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+# Verification guards earn default-on by measured precision, not by plausible oracle
+
+- Status: accepted
+- Date: 2026-07-25
+
+## Context
+
+A program to add claim-verification guards to `guardrails` (#1270) scoped three, on the
+reasoning that each had a mechanical oracle and no existing coverage:
+
+| Candidate | Oracle | Tier claimed at scoping |
+|---|---|---|
+| Asserted repo-relative path that does not exist | filesystem test | Deterministic |
+| Version string disagreeing with its owning manifest | manifest compare | Deterministic |
+| `/plugin:skill` reference that does not resolve | glob the plugins tree | Detect-then-judge |
+
+All three reasoned soundly from the oracle. Two did not survive contact with the repository.
+
+The **version guard** was dropped before implementation. Its only in-repo surface — a
+`## [<version>]` heading versus the manifest — is already covered deterministically by
+`scripts/check-changelog-parity.sh --check-bump`, a required CI gate. An enumeration of the
+residual prose surface (all `*.md` under `plugins/` and `docs/`, every string in every
+`plugin.json` and `marketplace.json` outside the `version` field, `plugins/*/hooks/*.sh`,
+`.github/**`, `scripts/`, `.claude/`) found only third-party versions no local manifest can
+adjudicate, plus claim shapes a manifest compare reads *wrong*: historical
+("before the `0.6.0` split"), minimum floors ("implementation `0.9.0`+", true and documented
+as explicitly *not* a version dependency), and planned values ("CREATE: `0.1.0`").
+
+The **path guard** was built, tested to 61 contract cases, reviewed, and then withdrawn on
+measurement. Swept across all 975 tracked markdown files, each fed to the hook as a real
+`PostToolUse` payload:
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| Files firing | **231 / 975 = 23.7%** |
+| Findings | **389** |
+| True positives | **0** |
+
+The oracle never misfired — no candidate resolved at the repo root. Every finding was a
+scoping failure. 72% were consumer-project config paths (`.claude/**` and similar) that a
+doc describes for a *consuming* repo and that a marketplace correctly lacks; its
+first-segment gate passed only because this repo happens to carry same-named top-level
+directories. Fixing the three dominant causes still left ~4% firing at zero true positives.
+
+The **reference guard** shipped. Same corpus: 4 true positives, verified individually. Its
+noise was 89% CHANGELOG rename entries — content the hook's own advisory calls correct as
+written, because a CHANGELOG is append-only by contract and a rename entry must keep naming
+the old command. Excluding CHANGELOGs moved it from 3.4% firing at 6% precision to **0.51%
+firing at 57% precision**.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A verification guard does not ship default-on until its firing rate and precision have
+been measured against a real corpus.** A sound oracle is a necessary condition, never a
+sufficient one. Specifically:
+
+1. **Measure before shipping, on the real corpus, at real scale.** Not a sample, not the
+   contract suite. A passing contract suite is evidence for the cases it contains — nothing
+   more; an input shape absent from the suite can still be misclassified. A corpus sweep is
+   what exposes the scoping. The path guard had 61 green cases and a 23.7% real-world firing
+   rate.
+2. **Report the number in the PR.** "It looks quieter now" is not a measurement. The
+   before/after firing rate and precision are the artifact that justifies default-on.
+3. **A guard that fires and is never right disqualifies itself**, however sound its oracle.
+   The disqualifying condition is **observed false positives with no true positive**, not the
+   absence of true positives on its own. A guard that fires on a quarter of writes and is
+   never right trains readers to ignore every advisory, including the ones that are right —
+   negative value, not low value.
+
+   **A guard that does not fire at all is not thereby disqualified.** A corpus may simply
+   contain no violation of the class, which leaves precision *undefined* rather than zero, and
+   a guard for a rare defect is exactly the kind worth having. The exemption is for **zero
+   findings only** — it is not a low-volume allowance, because precision does not improve with
+   scarcity:
+
+   | Sweep result | Reading |
+   |---|---|
+   | **zero findings** — did not fire at all | precision *undefined*, not zero. Inconclusive: establish detection by seeding known defects, then ship if the unseeded firing rate stays acceptable |
+   | fires at all, no true positive | disqualified. Precision is 0% whether the firing count is 389 or 1 — the path guard is the loud case, but a single false finding with no real one fails identically |
+   | fires AND precision is acceptable | shippable — the reference guard, 0.51% firing, 57% precision |
+
+   For a zero-finding sweep the burden shifts to **seeded defects**: plant instances the guard
+   should catch, confirm it catches them, and report the unseeded firing rate — which is zero
+   by construction in this branch — as the noise figure. Absence of evidence is not the
+   evidence of absence that rule 1 asks for.
+
+   **"Acceptable precision" is a judgment, and the ADR deliberately does not fix a
+   threshold** — the tolerable ratio depends on how costly a false advisory is in the surface
+   being guarded, and a single number would be false precision. But rarity is not itself
+   evidence: one real finding among a hundred false ones is a 1%-precision guard however
+   rarely it fires, and it fails for the same reason the path guard did at 23.7%. Scarcity
+   changes the volume of noise, never its ratio. State the measured precision, name the ratio you consider
+   acceptable for that surface, and justify it. The reference guard shipped at 57% with the
+   remaining noise attributed to a single identified cause — that shape of argument, not the
+   bare number, is what earns default-on.
+4. **Distinguish "wrong oracle" from "wrong scope" — by checking, not by assuming.** That
+   distinction decides whether a guard is deleted or re-filed for rescoping, so it is worth
+   establishing rather than inferring from a green suite. For the path guard it was
+   established per finding: each candidate was re-tested against the repo root and confirmed
+   genuinely absent, which is what made "the oracle is exact, the scope is wrong" a finding
+   instead of an assumption. It was re-filed (#1314). Had any candidate turned out to resolve,
+   that would have been an oracle defect the contract suite simply had no case for.
+5. **A guard whose only surface an existing gate owns does not ship at all.** A guard
+   duplicating `check-changelog-parity --check-bump` would fire correctly; it would simply
+   add no signal the required gate does not already produce, while adding a second place the
+   rule can drift. That is the **one mechanism per concern** principle
+   (`PLUGIN-PHILOSOPHY.md`'s validation section, owned upstream in `standards`) — redundancy,
+   not a silent skip. The deletion criterion for a future guard author is "supplies no
+   additional signal," which is a coverage test, not a correctness one.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- Withdrawal is a normal outcome of the build, not a failure of it. Two of three candidates
+  in #1270 were withdrawn, one before implementation and one after full review. Both
+  withdrawals are recorded with their evidence (#1314 carries the sweep) so the ideas can be
+  rescoped rather than rediscovered.
+- The cost is real: the path guard reached 61 contract cases and a full review round before
+  the measurement ran. Measuring earlier — right after the first working version, before
+  review — would have saved that. **The sweep belongs immediately after the guard first
+  works, not after it is polished.**
+- This extends the verification-promotion discipline in
+  [ADR 0002](0002-default-on-ai-review-advisory-with-earned-promotion.md) one step earlier in
+  the lifecycle. That ADR governs promoting an advisory gate to blocking on demonstrated
+  precision; this one governs whether an advisory gate ships default-on at all, on the same
+  evidentiary basis.
+- `docs/conventions/hook-precision/README.md` owns the over-fire discipline for a guard
+  already in the tree. This ADR is the pre-ship counterpart and defers to it thereafter.
+
+## Sources
+
+- #1270 (scoping, amended twice), #1284 (the two-guard PR, closed), #1319 (the shipped
+  guard), #1314 (the withdrawn guard's measurement and rescope)
+- `docs/conventions/hook-precision/README.md` — over-fire discipline
+- `docs/PLUGIN-PHILOSOPHY.md` — one mechanism per concern (validation section)
+- `melodic-software/standards`, `conventions/engineering/enforceability-tiers.md` —
+  classify the tier first, justify automation second