---
name: correction-belongs-where-the-falsifier-is
description: "To place a correction, ask WHAT made the sentence false: a lane's own change → same commit as the change; a RULING already made → at the record, now, and naming no lane."
metadata: 
  node_type: memory
  type: feedback
  originSessionId: c1ae55d3-50d8-4a36-a57c-bef54ae5f84b
  modified: 2026-08-22T05:10:44.190Z
---

Two stale sentences can look identical and belong in opposite places. The discriminant is **what
falsified them** (doyle, 2026-08-22, #213/#159).

- **A lane's own change falsifies it.** `CONTEXT.md:682` was TRUE and stayed true right up to the
  instant #159's parameter landed. The lane is the falsifier, so the amendment **rides the lane, in
  the SAME commit as the change** — not a follow-up commit in the same lane. Together there is no
  false window at all; every way the two could be separated is a way someone would create one.

- **A ruling already made falsified it.** #213's landed stage note said its deferred `int` leg
  "rides releases#159". A later ruling made that false — false NOW, on a row already in the gate
  tree, and false whether or not #159 ever branches. Correcting it in #159 would make a landed
  row's truth conditional on a lane that was cold, twice-refused and unbuilt. **Where a ruling
  falsifies a record, the correction belongs at the record, now** — here a fourth comment-only
  commit on the lane already on the gater's desk (`f7d26dd5`).

**Second half, and the part I got wrong on the first pass: the replacement must name NO lane at
all.** Repointing "#159" at a different issue number reproduces the same defect with a fresher
dependency. Write what is true independent of any lane, so the sentence survives that lane
landing, slipping, or being cut.

**Why:** I argued for the cheap placement (avoid re-rigging a live gate). Cost was not the
question — a comment-only registry change re-runs no test legs, and the real stake was whether a
landed row is true on its own. A gater who has already cut one milestone member that day for a
premise that did not hold will not bet a false sentence against a lane's survival.

**How to apply:** for every stale sentence a census turns up
([[census-enforcers-and-staters-of-an-invariant]]), ask the falsifier question before choosing a
commit. Then check the replacement for cross-references and strip them — a correction that carries
a dependency it never needed is the same bug one hop over. Related:
[[correct-by-replacement-not-annotation]], [[amendment-falsifies-more-than-named]],
[[stale-carried-forward-sentence]].