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16 changes: 13 additions & 3 deletions .claude/skills/mission-control/SKILL.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -968,9 +968,19 @@ a charter that was byte-identical to origin. This is rule 3a's trap wearing THIS
and it is the worst place for it: a broken tell and a genuinely stale charter produce the
identical output, so the failure routes a healthy iteration down the stale-copy path — or, in the
other direction, teaches you to distrust a tell you will need for real. Run it as
`grep -c "ITERATION <N-1>"` **alongside two controls in the same breath**: a known-present one
(`ITERATION <N-2>`, must be ≥1) and a known-absent one (`ITERATION 999`, must be 0). A `0` on the
known-present control means your instrument is broken, not that the charter is stale.
`grep -c "ITERATION <N-1>"` **alongside a known-present control in the same breath**
(`ITERATION <N-2>`, must be ≥1). A `0` on the control means your instrument is broken, not that
the charter is stale — that is the failure mode here, and the known-present control is the one
that catches it.

**Do NOT add a known-absent literal as a second control — in a file the loop WRITES ABOUT ITSELF,
the absent token does not stay absent.** Iteration 134 shipped `ITERATION 999` as its
known-absent control and then measured it coming back **1** within the same iteration: the STATUS
stamp it had just written *documents the control*, so the literal is now in the charter forever.
Any self-describing file poisons this class of control the moment a record mentions it. Where you
want a structural second check, assert the rotation invariant instead —
`grep -c "^## STATUS 2026"` must equal **3** — which is anchored to line-start and cannot be
tripped by prose.

**THE STATUS ROTATION IS THE MOST DANGEROUS EDIT THIS LOOP MAKES — SCRIPT IT WITH A LINE-COUNT
ASSERTION, NEVER A BARE `## `-HEADER SCAN** (added 2026-08-01 iteration 127; third failure of this
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