Two things, and the second is why the first does not ship alone.
## The opt-in
`resolveProjectColumnsForRoles` gains `untraitedProject:
"declared-columns"`. When **no** workflow in the project expresses
**any** lifecycle trait, every declared column id joins the answer.
This is the three-state rule at **project** scope — the last item on the
deferred list, recorded at three self-healing call sites (#2869, #2876).
A board that renames its lanes and declares no traits contributes
nothing today, so its cards are **absent from every role-keyed query**,
and the correct per-card fallback downstream never runs for them. A
fallback cannot rescue a card the query never returned.
**Not "no workflow declares this role."** A project that expresses
traits and has no review lane has *answered*; widening there would
invent lanes it deliberately lacks. Mutation-verified both directions —
widening unconditionally fails 1 of 12, making the option a no-op fails
1 of 12.
**Opt-in, not default**, because the safe direction differs per caller —
the finding in `project-union-versus-per-task-lanes.md`:
| caller | over-inclusion costs |
|---|---|
| sweep | nothing — the per-card check discards the extra rows |
| aggregator | an inflated number an operator reads (#2864, #2866) |
| action site | a card routed or notified under a vocabulary that is not
its own (#2852, #2891) |
Making it the default moves all three at once, in the one direction two
of them must not. Verified byte-identical without the option, so this
lands with **no caller changes** and each site adopts it on its own
reasoning.
## Main was red, and my own gate caught me first
I dated the new comments `2026-07-31` while today is `2026-07-30` —
**the exact defect `check-fnxc-future-dates` exists to prevent,
committed while writing the feature.** The gate I added yesterday failed
my own commit.
Correcting mine surfaced that the merged sentinel batch, #2947, and
three engine test files carried future-dated stamps too, so **the gate
was failing on `main` for everyone**, not just here.
All corrected to real dates rather than raising the ceiling. The stamps
were simply wrong, and a baseline bump would have recorded the error as
permitted — which is the failure mode that ratchet exists to prevent.
Core and engine `tsc` clean, `pnpm lint` clean, census `--strict` 0,
FNXC gate 0 (469 known, none added), gate green (161/487/13/71).
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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