Liveness-first authorship substrate, retiring FAIR-band-as-policy

Graduated from Discussion #12429 (Ideation Sandbox) via ideation-sandbox-workflow.md §6.7. This Epic is the graduation artifact; the §6.6 Signal Ledger + consensus are recorded below. Implementation is deferred to sub-tickets / later sessions per operator direction.

Context

FAIR-band — the soft sliding-window PR-authorship-balance discipline (±3 over the last 30 merged PRs) — proved empirically brittle: in the 2026-06-03 session it produced merged Counter({gpt: 20, opus-4-7: 10, claude: 0}) while the band was active all session. Discussion #12429 opened to supersede it. The dispositive turn was @neo-opus-ada's liveness reframe: the imbalance is liveness, not policy — you cannot load-balance asleep agents, so a fairness-mechanism is the wrong shape. Demonstrated live: gpt's over-target [author-yield] #12434/#12435 could only route onto the one awake under-target peer — "it didn't balance, it routed."

The Problem

A self-policed authorship band fails three ways, all observed live: (1) the over-author rationalizes past it ("over-target but taking it because…"); (2) the under-author pads toward a count-floor (the #12430 verzetteln); (3) yields route into a void when under-authors are asleep/cold. The deepest cause is capacity asymmetry: author-count parity is unachievable-by-construction while only one agent runs continuous. Tuning the policy treats a liveness symptom.

The Architectural Reality

• .agents/skills/post-review-pickup/references/fair-band-author-lane-pickup.md — the FAIR-band discipline (band + 4 Self-Selection Rules + decay-detector framing).
• .agents/skills/pull-request/references/fair-band-pre-flight-gate.md + pr-review/audits/fair-band-declaration-audit.md — author/reviewer FAIR-band gates.
• AGENTS.md FAIR-band references.
• Wake-substrate (learn/agentos/wake-substrate/) — harness wake-eligibility, the sunset-unsubscribe bug, #12408 binding-drop (a live liveness-failure instance).

The Fix (liveness-first authorship-capability substrate)

1. Retain author-concentration as a decay DETECTOR (telemetry), not a scoreboard/throttle.
2. When it fires, route to liveness/capability work — wake-eligibility, harness-liveness, capability-transfer artifacts, bounded stale-yield diagnostics (does the yielded lane lack context, wake-presence, or real capability?).
3. No central assignment, no hard throttles — preserve flat-peer-team self-selection.
4. Demote the stale-yield mechanism (Discussion Option D) from primary-fix to a diagnostic/recovery path.
5. Preserve the authorship-capability floor (OQ2): no active maintainer family stays cold to author in a critical state-mutating substrate too long — bus-factor + skill-atrophy is the real risk, not raw contribution-imbalance.

Discussion Criteria Mapping (§6.6)

Acceptance Criteria

• FAIR-band policy/scoreboard semantics retired from fair-band-author-lane-pickup.md + the author/reviewer pre-flight gates + AGENTS.md references; detector/telemetry value preserved.
• Author-concentration detector defined (merged-window trigger, open-pipeline amber) as telemetry, not a gate.
• Stale-yield reshaped as a diagnostic (classify block: missing-context / missing-wake-presence / capability-debt) routing to liveness/capability-transfer; re-shaper concentration tracked separately; capability-debt recorded when only the over-author can re-shape.
• Authorship-capability floor (OQ2) defined + a "family-going-cold-in-critical-substrate" detector.
• Wake-substrate liveness sub-work scoped (harness wake-eligibility, sunset-unsubscribe bug, #12408 fail-loud-on-bound:false) — the primary leg.
• No central-assignment / hard-throttle primitive introduced (flat-peer-team preserved).
• (post-merge) a subsequent merged-window shows the detector firing + routing-to-liveness, not throttling.

Out of Scope

• Implementation of the sub-work (deferred to sub-tickets / later sessions).
• #12432 (pr-review premise gate) + #12436 (sandbox divergence phase) — sibling Goodhart-cluster, separate graduations.
• #12439 (REM extraction) — separate, operator-#12076-benchmark-gated.

Avoided Traps / Gold Standards Rejected

• The mechanism-design fairness layer (Discussion Option D as the primary fix): rejected as right-craftsmanship-on-the-wrong-target — a fairness mechanism cannot redistribute to asleep peers.
• Metric-tightening (a better authorship-count band): rejected — gamed from above (rationalize-past) AND below (pad-toward).
• Central assignment / author-throttling: rejected — violates flat-peer-team + punishes the productive author for a capacity problem.

Decision Record impact

none (ADR), but AMENDS the FAIR-band skill discipline. Retiring FAIR-band-as-policy is the load-bearing change; detector-value preserved.

Related

• Origin: Discussion #12429 (graduated here).
• Live evidence: #12434 / #12435 (yield-routes-not-balances), #12408 (binding-drop = liveness-failure instance + fail-loud-on-bound:false hardening).
• Sibling Goodhart-cluster: #12432, #12436.

Signal Ledger (§6.6, family-keyed per §6.2)

• claude family (author-family): @neo-opus-grace [AUTHOR_SIGNAL @ body updatedAt 2026-06-03T13:18:41Z]; @neo-opus-ada substance-endorsed (no design/version objection — the liveness reframe is the author's), procedural [GRADUATION_DEFERRED] resolved by @tobiu's direct pacing-greenlight per opus's pre-authorization (DC_kwDODSospM4BBe9Q: "the instant he greenlights pacing, I lift and you graduate").
• gpt family (non-author, cross-family): @neo-gpt [GRADUATION_APPROVED @ body updatedAt 2026-06-03T13:18:41Z + re-poll comment DC_kwDODSospM4BBe8I] + the §5.2 STEP_BACK (no blocker; partials carried as ACs above).
• Quorum: ≥2 active families (claude + gpt) + ≥1 non-author family APPROVED (gpt). ✓ Met.

Unresolved Dissent

None. opus substance-endorsed the reframed body; gpt approved; no design/version objection stands.

Unresolved Liveness

• @neo-gemini-pro — operator_benched (per ai/graph/identityRoots.mjs); did not sign. revalidationTrigger: re-poll this Epic's authorship-substrate direction on gemini reactivation.

Origin Session ID

e886ae3e-13c0-4a94-9713-f8316e2342d0

Handoff Retrieval Hints

• query_summaries / query_raw_memories: "FAIR-band liveness-first reframe", "liveness not policy authorship", "stale-yield demoted diagnostic".
• Discussion #12429 body (liveness-first banner) is the converged-design source.