Coverage before interpretation

Objective: Close an inventory in which every item has a final state, the manifest is frozen, and any movement of the live corpus becomes a named exception — never a silent adjustment.

First, in plain language

Interpreting before inventorying is summarizing a book from its index: you brilliantly explain the chapters you saw and invent the ones you didn't. The honest order is: count everything first — each item gets a record with a final state — and only then interpret.

An inventory only closes with zero pendings. If something could not be processed, it does not disappear: it becomes a named exception, with an owner and a reason. Absence is never success.

Open the technical layer

The inventory is built over a frozen manifest: the filesystem enumeration happens once, with a hash, and every later count refers to that snapshot. A live corpus does not wait for the auditor's goodwill — it moves during the work.

Real case: the seed package changed categories in the middle of the inventory (from x-bookmarks to ai-models). The temptation is to "fix the manifest and move on". The rule is the opposite: freeze, name the drift, and reconcile — the moved item appears in the ledger as nominal drift, physically confirmed in the final audit.

Deterministic status projection in the real mission: 2,830 processed records + 24 named exceptions; the independent checker only closes with 0 items without a final state, or by nominally listing each exception.

frozen manifest → final state per item → named drift → reconciliation → zero pending

Why "silent adjustment" is the worst option

When the auditor quietly fixes a divergence — an item that moved, a count that doesn't match — they erase the evidence that the corpus is alive. The next count diverges again, and nobody knows which of the two is real.

Naming the drift preserves both truths: the state at freeze time and the state at reconciliation. It is cheaper than ambiguity.

Deterministic simulation · no file is read

The zero-pending rule

Give each item in the batch a final state. The inventory only closes when no item is pending.

item-0042 · readable source.md

item-0107 · video with unsupported codec

item-0255 · PII-heavy family, awaiting ratification

item-0913 · transcript processed line by line

item-1440 · 1×1 image (lesson 4 rule)

Assign final states and try to close. Nothing will be written.