Rendered from docs/probes/a-cold-agent-reaches-the-governing-document-through-the-corpus-descriptor.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

A cold agent reaches the governing document through the corpus descriptor

Task

Add a rule to this engine that reports a document whose summary is empty. Say where the rule is declared, where it is implemented, and what its severity is.

The session opens with .headwater/corpus.json and with no other pointer into the corpus. That is the state Q14 claims the descriptor serves: a cold agent that has read one generated file and nothing else.

Expectation

opened over HW-SPEC-check-layer. The transcript shows that the session read the document that states what a rule is, where it is declared and what makes it an error rather than advisory.

The task is written against behavior and not against a phrasing. It names no document, no shelf and no file path, so a session that reaches the check layer reached it through the descriptor or through the graph, and a session that answers from the task statement alone has not.

This probe measures the descriptor and never the answer. Whether the rule the session proposes is a good rule is a judgment, and a question that needs a judgment is not a probe. The predicate is over the read set, which is a fact about the transcript.

HW-OBL-0010 is what this discharges when it runs. It has not discharged it. The recorder landed and one session was recorded on 2026-09-09, and the commit that committed the transcript moved .headwater/taxonomy.lock in the same commit, so the first of the five confirmations refuses the recording and the result carries no verdict for this probe.