F105 Work that needs a person's judgement or hardware the machine lacks cannot be closed by the agent, and a bar the agent set itself blocked work

Field	Value
Status	active
Topic	Planning, recording, and what the person decides
Grade	R3/S2
Cases	polyweave, winwright
Contrary	none
Harness facts	none

Claim

Where a task needed a person's look or hardware the machine did not have, work closed without them rested on cases that had never run, work set aside with the reason came back once the person or the hardware was there, and a margin the agent chose in place of a person's bar blocked a port for a day.

Mechanism

Some acceptance conditions cannot be computed: whether a render looks right at display size is a person's verdict, and a runner that needs an engine or a controller cannot run where neither is installed. An agent that must finish can substitute a proxy (a margin, a run on the hardware it has) and report the proxy's result as the verdict. A deferred store with a recorded reason makes "waiting on a person" a state the backlog can hold, so the next pick moves on instead of retrying.

Observations

polyweave. The deferred store was declared when a task could not be finished from the

machine: "That needed a deferred store, which this project had never declared." [polyweave@e26bd7c] PW53 "cannot be finished without a person, three times over" [polyweave@ab4835e]. PW56 was set aside because "Godot is not installed on this machine" [polyweave@5a3a26c] at 08:59 and brought back at 11:22, "now that there is a Godot" [polyweave@0a82ee0]. For PW76 a search of 109 samples "found no rig that passes all four either" [polyweave@113f220], so the task was deferred as "a call for somebody looking at" [polyweave@113f220] a comparison image; it shipped the next day when "a person looked at the rig's 0.3977 beside the shipped sprite at display size and accepted it, so the bar moved to 0.41" [polyweave@d2ae97c]. The project then filed a block titled "A bar a person sets once" [polyweave@6d1c136:docs/ROADMAP.md#L33], whose first line records that "The dim star's 0.37 was a margin nobody asked for and it blocked a port for a day" [polyweave@6d1c136:docs/ROADMAP.md#L35], and another that "Six Cottony families are chained on a person's eye" [polyweave@6d1c136:docs/ROADMAP.md#L39]. At the pin seven of the eight deferred lines read "set aside (a person's judgement)" [polyweave@6d1c136:docs/DEFERRED.md#L20-L26]. The project states the constraint as "nothing here spends money on an agent's own judgement" [polyweave@6d1c136:CLAUDE.md#L57-L58].

winwright. WW88's cases were closed on a machine without the hardware they needed:

"The cases were written on a desk with no controller, so the two that need one had never run." [winwright@d2a9081] With a controller plugged in both passed, and the entry was corrected. The suite's desk half cannot run on CI at all, and "The desk half is gated on the guest before any commit" [winwright@7a37e95].

freewilly. Prose only: the contributor guide says of CI "It cannot verify the engine install." [freewilly@c1c2eaf:CONTRIBUTING.md#L34],

which is checked by hand on a virtual machine, and the pinned commit filtered CI away from a case because "a case nobody has run there is not a gate" [freewilly@c1c2eaf]. Not counted.

Independence

Two origins. polyweave is the first, with several separate occasions (PW36, PW53, PW56, PW76). winwright's is independent: a different project, hardware and date, recorded as its own correction (rule 1). The deferred store is a roadkeep feature, a shared tool, and adds no origin; polyweave declared it in response to its own failure.

Counter-evidence

Both origins are projects whose product depends on physical or aesthetic inputs (a renderer, an engine, a controller, a person's eye), which the case studies name as particular to them; the other three projects record no such task, so the finding may be scoped to that property. polyweave's history is three days long, and the person who accepted PW76 is the project's single author, so "a person" here is always the same one.

Grade

R3: independent occurrences in two projects. S2: each observation is a dated commit recording the deferral, the return or the correction. The figures in them (109 samples, 0.3977 against 0.37, seven of eight deferred lines) measure the render or were counted from the file, not the phenomenon, so the grade is not raised to S3. Not S4: nothing checks that a task needing a person was not closed without one.