Retraction text format — Railspike diagnostics

2026-10-25 UTC — Step 1 handoff

Necessary/useful instructions

• RAILSPIKE.md, Instruction Summaries and approval gates: made the rewrite gate explicit while allowing the host's small-change exception for directly requested concise policy edits. Retain the distinction between a reviewable plan and application implementation.

• step1_solution_assessment.md, Review and revision: preserved the user's removal of historical compatibility as a scope revision before handoff. Retain; it materially reduced the proposed work.

• RAILSPIKE.md, Experimental Effort Estimation: retained the original intake and a lower current projection rather than erasing the earlier assumption. Retain snapshot provenance and exposed-rater qualification.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

• Step 4 branch/commit cadence and runtime verification are future obligations; this step produced policy, an audit and an assessment. No stage commit or runtime pass claimed.

Uncertain assessments

• The Step 1 one-page target competes with verbatim request, two estimated alternatives and required study snapshots. Keep the decision short and supporting inventory separate; whether the metadata should move into a standard companion is a workflow-design question, not authority to omit it here.

— Codex · 2026-10-25 UTC

2026-10-25 UTC — Step 2 handoff

Necessary/useful instructions

• step2_feature_description.md, Core requirements and Completion boundary: required a readable end-to-end retraction outcome with recovery, rather than limiting the work to file serialization. Retain.

• step2_feature_description.md, Risks and Shared component inventory: exposed multi-file consistency and extension-based trust assumptions before implementation planning. Retain early validation and existing-surface reuse.

• RAILSPIKE.md, Experimental Effort Estimation: preserved the selected Option B projection and prior incompatible assumptions as history. Retain the separation between audit priority scores and cycle effort judgments.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No supported findings.

Inapplicable instructions

• The named-environment requirement does not add a production acceptance gate: this request names no deployment to repair, and the maintainer explicitly excludes historical retraction compatibility. Browser/source verification is still required for the delivered change.

Uncertain assessments

• The one-page target remains under pressure from required shared-surface coverage and study metadata. Keep the requirements compact; do not omit trust or interruption recovery merely to meet a visual page count.

— Codex · 2026-10-25 UTC

2026-10-25 UTC — Step 3 handoff

Necessary/useful instructions

• step3_development_plan_do.md, Key Risks and dependencies: the retained request path currently appears in deletion inputs, while import uses the JSON extension as an acceptance discriminator. Early contract/transaction gates prevent carrying these assumptions into the new format. Retain.

• step3_development_plan_before.md, scope reconciliation: keeps old retractions out while recognizing shared source-removal migration must remain intact. Retain separation of format replacement from unrelated recovery changes.

• RAILSPIKE.md, extended estimates and commit discipline: stages have stable identities and shared verification ownership; the plan explicitly excludes policy/audit implementation from the initial planning commit. Retain.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

• step3_development_plan_after.md, one-page limit: six stages with seven required fields, attribution, risk gates and study metadata do not fit a conventional single printed page. Recommend a concise decision overview plus compact stage records rather than a literal page ceiling; required verification is retained here.

Inapplicable instructions

• Known-host replay is not required: no production host is in the approved scope. Local ordinary browser/API/CLI recovery remains a release requirement.

Uncertain assessments

• Stage sizing is a prospective judgment, not measured work; stage 2 interruption behavior and stage 4 path dispatch may require splitting during implementation. The plan requires splitting before oversized work and renewed scope approval if necessary.

— Codex · 2026-10-25 UTC

2026-10-25 UTC — Step 4 handoff

Necessary/useful instructions

• step4_implementation_do.md, Stage Boundary Protocol: one planning commit plus six summary-bearing stage commits made the codec, interruption recovery, normal writes, import trust and cleanup independently reviewable. Retain; subprocess interruption testing found a real staged-deletion retry defect before later integration.

• step4_implementation_after.md, normal-flow verification and evidence limits: required actual browser signing, source byte inspection, ZIP export, rebuild, CLI and recovery rather than codec-only passes. This found historical-source trimming and a lost-finalize-response retry gap. Retain; final local results are distinct from deployment/full-suite/physical-device acceptance.

• RAILSPIKE.md, scope and estimate preservation: old-retraction compatibility stayed explicitly excluded while new-record interruption/retry remained required. Original 0.60 projection and separate 0.70 retrospective retained; no measured-time or acceptance claim. Retain.

Redundant/unnecessary instructions

No new supported findings beyond the planning page-limit feedback already recorded.

Inapplicable instructions

• Deployment and old-format migration are outside approved scope. No new dependencies, schema changes, navigation destinations or UI copy changes occurred, so corresponding approval/schema/icon work was unnecessary.

Uncertain assessments

• Native plain-text source rendering scales down on mobile; the receipt is readable structured text and supports browser zoom, but the task did not include a source-view redesign or physical-device acceptance. Retain this distinction rather than treating automated viewport coverage as device validation.

Final implementation commit: dc8bd8cc; planning 75ec624b plus six stage commits verified, each implementation commit includes the summary. Final checks: 117/117 affected regressions, 16/16 API/source, strengthened export/replay 1/1, actual browser scenarios and theme checks, keyboard/touch, PHP lint and documentation links. Working tree clean before this log-only handoff entry. No merge, push, deployment, full-suite or maintainer-fit claim.

— Codex · 2026-10-25 UTC