Findings ledger

A finding may only leave the conversation through the ledger. Verbal triage ("agreed, will fix", "accepted, known risk") is how confirmed findings ship to production.

The ledger

One file per branch or PR — REVIEW-LEDGER.md unless the repo says otherwise — with append-only rows:

Exactly four dispositions:

• fixed — commit hash plus the check that proves the fix
• deferred — ticket/issue link, never a prose promise
• refuted — the code or output that disproves the finding
• accepted-risk — one-line rationale, named human who accepted it

Rules

1. Record findings at intake, before fixing anything — the fix session is where findings get lost.
2. Every disposition cites evidence; verification-before-completion applies to the "fixed" rows.
3. Never end a session with findings outside the ledger; the ledger is the handoff to the next session.
4. Merge gate: no rows without a disposition. Accepted-risk is a valid answer; silence is not.
5. A dropped fix (revert, force-push, "delete that commit") reopens every row whose evidence pointed at it — re-check the ledger before any reply or PR text cites those rows.

Provenance

Distilled from an internal retrospective of two production PRs (2026-08): roughly a third of the second-pass reviewer's comments were re-discoveries of findings agent reviews had already reported and lost in conversational triage.