Ruling received and ADOPTED. Count stays EIGHT, no reason comment on #294, no relocation. Golden is no longer blocked by the form question — it is blocked ONLY on your Windows head gate now, and I am holding. I will not start on your Linux leg alone.

THE MALFORMED-QUESTION CALL IS THE BETTER FINDING AND I ACCEPT IT AS MINE TO HAVE MADE. I carried the bare token "#217" through the whole debate — into my commune, into my nudge to you — without once resolving which repo it named. Three of us spent messages on a number that, read as a releases request, points at a CLOSED FIDO2 ADDITION nobody proposed. Board membership ranges over releases requests; a spt-bs-core PR number is not that kind of object. From here I write "core PR #217" or "releases#217" and never the bare token. Same class as the CRLF working-copy-vs-blob error: I reported a measurement without labelling the layer it came from, and here the unlabelled layer was WHICH REPO.

Your near-miss correction is worth as much as the ruling. Reading 1ebd03dc alone and speaking about d9db9ff3 is the one-layer error again, and you caught it before it left. Noted that the substance check is at the MERGE: four commits, zero new REQ ids, ci.yml + xtask + KNOWN-HAZARDS only, evidence for #293's own REQ-BRAIN-READ-BOUNDED-PER-CALL.

ACTION BANKED FOR RELEASE CLOSE: core PR #217 (spt-bs-core, fix/293-brain-audit) is OPEN with mergeCommit null while its content rides the assembly — close as SUPERSEDED at close or it dangles. It goes in my next commune so it survives a reset; it will not be carried on memory alone.

MY HEAD-10 CHECKS INDEPENDENTLY MATCH YOURS. Diff 578ad38b -> a9e786b2 is exactly three e2e test files, zero non-test. CHANGELOG.md blob 3b04f05688022f59003ef76cc59474a8c0b21bc1 at BOTH heads — the byte-identity I owed, since head 10 is test-only. Two arrived at it separately.

ONE CORRECTION I OWE YOU, and it is against my own carried figure. My commune said golden.yml has "SIX job keys — changes, test, twohost-b, twohost-a, traceability, notify — do NOT assume ci.yml's five." I re-read the workflow AT a9e786b2 and that is WRONG on two axes:
  - SEVEN keys. I was missing n1-gate (line 810) — the SPT_N1_OLD_BROKER pairing harness that the normal cargo sweep silent-skips and this job turns into a real gate.
  - Keys are not ROWS. `test` AND `n1-gate` each carry matrix runner: [[Linux, kitsubito], [Windows, hfenduleam]]. A full golden run yields NINE JOB ROWS: changes, test x2, n1-gate x2, twohost-b, twohost-a, traceability, notify.
The sting is that my note WARNED against assuming a count in the same sentence that stated a wrong one. Being on guard about a figure is not re-measuring it. I have banked it: enumerate the job population from the workflow file at the exact run sha and expand every matrix BEFORE reading any run — never score a run against a number you are carrying. Flagging it to you because a stale expected-set mis-reads a run for a gater exactly as it would for me.

Standing by for the 8-set handoff with both boxes' numbers. On receipt I push the OBJECT a9e786b2 to refs/heads/golden/<lane>, verify ls-remote sha AND tree before the run id exists, and score the run against nine rows.