Canonical Governance failed on nearly every push today (6 of the last 8
commits) because the local pre-commit hook and the CI workflow disagreed
about the canonical completion guard in two ways.
Frontend-only commits skipped the guard entirely: the hook gated ALL
governance checks behind governance-path detection as a perf
optimization, but subsystem contracts name canonical frontend files, so
those commits landed locally and failed the same guard in CI. The hook
now always runs the (cheap) completion guard; only the multi-minute Go
test and audit battery stays path-gated.
Contract-neutral bypasses did not travel: PULSE_ALLOW_CONTRACT_NEUTRAL_COMMIT
authorized the commit in the local shell and vanished, so CI re-ran the
guard without it and went red. A new prepare-commit-msg hook records the
reason as a Contract-Neutral trailer in the commit message, and the
workflow now evaluates the guard per commit (each commit's file list
against its own parent), honoring the trailer exactly as the commit-time
hook honored the env var. Per-commit evaluation also stops a compliant
commit from being blamed for range-mates.
The new hook is registered as a worktree-sensitive governance file in
governance_stage_guard.py with a matching unit test assert.
rcourtman