0.84.2-alpha · core 2026-10-22

Single owner for the test-guard contract. New skills/stelow-workflow-testing-ai-code/references/guard-contract.md holds the 5-question ladder, the FAIL-OBSERVED-FREEZE-PASS ritual, the Layers order, the canonical anti-patterns and the canonical CI gates. Code truth stays in types/stages.ts and stelow.schema.json; the file is prose commentary and links to them.

Seven consumers link instead of copying. test-targets-and-gates.md, testing-ai-code/SKILL.md, testing-execution/SKILL.md, verification.md, step-3-feature.md, execution.md and goals.md now point at guard-contract.md. Four more files with guard logic (guard-quality-decision.md, workflow-audit.md, fail-observed-and-brownfield.md, records-and-tasks.md) carry a header pointer. No code-entity changes.

Two broken relative links. testing-execution/SKILL.md pointed at a references/guard-contract.md that does not exist in that skill, and goals.md used one ../ too few. Both resolve now.
Duplicated runtime-validation block. records-and-tasks.md carried the STELOW_VALIDATE=1 paragraph and the pre-commit paragraph twice. One copy removed; enforcement unchanged.
mutation-gate.py says what it is. Docstring now states repo-self-gate (14 hand-mutants for scripts/stelow only), not general mutation testing.