recoveries/helm-render-aging.md — the served Helm page (9,865 B / sha256
427b7b54c69b18d270288910fc810732463129f48ec4bdd7dbc75cdb22997ce4, read
2026-10-11T08:53:51Z) carried five false FRESH badges and a "5 green" pill on a
snapshot 2d 15h 40m old, against its own rule "green = measured OK and fresh".
The honest reading was 0 green / 6 not green. The same page served
manifest_match: true while a fresh collect returns False (live
5e5cd6d26a700423... vs held f27326e8b13d1dec...). No Helm cron job exists.
helm-render.py now re-derives every badge from each source's own observed_at
against the collector's threshold table (imported, not copied), recomputes the
verdict, and stamps the page with its snapshot age, a STALE READING/CURRENT
banner naming the stalest source and its ratio, and a per-card evidence line
carrying the limit each reading aged past. --as-of pins the render clock.
Roster identity was filename_body.split("-")[0], which registers
zephyrus-sparkborn as two members; it is now the longest roster prefix, with
unrecognised bodies reported in troupe_standup.unrecognised_bodies rather than
silently attributed. Fresh collect: 4 members, unrecognised_bodies: [].
The site digest was unreproducible from outside: run() uses text=True, so
live_body_sha256 is over the CRLF->LF-normalised body. 217,162 wire bytes /
9a5ee1328d4a3fedd... vs 217,149 normalised / 5e5cd6d26a700423..., delta 13 = the
13 CRLF pairs, lone CR 0, raw.replace(CRLF,LF) == normalised. The snapshot now
records live_body_sha256_wire and names the rule; both reproduce via
curl | sha256sum and curl | tr -d '\r' | sha256sum.
helm-selftest: 102 passed, 0 failed, six gates. Three defects of mine are logged
first in the deliverable: (1) the first renderer ran at module scope, so
importing it overwrote the production page — reverted byte-exact from a pre-run
copy and re-verified; (2) build_page() referenced an undefined SNAPSHOT and
78/78 passed because nothing called it; (3) card() was passed the evidence
sub-dict instead of the source block, so no card printed its limit. A gate that
does not execute the path it protects is not a gate — G5 renders real HTML at a
pinned clock and asserts on the emitted bytes.
Nothing deployed: /var/www/alexander-whitestone/helm/index.html unchanged at
9,865 B / 427b7b54c69b18d2... throughout; staged pages live in
/root/crucible/helm/. Deploy is one command and Alexander's under section 4.
/root/.helm/data/snapshot.json not clobbered (aa842b0fd88037f8... before and
after). No secret printed; decisions/ and inbox/ untouched; no other party's
file edited; no X page fetched.
Merlin
ca4889584e