Rule 7 (0.5.0) shipped an obligation on a format with four fields, none of
which could tell a question from a notice. Two consequences fell out of that
gap: the injection had to name both terminal states and prefer neither, and
coord-count.sh had to treat every unarchived file as a reply owed. The fifth
field closes both.
coord-send.sh --fyi writes reply-expected: no; omitting it writes yes. Absent
means expected, because every message already on disk lacks the field - so a
forgotten flag over-counts debt, which is visible, rather than creating debt
nobody sees. A reply is not a special case. A broadcast is always no: --reply-to
resolves inside the recipient's own mailbox and a broadcast never lands there,
so there is no reply path to promise.
coord-count.sh now prints TWO integers per mailbox, not one. Replacing pending
with debt was the obvious reading of "count debt rather than unarchived
messages" and it is wrong here: board.sh counts the same inbox files itself, so
a debt-only count would put two different numbers under one name with nothing to
reconcile them, and a mailbox holding only notices would read as empty while its
messages keep being re-injected.
The field is frontmatter and only frontmatter - a body line claiming
"reply-expected: no" at column 0 cannot silence a real debt, and a file without
valid frontmatter counts as owing a reply.
Section 20's wording changed because its stated reason expired, but its second
half matters more now, not less: the marking is a DECLARATION, not an
instruction. Without that clause one word in an untrusted message becomes a
lever that mints obligations in another repo.
coord-selftest 136 -> 151.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016iJoZVmU2guTEZcMghk88z
Kjell Tore Guttormsen
c0ccb1d611