nx_gate_dry_ratchet_gate.nx

nx_gate_dry_ratchet_gate.nx -- THE PERMANENT HALF OF D001 (2026-07-31, ws=gate-dry-d001). WHY THIS EXISTS AND THE 385 MIGRATIONS DO NOT REPLACE IT: migrating leaves is O(LEAVES) FOREVER. It remediates gates that already exist and does NOTHING about the next gate someone hand-writes with its own printf tomorrow. The corpus is a LINEAGE, not a flat file of thousands, and the fix belongs at the generation everything passes through -- not in 2800 descendants. nx_compose_builder was already fixed to emit inheriting gates; that was the real hoist. This is the other half: a RATCHET that makes the debt MONOTONICALLY NON-INCREASING BY CONSTRUCTION, so the campaign can never be silently undone. THE TOOTH: count non-inheriting *_gate.nx sources. Compare against a stored baseline. current > baseline -> RED. Someone added a gate that rolls its own verdict, or reverted a migration. current < baseline -> GREEN, and the baseline TIGHTENS to current. The ratchet only ever closes. current == baseline -> GREEN, no change. A rule nothing must remember beats a list. Nobody has to remember D001 exists; this fails if they forget. FIRST-RUN HONESTY: with no baseline on disk this INITIALISES and says so loudly rather than silently blessing whatever it found. An initialising run is NOT evidence of health -- it has nothing to compare against, and a gate that cannot compare must say so instead of printing GREEN as if it had. NON-VACUITY: the tooth is proven able to FAIL, not merely observed passing. gv_bite is fed a crafted regression (baseline+1 non-inheriting gates) and a crafted good state, so a run where the detector could not fire is visible as VACUOUS rather than counted as a pass. ENVELOPE, declared in-band: FLAT scan of runtime + runtime/_hdl_build under the discovered buildroot, same corpus as nx_gate_vocab_census and nx_gatebuilt_gate so all three numbers compose. Inheritance is detected by the SOURCE containing nx_gate_verdict -- a source-literal proxy, which is the right check here because the thing being ratcheted IS a source property. license_tier: ORIGINAL No hw writes (Rule 26). expect_exit: 0