## The gap
The marker works above a statement or a function. It does **not** work
in the position people actually use it — on the fallback arm itself,
right beside the literal it excuses:
```ts
flags
? flags.hold === true
/* DELIBERATE-LITERAL — the no-metadata fallback. */
: column === "in-progress";
```
That comment sits **before the `:` token**, so it's the colon's leading
trivia rather than the arm expression's — `getLeadingCommentRanges` at
the arm's full start never sees it. The ancestor walk doesn't rescue it
either: the next ancestor is the `ConditionalExpression`, whose own
leading comments are somewhere else entirely.
## Measured, not hypothesised
`in-review-stall.ts` carried a marker in exactly this position **and
stayed on the backlog**. The only way I could clear it was to
restructure the code into a named set (#3064).
That's the tool dictating shape rather than reading intent — and a
marker that silently does nothing trains people to stop marking. Given
this fleet phase has had several workers reach for `DELIBERATE-LITERAL`
(#3056 used it successfully at statement level), the failure mode is one
worker's marker working and another's not, for reasons neither can see.
## Scope and controls
Scoped to the span between the previous arm (or the condition) and this
one, so it can't pick up a comment belonging to anything else. Verified
both directions with a probe:
| case | before | after |
|---|---|---|
| marker above the statement | `deliberate` | `deliberate` |
| marker on the ternary arm | **`column`** | `deliberate` |
| unrelated marker on a neighbouring statement | `column` | `column`
(unchanged) |
**The real tree's count is unchanged at 51** — nothing is silently
reclassified, because the one site that had an arm marker was already
converted away. This is forward-looking.
## Not fixed here — pre-existing red on `main`
`lifecycle-column-census.test.ts` has two failures (`expected 22 to be
26`, `expected +0 to be 1`) whose fixture arithmetic drifts with real
tree counts as fleet conversions land. **Verified identical on
`origin/main`** before and after this change, so it isn't mine — but
someone should decide whether that fixture ought to be derived rather
than pinned, since every fleet merge moves it.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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