Rendered from docs/obligations/0126-every-asserted-document-carries-the-freshness-date-that-spec-3-says-it-cannot.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

Every asserted document carries the freshness date that spec 3 says it cannot

Context

Spec 3 states the rule in one sentence: "Content with the asserted warrant carries no freshness value, and the engine never reports it as stale. last_verified records that a human confirmed a document, and nobody confirmed this one. It cannot acquire the date without becoming accepted, which is what promotion is."

The pairing table beside it names what each warrant requires and what it forbids. asserted requires drafted_by, activity and the sources that produced the content, and it forbids accepted_by. The table says nothing about last_verified, so the ruling stands in the paragraph alone.

The facet contract answers the other way. last_verified is in the freshness role, every kind that carries the facet requires it, and facet.required.missing reports its absence as an error. A document with the asserted warrant and no last_verified therefore fails the commit gate. This record was drafted after a run of headwater check reported exactly that against a new decision. That decision was HW-DR-0024, for Q24, which is the first decision here drafted with the asserted warrant. The commit gate refused it.

Obligation

The corpus stands on the facet contract's side, in every case. headwater taxonomy audit reports nine documents under warrant: asserted on 2026-08-15, and nine of the nine carry last_verified. No document exercises the reading that spec 3 states.

Nothing reports the split. facet.required.missing reads the kind and never the warrant, and no rule pairs the two. So the sentence in spec 3 is a rule that no check enforces and that no document obeys. A reader who follows it writes a document the gate refuses.

Three answers are open and each says something different about what a warrant means. Spec 3 is wrong. A freshness date on unaccepted content records when the content was produced, rather than when a human confirmed it. Or the facet contract is wrong, and last_verified belongs to the kinds whose documents can be accepted rather than to every kind. Or the nine documents are wrong, and asserted is a warrant that this corpus has been writing for the wrong reason.

Discharge

A ruling that names which of the three holds, recorded where the next author meets it. If spec 3 stands, the facet contract needs a declaration that makes last_verified conditional on the warrant. HW-OBL-0123 already reports that such a declaration has nowhere to be stated. If the facet contract stands, the sentence in spec 3 goes and the pairing table gains a row.

This is not settled by an agent. The question is what an acceptance stamp and a freshness date each mean, which is the same question HW-OBL-0108 and HW-OBL-0125 put to a human. An agent that answered it would be deciding what stands behind its own drafts.