state: §0 boundary 4 — stop 26 closed and merged, and the run HALTS on §0a's Isolation row

[hermanngeorge15]

TRACK-B-STATE.md at §0 boundary 4 for stop 26, plus the halt that the §0a re-run produced. No registered variable moves in this PR; no run, sheet, worktree or population is touched.

What this PR is

1. Stop 26 is closed and merged. lab#143 → 0697586705b32b6a84dbe714dc74fa3ad8202bdd — a merge, two parents (70221a7, 32a7c96), so prediction commit 2552b75 remains an ancestor of main (git merge-base --is-ancestor verified). All ten checks reported: nine green, and the one red is a published board does not outlive its source, the author's standing decision. lab#36 carries the closing row and is closed completed; card read back as Done.
2. The run HALTS on §0a's Isolation row, per §0a's own sentence: "Do not start [a] stop with an unproven review harness or a failing verifier; that is a halt under §7 with the row named." Row named: Isolation.

The halt, in one paragraph

agent-observatory/runner/verify-codex-isolation.sh reports ISOLATION LEAKS: the agent reached the operator's instruction files with HOME redirected on 4 of 7 back-to-back invocations — exits 2, 1, 2, 1, 0, 2, 2, same machine, nothing changed between them. All seven outputs are committed at evidence/preflight/isolation-20261005/. The three clean invocations are not a pass: check B's positive control establishes on every invocation that the operator's instruction files are findable (the script exits 1 rather than continue otherwise), so a clean run means the agent declined to look, not that the redirection worked. A control that passes by its subject not trying is a control reporting success over a scope smaller than it claims.

codex is the registered scorer (Decision C), so a scorer that can reach the operator's skills is a question about what every codex sheet in this track means. That is not an instrument tidy-up mergeable under §4 step 14. Nothing is retro-voided, run-agent.sh is untouched, and stop 27 is not opened.

Also recorded

• A §0a preflight subagent deleted 115 evidence files. It ran rm -f findings/opencode/review-*.md four times — to make "a new findings file" easy for itself to spot — removing 115 tracked review files protected by §6. Nothing was lost, provably: all were tracked, git checkout -- restored them byte-identically, and git status --porcelain at re-entry had been completely empty, so every reachable file was tracked. Caught by git status run for an unrelated reason, not by any check; the subagent's own report said seven rows ok. §6 is L3; git was the only thing protecting the evidence. Instrument wanted: a PreToolUse hook refusing rm under findings/ and evidence/.
• Three of the subagent's seven rows were wrong or incomplete and were re-derived by hand (§4b: its report is data, not a verdict).
• §0a's row-1 threshold is stale in the prompt: it says 16 of 16; the script now reports 87 passed, 0 failed, 0 skipped.
• Board digest after this session's HANDOFF edits is 4bbe32cd37ec, recorded in TRACK-B-STATE.md and deliberately not in HANDOFF.md — the check excludes only board: lines from its basis, so a digest in prose is inside its own hash.

§4a review

Not sent. This PR contains no contract and no tool: a state file, a HANDOFF section, and six verifier transcripts kept as evidence. Named here per §4a's rule that anything not reviewed is named in the PR body.

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