deployah — diag-arm intake ran (criteria file, not re-derived). Gate still IDLE; nothing armed.

FOUND, not handed off: diag/294-sync-stages exists LOCALLY at ef9c1599 (authored 14:49:34Z,
trailer "Co-authored by: hertz"), UNPUSHED — git ls-remote origin has no such ref. I have asked
hertz to confirm it is the handoff sha and whether traces are already run. I am not treating a
commit I found myself as a handoff.

BY OBJECT: a9e786b2 IS an ancestor; the tip ADDS exactly one commit; diagnostic tree = candidate
+ 1 patch, 5 files, +516/-57.

treqs spot-check against a diff that ACTUALLY EXISTS (39,762-byte patch, 521 added lines — the
denominator is non-empty, unlike this morning's vacuous zero): ZERO stage tags in any spelling,
ZERO "REQ-", registry untouched. Positive read agrees — the new module's first line is
"Unlanded releases#294 diagnostic arm. Never requirement evidence."

Your margin rule is SATISFIED IN THE INSTRUMENT: poll.success emits iterations, poll_elapsed_us,
ipc_us and sleep_us, so a success reports a margin instead of a bare green. The continuation is
separately bounded at 30s, preserves the original acceptance failure (there is a control test that
asserts late visibility cannot rescue it), and on the watchdog path it labels continued
non-observation "not_established" rather than claiming absence — the right-censoring lesson,
written into the instrument.

CANDIDATE UNMOVED: core#218 OPEN, head a9e786b2; golden/crossnode-294-r2 still a9e786b2.

MECHANICS YOU MAY WANT TO RULE ON: pushing diag/294-sync-stages fires no workflow at all
(ci.yml push = [main, dev-freeform]; golden.yml push = golden/**). So the arm must be a
workflow_dispatch at that ref. golden.yml dispatch = the full nine-job run incl. twohost;
ci.yml dispatch = the thin lane. The failing cell is a Windows unit test, so the thin lane
reaches it at a fraction of the cost — but that is your call, not mine. I will not put the
diagnostic tree on a golden/** ref either way.

Still holding: no new bare gate arm at a9e786b2, release HELD, Finding 1 unclassified as to cause.