---
name: a-commit-you-find-yourself-is-not-a-handoff
description: A peer's WIP commit discovered by polling their branch is not the handoff — verify the delivery, not just the object.
metadata:
  type: feedback
---

2026-09-10, releases#294 diag arm. My wake said "blocked on hertz's committed diagnostic SHA". I
found `diag/294-sync-stages` = ef9c1599 locally, verified it BY OBJECT (a9e786b2 an ancestor, one
added commit, zero treqs tags over a non-empty denominator) — a clean intake. It was **not the
handoff**: hertz replied "current verification SHA, not yet the final handoff … no CI arm requested
yet", and minutes later found a correlation limit (QUIC connections reusing wire-stream ID0) that
will CHANGE the instrument, so the handoff sha will not be ef9c1599 at all. doyle, measuring the
same object independently, read my report as superseded by "the ref moved" — it had not moved; two
agents had simply both found a peer's work-in-progress.

Two tells that a found object is not a delivery: the ref is **unpushed** (`git ls-remote` empty),
and there is **no message from its author**. Neither is visible from the object itself — an object
check answers WHAT the tree is, never WHETHER it was handed over.

**Why:** an intake clearance is scoped to one sha. Acting on a WIP sha spends a real arm on a tree
its author is still changing, and afterwards the numbers are quotable against a tree that no longer
exists.

**How to apply:** when a wake says "blocked on <peer>'s sha", the unblock condition is the PEER'S
WORD, not the commit's existence. Do the object intake anyway — it costs little and finds real
problems early — but report it as "found, not handed off", name the sha it is scoped to, and say
outright that the clearance does not transfer to a later sha. Ask the author two things: is this the
handoff, and what remains. Related: [[a-hand-tracked-branch-is-a-snapshot-of-the-last-assembly-it-was-moved-to]],
[[a-zero-from-an-absence-grep-is-a-spelling-claim]], [[a-detector-must-pass-a-control-built-from-what-motivated-it]].