Rendered from docs/obligations/0108-an-agent-writes-the-acceptance-stamp-of-every-document-in-this-corpus.md in the Headwater
corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy
the descriptor names: corpus.json.
An agent writes the acceptance stamp of every document in this corpus
Context
Stop rule 5 states the bar. An agent never writes accepted_by, and it never moves a warrant to accepted. It drafts, and it marks what it drafted as asserted where no human read the result. HW-EVAL-adjacent-work names the failure the rule prevents: a stamp that an agent applies to its own output, with a false name attached.
A count over the corpus root, excluding the package content that the descriptor excludes:
| reading | value |
|---|---|
| documents with front matter | 164 |
| documents with a provenance block | 163 |
blocks that name an agent in drafted_by |
161 |
of those, blocks that also carry accepted_by |
161 |
of those, blocks that carry warrant: asserted instead |
0 |
The agent that drafted each document typed accepted_by: j.baxter and warrant: accepted into it, before any human read a word of it. That is every case where the rule could apply, and the rate is one.
This record does the same thing, in its own front matter, for the reason the next section gives.
Obligation
The corpus owes a ruling, and the two available answers differ in what they cost.
The rule is right and the practice is wrong. An agent writes warrant: asserted and no accepted_by. A human moves both at review. Nothing in this engine moves a warrant, so the human moves it by hand on every document, and 161 documents need the correction.
The practice is right and the rule is worded wrong. A pull request is the acceptance, the block is part of what the human reviews, and a merge is the act that accepted_by names. Under this reading the stamp is a proposal until the merge and a fact after it.
The second reading is defensible and the bytes do not carry it. A document that a human merged and a document that an agent stamped and nobody read are the same file. So the corpus cannot answer the question that spec 3 says provenance exists to make a query rather than an archaeology exercise.
Nothing reports any of this. HW-OBL-0030 records that no taxonomy declares the block, so no rule reads a field of it. A stop rule with no instrument is a preference. This is the measurement of what that preference costs over 161 documents.
Discharge
This record is discharged. HW-DR-0034 rules that acceptance is the merge onto main, and that the second reading below holds. An agent may write accepted_by and warrant: accepted on a document it drafts. This holds where the document goes into a pull request a named human reviews before the merge. The stamp answers to nothing until the merge decides whether it was true. Stop rule 5 is reworded to say so.
A ruling on which reading holds, in the decision register, because the two answers assign the act to different parties.
Under the second reading, the block owes a form that separates a proposed stamp from a merged one. A warrant of asserted at draft time and a promotion at merge is one shape. It needs an actor that this engine does not have. HW-OBL-0105 already records that the hook actor plays no part anywhere.
Under either reading, the block owes a declaration before a rule can read it, which is HW-OBL-0030.
The practice moved before the ruling arrived, and this is the count
Re-measured on 2026-08-14 over every Markdown document under docs/, outside docs/taxonomies/**. 182 carry drafted_by. 179 carry accepted_by. Six carry warrant: asserted and no accepted_by at all, and every one of the six was written on 2026-08-14. They are the three probes, HW-OBL-0123, HW-OBL-0124 and HW-SPEC-the-recorder-contract.
So a second practice runs beside the one this record measures, and nothing declared it. An agent drafts, states the warrant it can state, and leaves the stamp to the reader of the proposal. That is what stop rule 5 asks for, and it is a shape rather than a ruling. The ruling this record waits on decides whether the six are the right answer or the start of a second gap.
A third practice runs beside both, and it is worse than either. The warrant reading of taxonomy audit reports the documents that state warrant: proposed, which spec 3's closed set does not hold. Each of them also names an acceptor, so each states a stamp under a warrant that requires nothing. HW-OBL-0125 holds it. The ruling this record waits on now covers three practices rather than two.