A settled wire

Closed August 2026. A machine consumer of the report could not build against a contract that reserved the right to reshape under it, and pinning an engine release only moved the problem. This phase gave the wire its own version, decoupled from engine releases, ran a public quiet period under a mechanical tripwire, and froze the contract at 1 when the last condition closed. The report stays the live chapter; this page records how the freeze was earned.

The mechanism shipped first, in v0.18.0. compatibility is the payload’s own version and travels inside every report, so a consumer reads stability from the report rather than from the version of the binary that wrote it. Engine releases were declared to mean engine behavior only. The clock got a tripwire in the tree: the example the last release shipped is retained beside the rolling one, refreshed by the release workflow, and a contract test fails the build the moment it stops clearing the current schema and reader, which is exactly a reshape.

Three conditions had to hold at once, and each has its own exit evidence. Every supported lane’s trust story closed on retained live evidence, recorded in Live provider evidence. The release carried no half-built trust path: the launcher placeholder was cut, and the verified-consumption lane is the attestation recipe in Security model, checked against every release the workflow publishes. And two consecutive minor series shipped without reshaping the payload: v0.19.0 and v0.20.0 carried the fix, claim, and adopt verbs, two report projections, and a policy grammar binding, all additive, with the tripwire green through both.

The freeze itself is additive law made mechanical. The writers emit 1 from one wire constant, the schema pins the same value by a contract test, and the first frozen example is retained permanently at spec/examples/scanner-report.frozen-1.json, byte-pinned against edits, with every later schema in the major required to keep validating it. A 1 report may gain optional fields as 1 rolls forward; nothing a 1.0 consumer parsed ever changes meaning or disappears. Reshaping past that promise mints 2, and since a new contract breaks consumers whatever the binary is called, that release is a major one. The engine’s own 1.0 remains a maturity statement about the engine, made on its own grounds; the wire did not wait for it and does not follow it.