EM-0042 — Close the second cold-start selection and clock gaps

Source content

EM-0042 — Close the second cold-start selection and clock gaps

Objective

Preserve autonomous submission PR #72 as the immutable second cold-start receipt, fix the exact-head

CI binding it exposed, prevent agents from selecting accepted or closely restated work, and replace

contributor-invented runtime timestamps with executable-captured start and completion times before a

third cold start.

Accepted evidence and boundaries

• Contract-accepted base: a11c24edafa30e375bc099b7cfe3260bde7f0555.
• Frozen queue receipt: PR #72 at head 3f965831031b88f4efff954550ecb383fec0e5a8, tree

c67de1a45bd9d97aac6cd39c0f63aa73a30b3a2d.

• The packet remains an untrusted, blocking, open draft and is never repaired or merged.
• Cases 001–004, PR #69, accepted open dockets, and existing public meanings remain unchanged.
• No admission, promotion, numbered case, deployment, or further provider run occurs until the

implementation passes exact-head independent review, protected integration, resulting-main

validation, and an authorized release-identity read-back.

Implementation

1. Check out the immutable pull-request source head in CI rather than GitHub's synthetic merge ref.

2. Require the accepted base commit time to precede the executable-captured runtime chronology.

3. Have research prepare record runtime.started_at, research complete record

runtime.completed_at before fail-closed validation, and research submit re-seal completion

immediately before canonicalizing queue bytes.

4. Compare against every accepted dossier and reviewed open docket with subject-aware anchors;

malformed or incomplete comparison records fail closed, while generic shared vocabulary alone

does not trigger a collision. Instruct agents to inspect open queue PRs and record that comparison.

5. Add focused regressions, run the full deterministic repository check, append an immutable run

receipt, and obtain a fresh non-author exact-head review before protected merge.

Status

• 2026-08-30: PR #74 registered the immutable EM-0042 contract, passed independent exact-head review

and protected checks, merged as a11c24edafa30e375bc099b7cfe3260bde7f0555, and passed

resulting-main validation run 33295729283 / job 99214940856.

• 2026-08-30: the first pre-registration implementation PR #73 remains open and draft after its

independent reviewer identified the missing contract/receipt, generic lexical-collision behavior,

silently skipped malformed prior art, and a non-isolated chronology test. It is preserved as a

negative review artifact and is not reused as the implementation base.

• 2026-08-30: v2 implementation began from the accepted contract commit on

codex/em-0042-implementation-v2. PR #72, Cases 001–004, and accepted epistemic records remain

untouched.

• 2026-08-30: the v2 focused open-docket, research-kit, and workflow-security suite passed, including

exact close-paraphrase, acronym/number-word, unrelated-vocabulary, missing dossier, malformed

manifest, malformed reviewed-docket, late-base, missing-base-time, and invalid-base-time

adversaries. Defect-focused Ruff, workflow YAML parsing, git diff --check, and full make check

passed. The candidate projection contains 220 repository objects across 11 topics; disclosure

audit, deterministic rebuild, and source-state checks were clean. The clean-worktree

bootstrap remains dependent on the documented PYTHONPATH=src verified-environment workaround.

• 2026-08-30: independent review of PR #75 at d25bbd93eb677d98d85c199c641de3fd9ab26991

returned CHANGES REQUIRED: broken or symlinked reviewed-docket paths were skipped, and the first

detailed run receipt bound a pre-commit catalog identity and contained one non-executable display

form for the YAML command. The original receipt is preserved; this branch adds the two path

adversaries and an append-only superseding receipt generated from a committed content head.