A task that declares obligations reaches the outcome completed only when each one has evidence recorded against it, and evidence taken over files that have since changed, or at a commit the branch has since left, no longer discharges anything

What it means

A task may declare requires beside scope. Scope is a containment promise — where a worker may write. requires is a delivery promise — what the worker owes before the outcome completed is available. The tokens are declared in share/obligations.yaml: implementation, tests, docs, generated, rules, commit, push, target, pages, deploy, verify.

majordomus evidence --covers <token> records that one of them has been discharged, naming the command or artifact that produced it — narrative is not evidence — and the hash of the tracked files the obligation names. Four tokens are never recorded: commit, push, target and pages name facts the tool establishes for itself, and obligation-establishment is that half of the story. check and finish evaluate every declared obligation on every run through the doctrine majordomus.obligation-closure. An obligation with no evidence fails. An obligation whose recorded input hash no longer matches the tree fails, with both hashes named. An obligation whose fact is remote — a push, an integration, a publication, a deployment — is bound to the commit it was taken at instead, and fails once the branch has left it.

Only an outcome of completed is refused. A worker reporting partial or blocked is being honest, and refusing that would teach them to claim completed instead.

How it works

mj_validate_obligations in lib/evidence.sh reads the task's requires, then for each token reads the most recent task.evidence line for that task from the ledger. Evidence is a ledger line rather than a new store, because the ledger is already append-only, ordered and integrity-checked, and its envelope already carries the head, the branch and the session.

Currency is decided by recomputation, never by a timestamp. mj_obligation_inputs_hash expands the obligation's pathspecs with git ls-files and hashes them through mj_inputs_hash in lib/common.sh — the same implementation, moved there from the site generator, that produces the site's own source_hash. So "is this evidence still true?" and "is the published site still current?" are the same question asked of different inputs. For a remote obligation there are no inputs and mj_git_label decides, with the four values the rest of the repository already uses: exact, advanced, diverged, different_context. No fifth vocabulary was invented.

One reporter, mj_obl_verdict, decides whether a shortfall refuses or merely reports, so the judgement is written once and check can name a stale evidence without blocking work.

How to see it

majordomus start "a change" --scope lib/
# declare what it owes, then try to finish without proving it
majordomus finish --outcome completed --note "done"
# FAIL obligation  tests — owed, and no evidence was recorded; exit 10

majordomus evidence --covers tests --type test --command 'bash test/run.sh'
# evidence: tests recorded for t-... (inputs 28a9ccc503fb)
majordomus check     # OK obligation tests — discharged over inputs 28a9ccc503fb

echo change >> lib/a && git add -A && git commit -qm change
majordomus finish --outcome completed --note "done"
# FAIL obligation  tests — the evidence was taken over inputs 28a9ccc503fb and this tree
#                  hashes to 8c27a0fd8ec7; it no longer describes what it proved

What it does not cover

It does not judge whether the command a worker names actually proves the obligation: a task may record --command true against tests and the ledger will hold it. What it removes is the ability for that record to survive the change it was supposed to describe. It does not run anything itself, and it does not invent obligations — a task that declares none behaves exactly as it did before, which is what every task in this repository does today.

Of the remote tokens, deploy and verify still depend on facts a laptop cannot establish alone; their evidence names a commit and a time, and the honest report for work that has not reached the trunk is that the obligation is not discharged.

Why it exists

The finish contract already refused, but everything it refused over was inside the working tree. A worker could satisfy every line with the work uncommitted, unpushed, absent from the trunk, unpublished and unverified, and the record would say completed. Implemented, committed, pushed, integrated and deployed are five different facts.

The second half is worse and quieter. Evidence that cannot expire is a claim about the past presented as a claim about the present. A test result recorded before a change says nothing about the tree that exists after it, and a report that treats the two as the same is how "done" comes to mean nothing in particular.