ADR 0282: Self-invocations carry recorded provenance

Status: accepted. Extends ADR 0162 and the population reporting in ADR 0160.

The gate's job runner exports CI=1 to every job it spawns — the honest signal for a local CI run, and the switch that keeps watch-mode test runners in single-run form. A job that itself invokes discern therefore records a Logbook event whose environment says CI, whose format flag says --json, and whose identity markers are whatever the outer session leaked in.

Measured over this repository's Logbook, roughly a third of all recorded verb events are gate children. Under format-flag scoring they inflated the agent tally; under signal scoring they land in unknown; when the outer session was an agent's, their inherited markers credit that agent's cohort with plumbing nobody chose to run. Reading ci alone as the automation marker would conflate an externally scheduled gate run with a gate's own child: both are ci=true.

discern knows precisely when it is spawning itself. Inferring that fact back out of ambient environment evidence discards knowledge the runner holds first-hand.

The job runner declares itself. Alongside CI=1, it stamps DISCERN_SPAWNED_BY=<invocation id> — the running verb's Logbook invocation id, published across the process by the recorder. The CLI driver facts record the marker verbatim as driver.spawned_by; scoring stays reader work.

Readers gain a fourth driver kind, automation: spawned_by present, or — covering pre-marker history and genuine external automation — ci set without it. Population accounts report {agent, human, automation, unknown}. The cohort seam excludes automation events from identity attribution and run denominators, so cohorts compare what a driver chose to run; the excluded share stays visible in the population account.

A CLI process records one verb, so the stamped id is exact there. The long-lived MCP server could overlap two effectful verbs; the published id is last-write-wins, advisory evidence like every driver signal, never authority.

• Gate children stop counting as anyone's decision: cohort denominators drop the plumbing share, and per-verb findings stop crediting tidy and documentation checks to whichever agent ran the gate.
• ADR 0162's re-scoring promise pays retroactively: accumulated history reclassifies through the ci fallback with no migration, and the conflation of external CI with gate children in that fallback resolves itself as newly recorded events carry the explicit marker.
• A project running discern inside real CI reads honestly: externally driven runs are automation too, which is what they are.
• One more DISCERN_* variable rides the process-internals registry; a job's children inherit it. The blast radius is one advisory Logbook field.

• Classify ci=true as automation with no new marker. Rejected: it permanently conflates external CI with self-invocation, and it misreads any project whose developers export CI locally.
• Thread the invocation id through the call chain to the runner. Rejected as invasive: the recorder already owns the id; a process-scoped seam carries it with one setter and one reader.
• Suppress Logbook recording in gate children. Rejected: the events are real work with real durations and failures; the honest fix is classification, not silence.