ADR 0220: Self-supplied commands count for nothing in setup assurance

Amendments.

• ADR 0317 — applicability: enforcement and housekeeping still derive from [jobs]; the applicable denominator also reads the explicit [setup].not_applicable list. The three-state row enum remains closed, with an additive marker distinguishing an inapplicable absence.

Status: accepted; applies the additive-output discipline of ADR 0208

discern setup done closes with a quality-coverage assurance: each known job classified from [jobs] alone, rolled into a full / partial / minimal verdict, with minimal carrying the honest "no quality checks are wired yet" message. The classification was two-valued on presence: any command surviving no-op filtering made a job enforced.

The scaffold seeds format = "discern tidy" into every install. Under that rule the seed alone made enforced ≥ 1 on every fresh project, so the minimal verdict was unreachable in practice: a project with zero real checks completed setup reading "quality checks are wired". discern doctor's known-jobs warning — "gate may pass without the built-in protections" — was silenced by the same seed. For a product whose claim is that it checks what agents claim, awarding itself an unearned green at first contact contradicts the thesis.

Two constraints shape the fix. The seed is worth keeping: discern tidy genuinely runs in the gate and keeps discern's own surfaces canonical — but it is discern maintaining discern, present everywhere, evidence of nothing about the project. And the assurance state vocabulary is a closed enum on the public result contract, which evolves additively within a schema major: a consumer pinned to the published schema may validate results and switch exhaustively over the three states, so widening the enum is a breaking change the compatibility guard rejects.

A command that invokes discern's own built-in vocabulary — discern followed by a built-in verb, driven off KNOWN_VERBS as the single source of truth — is self-supplied and counts for nothing in coverage accounting. A known job whose real commands are all self-supplied classifies as deferred — the existing "present but counts for nothing" state — carrying a new optional self_supplied: true marker that distinguishes it from the :/empty no-op deferral. Only enforced jobs count toward the verdict, so a fresh scaffold reads minimal. Doctor's known-jobs warning keys on the same shared classifier. Human surfaces render the marked case as housekeeping; the wire keeps the three-state vocabulary and gains only the additive marker, per the additive-output discipline.

A Project Script invoked through the namespace (discern <script>) is project-authored and still counts: the predicate matches the built-in verb set, not the discern program name.

Explicitly not done: the seed is unchanged (tidy stays wired and the gate still runs it), and the exclusion is not an exact-string match on discern tidy — any built-in verb in a job command is equally self-supplied, and a new verb enrols the moment it joins KNOWN_VERBS.

A skeptic pointing discern at an empty repository now gets the floor verdict and the honest copy, and doctor warns until a real check is wired. The completion report can only improve by wiring genuine project commands. Consumers pinned to the published v1 schema keep validating: the state vocabulary is unchanged and the marker is an optional field addition.

deferred now spans two distinguishable cases — the deliberate no-op (with its inline-comment reason channel) and the self-supplied housekeeping job (with the marker) — and renderers that want the housekeeping distinction must read the marker, not the state.

Guards hold the semantics: every KNOWN_VERBS member is asserted self-supplied, and the template's canonical [jobs] block must assess as minimal, so a future seed cannot quietly re-award coverage.

Stop seeding discern tidy. Restores honesty by removing the cause, but loses canonical formatting on fresh installs and doctor's during-setup guarantee that the tidy hygiene survived the setup agent.

A fourth housekeeping state. The cleanest vocabulary, but it widens a closed enum on the public result contract within a major — a breaking change for pinned validators, rejected by the compatibility guard. The additive marker carries the same information compatibly.

Exclude the exact string discern tidy. Fixes the instance, not the class: any other self-invocation seeded or hand-wired later would re-create the unearned green, with no forcing function enrolling new verbs.