OKF: the stall can mask a real failure; a local visual red needs a master run

[pftg]

Session wrap-up. Two gate rules sharpened after a six-PR merge pass, both added to existing concepts rather than as new ones.

ci-gates — the stall can hide a real failure behind it

The concept already said re-run, don't raise the cap and if the job got past checkout it's a real failure. Necessary, not sufficient.

On #511 Unit Tests read fail 10m2s — the stall signature exactly — and "known flake, merge it" was the tempting call. The fresh run got past checkout and failed again in 1m48s on a genuine defect: PavedPathGuardTest caught friday-report.css wired into bin/qtest but missing from css-bundle-ownership-map.md. Same check, same PR, two unrelated causes.

Rule added: a slow failure and a fast failure are different failures. Multi-minute with no assertion output is infrastructure; fast with an assertion is the code. The first red's explanation must never carry over to the second.

test-gates — a local visual red can't condemn a branch until master runs the same way

Verifying #511, bin/qtest --changed went red pointing at services/fractional-cto — a page the PR never touched. The available story was that its postcss.config.js edit had shifted CSS site-wide. It hadn't: that edit only adds purgecss safelist entries, and safelisting more can only preserve more CSS, never remove any.

The check that settled it: the same system test on clean origin/master on this macOS host — 34 runs, 6 failures, 8 of 77 screenshots mismatched. The suite is red on master here, so the local leg couldn't answer the question. CI's native-Linux Screenshot Tests passed #511 in 16m15s and was right.

Also noted: the run rewrites two of those baselines mid-run then fails its own dirty-check, so git checkout -- test/fixtures/screenshots/ never converges.

Validation

okf_validate --strict conformant, 0 errors (the 70 warnings are the pre-existing house log-heading convention, unrelated to these edits). bin/hugo-build green. Docs-only.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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