resolves every citation marker against the artifact it names, and
has one structural blind spot: it can only resolve the markers that exist. A
measured figure written into prose with no marker beside it is not a failed
citation, it is not a citation at all, and nothing looks at it again.
Desk pass 11 proved it. "A median 24 rounds" sat in the Pacing Note and "24 if
the column joins" in EXPOSURE, against a baseline holding 21 at two of the
column joining and 25 at three, through every pass that checked citations.
This reads the figures instead of the markers. Narrow by design: an earlier
draft matched any number within 45 characters of a measurement word and found
282 candidates, nearly all prose ("down 140 steps", "an engineer on his
rounds", "01:06"). The shapes here are the phrasings the documents actually use
when quoting the simulator, each read off a figure that is cited somewhere.
Opt-in rule: a document that uses citations must mark every measurement figure.
One that cites nothing is held by a ratchet instead — turning three unguarded
scenarios red is how a guard gets switched off on the day it is written — and
joins the strict regime the moment it gains its first marker.
It found three things in CLEAN GROUND before it was wired in:
- 74.9% printed bare twice while cited correctly four times, and that is the
figure that was published at 58.7% until the truncated sweep was found.
- "the longest fight is 120 rounds" — 120 is exactly packs cut.hollow6.longest,
the field check-cited REFUSES to let anybody cite because a sample maximum
moves by a third on a re-seed. Refusing the citation while printing the number
left the least stable figure in the suite as the only one nothing held. The
sentence now leans on the guarantee that is actually strong: check-packs
refuses to record a sweep in which anything reached the cap.
Proved by breaking it, four ways, with byte-identical restores: a stripped
marker fails, a planted "median 24 rounds" fails at its own line, a new bare
figure in an uncited document trips the ratchet, and a threshold column header
("Past 15 rounds") does not fire — that last one was a real false positive in
the first draft, which tested the matched text rather than its context.
v0.23. 21 guards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
