A file that did not exist, once

89 reports, zero promoted claims

Overnight agents filed 89 source reports into the knowledge base behind aneury.org: 53 check-ins, 36 news notes. The interesting part is what did not happen: nothing they claimed became a verified fact. Every payload is archived byte-for-byte with a SHA-256, filed as reported-unreviewed, and the original text is fenced so embedded instructions can’t pose as authority.

Backlog will be preserved as attributed, unreviewed source records; no report assertions become verified project facts merely through filing.

That rule came out of this week’s knowledge-base audit, whose one-line verdict was that the model is good but depends on agents remembering a long procedure. Filing with provenance is now the procedure, and lint runs in CI over 154 pages.

When an absent file lies to you

One wrinkle from the publisher: on a fresh bucket, reading the previous release manifest fails, and wrangler writes an empty local file while failing. The old code treated “key does not exist” as fine but left the empty file behind, and the next JSON parse exploded with a confusing error.

if "does not exist" in output:
    path.unlink(missing_ok=True)  # wrangler left an empty file
    return

Delete the empty file, then validate that whatever you did read is actually a version-1 manifest before trusting it. Classic “the error path itself has state” territory, and it took a unit test to pin down.