ADR-0021: D-23, D-24 and D-25 were never issued — tombstone

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-02

Decisions

D-43 The ids D-23, D-24 and D-25 are permanently void and must never be assigned

No ruling is missing. The numbers were spoken during a grill session before the ADRs were written, and when the decisions were actually recorded they received different ids: the proxy corpus became D-28/D-29 (ADR-0016), the curation spike became D-32 and the metrics ruling became D-30/D-31 (ADR-0017).

Context

The repo's rule is that ids are append-only and never renumbered, so a hole in the sequence is permanent by design. The rule also says a removed item becomes a tombstone row rather than a missing number — this document is that tombstone.

Found by an adversarial review of the stage-2 spec, which was directed to cover "D-01..D-36" and correctly refused: three of those ids are declared nowhere the gate scans, so listing them in a Coverage table would have failed rule 3 (a reference to an id declared nowhere). The agent reported the discrepancy instead of quietly closing the gap, which is the behaviour the harness is built to produce.

The near-miss worth noting: had it silently written those rows, the gate would have caught it. Had it silently skipped them, nothing would have.

This ruling may not be re-decided

If a change contradicts this ADR: stop and raise it. Do not implement over it. Do not "fix" the sequence by renumbering later decisions to close the hole — living documents reference their ids, and the hole is cheaper than the churn.

Coverage

Bookkeeping only; no upstream finding lands here.

Upstream	Landed in	Evidence	Note