Un-blind the link checker, tighten the ratchet, and require breaking new tests

[pftg]

Follow-through on the fault-injection audit (#572 / 20.11), which caught 3 of 8 planted defects.

The link checker was inspecting almost nothing

Production renders internal links absolute; lychee --offline excludes every http(s) URI by design. 133,874 of 149,516 links were excluded — the homepage's single "OK" was its own #main-content skip-link anchor. It had been green for a year. --remap onto the built tree takes it to 114,050 links checked.

Turning it on found five real defects nobody could see:

Defect	Cause
/blog/2025/complete-guide-... ×2	link carried the directory; the slug drops it
/blog/rails-8-1-...-end-lost-... ×3	link used the directory name; real slug omits it
that post's own canonical_url	self-canonical pointing at a 404
/contact/ ×2	a conversion path; should be /contact-us/
/resources/internal-product-roi-calculator	never existed

The last one wasn't a broken link. The section promised an "Internal Product ROI Calculator" spreadsheet and itemised five things inside it, "no email required, instant download". There is no /resources/ section, and the sibling lead magnet shows the real pattern (content/lead-magnets/ + download_file). A promise with nothing behind it is the same class as an unsourced number, so it's removed — the post already closed with a working consultation CTA. If the calculator exists somewhere, say so and it comes back as a real lead magnet.

Two ratchet gaps

RENDERED_BASELINE sat at 14 against an actual 11 — those three spare hits swallowed a planted banned phrase whole. Tightened to 11 and proven exact (fails at 10, passes at 11). SURFACES never globbed content/next/**, so the entire v2 rail had no source-side cover.

New standing rule

A new test isn't done until you've broken the code and watched it fail. Green proves a test runs, not that it works — and the two are indistinguishable in CI. Inject the defect, quote the failure, revert, re-run green. Both halves are the evidence. Where a gate genuinely can't discriminate yet (derived tenure is blind until 2027-01-01), say so in the test body rather than letting a pass read as proof. In CLAUDE.md §TDD and .okf/build/test-gates.md.

Verified

rake test:links 0 errors / 114,050 OK · unit 287 runs, 6143 assertions, 0 failures · bin/hugo-build clean. Content-only changes otherwise, so the visual suites don't apply.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_011SP5gaqXEgUie8pdFrmbeJ

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