Phase 3r landed §6.7 and the phase-5 audit was re-run against it immediately.
It found a second measured defect within minutes: a real hardware sink
carrying `unresolved-ancestry` permanently, from one link observed while its
output node was still unbound during enumeration. Round 8 made that
systematic rather than rare, because every node is now withheld until its
bind resolves.
New §6.8: sticky taint is a claim about history, and uncertainty is not
history. Retiring by reason code would not be enough — an unresolved node
propagates `TaintedUpstream`, which is indistinguishable from real
contamination once recorded — so the split is by provenance: the engine runs
its fixpoint twice, and only the evidence-only pass may feed sticky state.
Decisions are unchanged and still fail closed.
Also recorded in §6.8, both from Codex's round-9 review and both pre-existing:
hardware playback-to-capture paths ("Stereo Mix") defeat the `session_device`
classifier in a way the driver denylist cannot detect — a real echo path
needing a design call — and the 2 s readiness budget has no calibration
argument beyond one measurement on one idle desktop.
Impl plan: phase 3r marked built and merged with its gate results, including
the extra Device-side live gate and why row 1 alone could not cover it.
The phase-5 dry-run gate failed on its first live run: the engine built to
v3.4 could not see its own primary taint root (echo, AEC off) while excluding
every stream on the machine (silence). One cause — the PipeWire registry
`global` event carries only a filtered subset of an object's properties, and
eight the design depends on are never announced.
Design doc (v3.4 → v3.5):
- NEW §6.7 — the observation boundary. The global is an index, not a source of
truth: bind every Node and Device, `info` props are the sole source, live
prop tracking, one readiness obligation per unbound node, fail closed.
Four user design calls recorded.
- §5.1 — a second, registry-visible tag carrier (`node.name` prefix) alongside
`peerspeak.owned`, so the primary root does not rest on one mechanism.
- §6.4 — node/device props are not an optimisation to skip, they are
unavailable from the global; the round-6 Link lesson was right and applied
to exactly one object type.
- §6.1.0, §6.1.4 — the two corrections the impl plan owed v3.5: a
time-dependent "hazard is LIVE" claim, and an unreachable nominated test
case (twice over).
- §9.1 measured facts, §12 rig discipline (pw-dump binds; the registry does
not), §14 readiness.
Impl plan:
- NEW phase 3r with a four-part exit gate, the first the direct inverse of the
finding. Ports deliberately not bound in v1, with a revisit trigger.
- Phase 1 pins the second carrier literal as a cross-repo contract.
- Phase 5 marked GATE FAILED; matrix and O5 re-run after 3r and 1.
- Risk register: the over-exclusion row fired and worked; new row for the
observation boundary class.
Architecture is unchanged and vindicated: fed correct properties, the engine
decided correctly in every fixture. The §5.1 exact-partition requirement is
what caught this — every exclusion was defensible and the eligible half was
empty.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Turns the converged v3.4 design into ordered phases with falsifiable exit
gates. Three adversarial review rounds with Codex (gpt-5.6-sol, xhigh);
findings adjudicated rather than accepted wholesale, with reachability
verified against source on both sides.
Structural decisions:
- Phase 0d closes BOTH unsafe paths into the capture (source string and
capture-sink inputs) before any machinery that could take them exists.
- Phase 5 dry-run audit mode is a hard gate: the taint engine runs against
the live graph, creating no links, asserting exact eligible/excluded
partitions with reason codes.
- Link manager is deliberately last among the pixelpass components.
Two measured corrections owed back to v3.4 (plan §11): §6.1.0's "hazard is
LIVE right now" has already flipped and must not be gated on, and §6.1.4
nominates an unreachable test case (as did my first replacement for it).
Design approval only. No code, nothing approved for merge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
mollusk
