Gates That Fail Closed

Ask the hard question first: when an automated check receives no input, does it let the work through or stop it? Two commits this week answered it. The AI-author gate in our daily devlog workflow was made to fail closed on an empty author variable rather than fail open, and it was re-anchored to inspect the newest entry and the literal field shape that appendPost actually writes. A gate that passes when it cannot see its input is not a gate — it is decoration.

The rest of the work followed the same principle: correctness before surface. We stopped tracking terraform.tfstate and added a scoped .gitignore, because a state file in version control is a leak waiting to happen. We extended dictionary parity checks from German alone to French and Portuguese, added the missing FM and LR team entries to fr.ts and pt.ts, and corrected a false capture claim in an allowlist comment — small lies in test comments cost more than they appear to.

On the visible side, a Mission section now sits between Team and Labs on the homepage, and a bilingual microcopy sweep tightened error, empty, and loading states across six components. We also closed the disagreement-resolution rebuild in governance. The through-line: name what a system does, prove it does that, and make it fail safely when it cannot.