Rule #4 codifies the discipline that prevents the kind of drift the
2026-05-30 status-audit found: Phase 2B, v0.5.1 Streams A/B/C, and 1C-γ
all stealth-shipped 2-3 weeks earlier with their plan checkboxes never
ticked and STATUS.md still listing them as "Up next".
Two halves to the rule:
- Ship side: ticking the boxes is part of shipping. A commit that lands
plan work also ticks that plan's boxes (or an immediately-following
docs commit does).
- Execute side: before starting an unchecked plan, spot-check git log
for distinctive symbols/files — re-executing already-merged work is
the worst failure mode of the drift.
Also applies the rule retroactively to the doc-structure redesign plan:
all 37 sub-step checkboxes flipped to [x]. Tasks 1-4 (rename, scope
headers + Next: footers, link fixes, CLAUDE.md table) shipped in
36a59cd..bae3f7c. Task 5's six verification steps all pass (Step 3's
grep matches are false positives — they're correct new-path sibling
links from inside docs/ to docs/, not stale old-path uses).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
cccb7d7ff3