ADR-0072 — An unknown is surfaced, never refused

Date: 2026-09-11 Status: accepted 2026-09-11 (this states a rule the product already follows in three places and that two investigations proposed to break; writing it down is the decision) Deciders: the maintainer Method: measured on the placeholder exoneration and on the register's own history

Context

Two axes of the 2026-09-11 investigation independently proposed the same fix, and it would have made the product worse.

The observation is real: runward/runbook.md crosses its gate with four contacts reading UNKNOWN, and handover.md accepts a bracketed placeholder where it refuses an honest sentence. The proposed fix in both cases was to REFUSE the unknown: make UNKNOWN a violation, make the placeholder a violation.

The register already records, twice, what that does. RWD-2026-0020: "The gate punished precision: writing the more precise form was worse than writing the vaguer one." RWD-2026-0046: "Deleting five characters from a pointer turned a refusal into a pass — the vague spelling was the one that passed." Both are the same shape: a guard that makes honesty more expensive than vagueness trains the operator to be vague. Refusing UNKNOWN completes that training, because the operator who does not know the on-call contact has exactly two moves left, and only one of them costs nothing: invent a name.

A third instance was measured the same day and is the sharper one: handover.md's condition EXONERATES a cell matching /^\[/. So [to be named] passes and "no successor has been named; the maintainer carries this alone" does not. The incentive is not merely absent, it is inverted.

Decision

Ratified:

1. A declared unknown is never refused for being unknown. UNKNOWN, none, not yet named and their kin are legitimate answers; the gate's business is that the question was answered, not that the answer is comfortable.
2. A declared unknown is DISCLOSED, by name, everywhere the verdict is published — the run, the machine payload, and the delivery report an assessor reads. An unknown that only the operator sees is the silence this project refuses (the ADR-0060 posture: legitimate in real cases, never silent).
3. No exoneration may make a placeholder cheaper than a sentence. Where a condition today forgives /^\[/, it stops forgiving it: the bracketed scaffold is the one thing that is NOT an answer. Honesty must never be the more expensive spelling.

Alternatives discarded

• Refuse the unknown. Measured above by the project's own history, twice. It buys a greener manifest and a less true one.
• Keep exonerating brackets and refuse UNKNOWN. The worst of both: the scaffold passes, the confession fails.
• Say nothing and let the operator decide. That is the current state for the contacts, and it means an assessor reads a crossed gate over four unknowns without being told.

Consequences

• Positive: the product stops training vagueness; the assessor learns what is not known, which is information they can price; and the inverted incentive in handover.md is closed.
• Negative, accepted: some missions will publish a report that says, in writing, that four contacts are unknown. That is the point, and it is the honest cost of rule 2.
• On other boundaries: nothing in the verdict path changes for rule 1 or 2 (they are disclosure); rule 3 makes one condition stricter and can turn a green mission amber, so it lands behind the structure-contract opt-in like every other hardening (ADR-0069).

What would settle it

After rule 2 ships: a mission with unknown contacts must produce a report in which a reader finds the unknowns without being told to look for them. And after rule 3: the honest sentence passes where the bracketed placeholder does not, measured as a pair — the inversion, righted.

Reevaluation trigger (mandatory, dated)

An operator reports that the disclosure of unknowns made their report unusable with a stakeholder (the disclosure is then too loud, not wrong), or a new guard is added that refuses an unknown without offering a cheaper honest form.

Trigger set on: 2026-09-11 · Watched via: the register's wrong-guidance class and the pilot's report reading