fix(devx): verdict handshake for check-platform-checklist and dispatch-gates self-tests - #14960

Part of #13800

Hole 2 (the verdict handshake) for the four files that card carries forward. Two of the four needed no work — see the falsified premise below — so this PR repairs two and reports measurements for the other two. Fixes is deliberately not used: two rows are delivered as readings, and the card should stay open for triage to close.

Verified at b12a5bda (the head of this branch).

The premise, re-derived — and partly falsified

The card's acceptance criterion was the guard form !== SELF_TEST_VERDICT, with a positive control of 81 files on origin/main, each of the four returning 0.

That marker gives a false zero on two of the four. A second, equally deliberate spelling landed in commit 9acddde9 ("Verdict handshake for 134 scripts/** self-tests that exit 0 on an early return", #14479) — a module-level flag, chosen with the rationale stated in the code: "The self-test's own exit code stays load-bearing, so the handshake is a flag rather than a returned sentinel." Counting only the sentinel cannot see it.

A marker that separates before from after, proven across that commit:

Union control on origin/main: 81 sentinel files + 77 flag files = 158 carrying a handshake in one spelling or the other.

Per-row outcome, each one measured rather than read

Probes inject return; (or a partial early verdict) at a hand-chosen anchor, write the mutation to a copy beside the original — the tracked file is never mutated — prove the mutation is on disk before running, and delete the copy in a finally.

1. scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs — was NOT MEASURED, now measured, defeated, repaired

The card's NOT MEASURED was a property of the instrument, not the file. measure-self-test-floor.mjs's injectEarlyReturn() anchors on the first function selfTest() { in the source; in this file that match is inside a fixture string (a template literal), so the injection only ever produces a SyntaxError. The real definition is at line 10517 and the dispatch was:

if (process.argv.includes('--self-test')) {
  selfTest();          // <- result discarded
}

Anchored on the real definition, the anchor is unique (1 match) and the reading is clean:

Repaired with the landed sentinel form. ENTRY_BY_HAND in measure-self-test-floor.mjs is deliberately left alone: its note stays true of the mechanical probe after this repair, and that file is outside this card's surface.

2. scripts/check-platform-checklist.mjs — was NOT MEASURED, now measured, defeated, repaired

Five batteries returning { checked, failures }, combined by the caller. Both failure shapes the card predicted, measured before the repair:

After the repair, all three mutations exit 1 and name the battery that did not finish:

✗ check-platform-checklist self-test: selfTestTrapVocabulary() returned without reaching its verdict,
so its assertions did not all run and no failure of theirs could be reported.

— and the same for selfTestSourceLineCitations(), confirming a late battery is caught too, not just the first.

Spelling: the flag form, not the sentinel, for exactly the reason the two sibling files state — the return value is load-bearing here (it carries checked and failures), so the handshake cannot be the return value. The guard is checked on both legs, including the inline one that runs on every invocation (this gate has no --self-test leg in CI), and it is placed before the .failures read so a bare return reports itself instead of crashing its reader. One requireReachedVerdict() helper carries the landed wording to ten call sites (five batteries × two legs); the check, the message and the exit code are the landed ones — only the tenfold duplication of the prose is factored out.

3. scripts/check-durability-degradation-log-level.mjs — already repaired; untouched

Received hole 2 in 9acddde9 (flag spelling). Both of its entries probed, and both hold:

• selfTest → exit 1, ✗ ... selfTest() returned without reaching its verdict
• selfTestReadSeams → exit 1

4. scripts/check-dispatcher-error-vocabulary.mjs — already repaired; untouched

Also from 9acddde9. Probed: exit 1 with the named diagnostic. Its hole 1 (SELF_TEST_BATTERIES, 7 hits, from #13799) is left strictly alone — the two counts are not merged.

The derived list, and the irony

Derived from this worktree after the edits, with --repo asserted:

node scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs --commands --repo objectstack-ai/objectstack

One of the two repaired files IS that script. Re-derived both ways on identical explicit inputs — the base version of the script and the repaired one — the derived list is IDENTICAL. The repair changes the self-test handshake, not the derivation.

All 21 derived families re-run at b12a5bda and green, including pnpm check:pm-dispatch-gates (1288 cases) and pnpm check:parse-guard / check:entry-guard / check:nul-bytes. Every exit code was captured before any pipe.

Two derived entries were NOT MEASURED rather than red, both prerequisite refusals and neither a finding:

• node scripts/check-test-completeness.mjs → exit 3, PREREQUISITE NOT MET — this gate grades a saved turbo run test log, and no log was named. Its own --self-test runs clean (exit 0).
• node scripts/check-durability-degradation-log-level.mjs on a fresh worktree → exit 3 before pnpm install; re-run after install, exit 0.

One gate is red, and it is red on main too

pnpm check:platform-checklist exits 1 with 4 UNCLASSIFIED coverage findings (batch_endpoints, crud_endpoints, metadata_endpoints, route_generation). Not caused by this PR — the ca3fd4b1 version of the file, run in the same tree, produces the byte-identical four findings (diff of the two finding sets is empty). This gate is deliberately excluded from CI (.github/workflows/lint.yml: "validated by pnpm check:platform-checklist, but by MAINTAINER action"), which is why the drift accumulated unseen. Filed separately rather than fixed here.

skip-changeset: scripts/** publishes nothing.

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