Exploratory cards can be recovered without losing the work. When a worker wrote somewhere other than the card's own workspace, the card now offers exactly one evidence-led next step: promote the workspace, review a worker-reported registered checkout, choose between several reported checkouts, or state plainly that only documents remain. Attaching records the reviewed project, branch, HEAD, and changed-file count on the card and keeps the original exploratory path in its audit trail.
The audit receipt must name the checkout it verified.audit.md now carries an Execution context section recording the absolute path the worker actually wrote to, so a receipt can never silently attest a different codebase than the one the card ran in.
Fixed
Seeded scaffolding no longer counts as source material. Every card workspace carries skills/, data/, .stelow/, and stelow.json; treating those as source made every exploratory card look promotable and hid the reported-checkout review path. Only a real source file, or a directory Stelow did not create, marks a workspace as promotable.
Recovery refusals name their exit. Promoting a folder that has no source, or already has a reviewed checkout attached, explains what to do instead of failing generically.