---
name: premature-closure-guards
description: "Two guards that keep a fault seed from closing early — a heal assigns owner but never closes, and agreement never promotes a hypothesis to proven."
metadata: 
  node_type: memory
  type: feedback
  originSessionId: 125af465-6d8f-4614-aac1-b808944b64b2
  modified: 2026-07-25T12:46:39.097Z
---

Two guards doyle banked verbatim into canon (2026-07-25, IDLE-EDGE W1 close, counter 76). Apply them to any open fault seed:

1. **heal-assigns-owner-never-closes** — when the candidate fix is an environmental reset (restart the session, restart the daemon, re-run setup), a GREEN result after that reset does NOT close the seed. It only assigns the owner. If a restart fixes it, the real defect is that the thing broke *silently and permanently* with no notice — that's what needs remediation (live rebind, or a loud RESTART-REQUIRED-class notice), not the restart.
2. **agreement-never-promotes-to-proven** — N independent reads converging on the same cause is the strongest evidence *shape* available, and still not proof. Keep the seed RCA-first; make someone actually read the suspected-dead path before the cause is written down as established. Three-way agreement crossing in flight feels like proof and isn't.

**Why:** both are the seed's two most likely premature closures, and both feel like completion at the moment they'd be taken. In the liam never-seals case the arrow pointed at extraction-death from three directions (my single-cause reasoning, doyle's seed rewrite, liam's co-located flynn discriminator) while extraction-death itself was never actually observed.

**How to apply:** write the guard into the artifact, not the conversation. Same pattern as the design-constraint version — when a constraint exists to stop a future builder re-litigating it (e.g. "this warn surface is DIAGNOSTIC only, zero authority over sealing, ADR-0048 line holds"), state it in the REQ text at mint so it survives its builders. A constraint that lives only in a message dies with the context.

Related: [[stale-snapshot-equality-proxy]], [[sweep-dispatch-site-counts]] (same family — stop-and-surface before building on an unverified premise).