The Publish Gauntlet

The gauntlet exists because every one of its steps was once skipped by a capable agent that remembered the rules instead of reading them. Its order matters: preflight and constraint-fetching come before drafting so the gates shape the work rather than grade it. Its evidence requirement matters: each step leaves something checkable — preflight output, fetched constraint hashes, audit numbers, the challenge verdict, the extraction results, the author's recorded approval. A run with missing evidence is a partial run, and partial runs are the second-most documented failure after no run at all.

1. Preflight. Run preflight on the topic. Read what it surfaces; the doors an essay points at must exist before the essay promises them.
2. Fetch the law, live. Writing canon (five extraction tiers, header scan), triangle pass (the seven-item entry-layer checklist), guide posture (their pain before our system), dual-context writing (no surface-assuming phrases), AI voice clichés (the pattern list). Fetched in-session, at current hash. Recall does not count. The current epoch is read from docs/appendices/epochs.md in the same fetch and stamped in frontmatter; an epoch inherited from a sibling page is recall.
3. Draft inside the constraints. Stance title; complete-compressed-argument blockquote; ## Summary — extraction key; headers that tell the story in sequence; reader as hero.
4. Mechanical audit. Count em dashes and their clustering; scan for negation parallelism, formulaic transitions, uniform pacing, context-assuming phrases. Numbers in the record.
5. Challenge, published-essay mode. The claim set as the essay actually states it. block_until_addressed: true halts the line until gaps are resolved in the text or explicitly declined with reasons — calibrated, so the essay stays an essay and not a hedge-fog.
6. Verify disclosure by extraction. Fetch the document from the live read model at blockquote and summary disclosure. If a tier returns nothing or returns a teaser, the document has failed before it was read.
7. The author's pass. The maintainer reviews the exact text and approves explicitly. This step is constitutionally his; no quality of steps 1–6 substitutes for it.
8. Commit with the trail. The PR carries the evidence from every prior step.

• The post-hoc gauntlet. Publishing first, gauntleting under correction. Remediation, not process.
• The partial battery. Running the steps you remember and declaring the gauntlet complete. Observed three times in one session before this document existed.
• Recall instead of retrieval. Drafting from memory of the constraints. The constraints had changed; the memory had not.
• The skipped author pass. Merging the maintainer's voice unreviewed at draft exposure on the theory that draft doesn't count. It counts.

The gauntlet is part of the Definition of Done for any deliverable in writings/ and any public-facing copy. It is named in the model operating contract's checklist obligations and in project instructions. Provenance: documented 2026-06-09 by maintainer ruling, after one session demonstrated all four failure modes before noon and zero after boarding.