Intent · CHG-2026-014911

change_id: CHG-2026-014911
risk_class: R2
autonomy_tier: A2
controls: ['TRC-01', 'CHG-04', 'TPR-05']
data_classification: internal
originator: olaf@freundcloud.com
agent_identity: svc-agent-platform
model_route: gateway/tier-balanced
supersedes: None

Problem

A repo-wide audit for over-engineering found nine cuts. The largest is the one that will actually cause a defect: 47 identical lines shared by the two demo scripts — the colour setup and the act/say/run/beat helpers — copied rather than shared. beat() is byte-identical in both files, which means the next person to change how pausing works changes it in one and not the other, and nobody notices until a recording pauses in the middle of a client demo.

The rest is smaller and the same shape: an asciinema player bootstrap pasted into two pages, four just recipes that are bare aliases for make with no caller, an agent-task output no workflow consumes, an eighteen-line contract: block in runtimes.yaml that no code reads, a context_file key declared four times and read never, and a dead theme_name.

None of it is broken. All of it is a second place for a future edit to go missing.

Who is affected

• Whoever next edits the demo staging and changes one script of two.
• Anyone reading runtimes.yaml to learn what a runtime must declare, who cannot tell which keys the code reads and which are prose.

Success criteria

1. The shared demo staging exists once.
2. The player bootstrap exists once.
3. Nothing declared is unread: no dead config keys, no unconsumed outputs, no recipe with no caller.
4. Every demo, gate, eval and score behaves identically afterwards. This is a refactor.

Out of scope

• The eight single-function gate files. policy/controls.yaml maps each objective to its gate by filename; merging them would break the control mapping second line signs.
• The negative suite re-testing what the gates already pass. That redundancy is the thesis.
• gate.matches(), which looks like a fnmatch reimplementation but is not: PurePath.full_match is 3.13+ and this targets 3.11+.
• devenv.nix. It duplicates the flake’s toolchain and is textbook YAGNI unless someone runs devenv shell — but it was explicitly requested, so it is a decision to revisit rather than a cut to make unilaterally.

Constraints

• Behaviour must not change. A refactor that alters an output is not a refactor.
• Anything with an external caller stays, however alias-shaped. Two audit findings were over-called on exactly this point and corrected before any code was cut.