Add stale-derived-status: freshness dates the cell, not the root

[Silentpartnercoding]

The profile already carries two cases where agreeing evidence is worth less than it looks:

• copied-consensus — about count
• incomplete-search — about coverage

This is the third in that family, and it is about recency.

The case

A memory cell asserts a current state. Its only recorded time is lifecycle.observed_at, which says when the cell was written. One of its claims is a restatement whose derived_from points at an older observation.

The roots collapse correctly — the profile already handles that. But nothing in the document dates the observation the restatement rests on, so a consumer reading a fresh-looking cell about a current state cannot tell whether the underlying observation is minutes or months old.

It contradicts a claim the README already made

Point 4 read, without qualification:

"Freshness, nonce, and revocation fields make replay and stale evidence visible to the consumer."

They do — for the cell. They do not for a derived claim's root. The wording is now qualified and points at the fixture. A profile that overstates one of its own invariants is worse than one that names the boundary, and this is exactly the kind of overstatement the profile exists to catch elsewhere.

The assertion is deliberately about absence

assert all("observed_at" not in claim for claim in stale["claims"]), (
    "a claim-level observation time would let a consumer age the root; "
    "its absence is what this case reports"
)

A claim-level timestamp would resolve this case. That it does not exist is the finding. Asserting it here means adding one later becomes a visible change to this file rather than a silent improvement nobody notices.

Provenance

This case was not invented. It is a defect that occurred: a status record asserting "not yet sent" was read and reported as current when the underlying state had changed hours earlier. The cell was honest, the roots were traceable, and the consumer still could not age it.

Standard library only. 5 examples, 8 adversarial cases still rejected.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code