test(prose): give the eight read-only cases something that can fail

[leeovery]

Summary

• Eight cases were enforcing nothing, all showing green. Every entry case declared exactly one check — engine_before_write — and those walks write nothing, so it reported "no workflow state was written" and passed regardless of what the prose did.
• A check with nothing to examine now reports N/A, not PASS. A green tick for absence of coverage is precisely how this went unnoticed.
• The eight get real declarations, drawn from claims they already make. Their "further claims" turn out to be not-called assertions almost word for word — "the entry skill records nothing", "an entry that only validates writes nothing", "the knowledge base is queried, never written to" — so each becomes a calls_exclude over topic start / topic reopen / manifest set / knowledge index. What each says it reads becomes a calls_include over the gate it must render.
• calls_in_order is new — the one thing presence could never settle. A gate read after the arm it was supposed to select proves the arm was chosen some other way. Declared commands must appear as a subsequence, anything permitted between them.
• P9 corrected. It demanded every case run until state landed. Wrong twice: it treated file changes as the only hard evidence when recorded actions are equally deterministic, and it would have pushed short entry walks into needing conversation stubs — trading live prose for hand-written fiction. A handoff is a fine ending. The rule is that every claim must have a deterministic answer; the stop point follows.

Verified against live walks

These declarations were derived from each case's claims and its skill's actual calls, then confirmed by running the whole corpus: all eight passed on claude-sonnet-5, so the gates, orderings and not-called assertions were right as written. No corrections were needed.

Test plan

• Prose suites 75/75, including new coverage for ordering (in-sequence, out-of-sequence, gaps tolerated, missing call, minimum length) and for N/A vs PASS
• Corpus valid
• Full run: 8/8 PASS

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Stack

1. docs(design): prose-tests programme design log #544
2. feat(prose-tests): the framework — cases, worlds, runner, skill #545
3. test(prose): feature happy-path corpus — five worlds, seven cases #546
4. test(prose): bugfix corpus — the investigation-centric surfaces #548
5. test: retry recursive teardown removals — kill a class of phantom failures #549
6. fix(entry-skills): close the handoff fences — six files render their arms wrong #550
7. docs: a contributing page for working on the system #551
8. fix(entry-skills): every handoff arm says to invoke the skill #552
9. fix(implementation): environment setup belongs to the setup reference alone #553
10. fix(prose-tests): the asserter is told which substitutions were armed #554
11. feat(prose-tests): the mid-flow substitution, and a world only prose can describe #555
12. test(prose): claims assert consequences, not what was displayed #556
13. feat(prose-tests): record everything the agents do, results included #557
14. fix(discussion-entry): the handoff reports the source it actually had #558
15. fix(prose-tests): the stop hook records, and names the model that walked #559
16. fix(prose-tests): command output was never actually recorded #560
17. feat(prose-tests): judge the walk as told, not the summary returned #561
18. feat(prose-tests): decide in code what an agent should not be deciding #562
19. test(prose): a case starts where a session starts #563
20. feat(prose-tests): walk on Sonnet, judge on Opus, escalate a failure #564
21. test(prose): give the eight read-only cases something that can fail #565 👈 current
22. test(prose): only walks that can be observed, and checks that survive the trip #566
23. fix(prose-tests): the verdict names only the model the record names #567
24. test(prose): discovery, walked to the point where work first exists #568
25. fix(prose-tests): the asserter judges which of prose or walker was at fault #569
26. docs(conventions): a step whose reference routes every exit still signposts #570
27. test(prose): discovery's epic arm, to the same durability boundary #571