## `main` is currently red on `check-fnxc-future-dates`
Four stamps read `2026-07-30-26:10` — an hour that cannot exist.
They're exactly what #2995 taught this gate to catch. That PR landed the
hour validation (`00-23`) *after* #2999 had already merged these four,
so the gate started reporting a defect that was already sitting there
rather than one introduced afterwards. **The guard is working**; nothing
was checking before it.
```
scripts/lib/backend-db.mjs:41
scripts/reconcile-task-state-consistency.mjs:8, :51
scripts/__tests__/reconcile-task-state-consistency.test.mjs:109
```
Corrected by **literal normalisation** — 26:10 on the 30th *is* 02:10 on
the 31st — rather than flattening them to an arbitrary in-range hour.
AGENTS.md specifies `yyyy-MM-dd-hh:mm`, and the stamp exists to give a
readable why-does-this-exist trail, so the ordering is the part worth
preserving.
## The baseline tightening rides along, and it's a date rollover
Stamps written yesterday as `2026-07-31` were future *then* and were
baselined as such. Today they're past, so **176 files ratchet to zero**.
Nobody did anything.
The gate rewrites the baseline as a side effect and exits 0, so leaving
it uncommitted dirties the tree on every subsequent run **for everyone**
— which is why it belongs in this commit rather than a later one.
Re-recording on a decrease is the rule this gate and its siblings
already state.
Worth knowing about the design, since I wrote it: this churn recurs
whenever a day boundary passes with future-dated stamps in the baseline,
and it shrinks only as people stop writing them — which is the behaviour
the gate exists to produce. **93 files still carry a non-zero
allowance**, so the drain isn't finished. If it stays noisy once those
clear, the gate's fail-on-tighten contract is the thing to revisit, not
the stamps.
## Measured
| check | result |
|---|---|
| gate | red before, **exit 0 after**, stable across two consecutive
runs |
| baseline | −176/+25 entries, all date-rollover |
| inert-seam · sql-literal · lane-wiring · census | all green |
| reconciler's own suite | green |
## One correction to a claim I made earlier this session
While investigating I reported the gate as hanging for 600s. It wasn't —
the harness killed the process (exit 144) and the empty output made it
look like a stall. The gate completes in seconds. Noting it because I
nearly filed a performance bug against a healthy script.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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