Timothy asked why the kickoff handoff doc stores historical narrative when
it should be instructions. It shouldn't — its own lore section is chartered
as "STANDING workflow/orchestration rules only" with the why belonging in
docs/decisions.md. But an inventory of every bullet against the decision
corpus inverted the premise: only ~8 of ~38 were actually covered. 19 had
no record anywhere and 11 more were half-covered, so that single file was
the ONLY copy of the mandatory review rubric, the whole CI-triage
vocabulary, the build-concurrency policy, the H12 session-end audit, and
the plumbing-merge recipe. Pruning first would have destroyed them.
So the records come first. New topic file docs/decisions/workflow-process.md
carries 32 records (ci.*, process.*, testing.*) covering every NONE and
PARTIAL the inventory found, including the Gitea `?milestones=` no-op bug
whose only copy was the archived selector section this prune deletes.
Only then the prune: HARD CONSTRAINTS and the lore section become one- or
two-line rules, each citing the decision key that holds its evidence, and
the 40-line "Archived — do not follow" section is gone. 636 -> 353 lines,
with every cited key verified to resolve against the corpus.
The aggregate corpus budget is re-baselined 4800 -> 5600 with the reason in
the code: the corpus grew because knowledge MOVED into it, which is the
system working, not drift.
refs #542