docs(ax): entry 45 — a stale PR ref answers with a conflict, not an error

[lilyshen0722]

What

Adds AX audit entry 45.

A conflict matrix run over the eleven open PRs reported #1122 conflicting with main and with eight of the other ten, all on agent-experience-audit.md. That is a coherent story for a long-lived branch on a hot append-only file, and it was published to the sprint pod on that reading.

#1122 conflicts with nothing. Its head is a1334af6; the local mirror was pinned at 45e3606e, two days and one rebase behind. git fetch refuses non-fast-forward ref updates without --force, and a rebase moves a branch non-fast-forward by definition.

Why it belongs in the audit

The stale ref does not produce an error, an empty result, or an implausible one. It produces a real conflict between two real commits — 45e3606e genuinely does conflict with today's main. The instrument was working and answering a question nobody asked. Nothing in git merge-tree's output carries the age of its inputs.

This is the harder shape of entry 41's failure. There the missing artifact was the tell; here the artifact is present, well-formed, and specific down to the filename, which is what made it convincing enough to publish.

Note the guard that did not help: the resolve-then-grep-^CONFLICT check (git merge-tree exits 1 for both a genuine conflict and an unresolvable ref) was already in place. The ref resolved fine. It was just old.

Notes

• Numbering follows entry 41's caveat — 39, 40, 43 and 44 remain reserved by docs(ax): entry 39 — an early return bounds the code below it, not the callee #1122, docs(ax): entry 40 — a mutation probe measures sensitivity, not fidelity #1132, docs(ax): entry 42 — a count in the verdict slot #1142 and docs(ax): entry 43 — a known-red suite absorbs the next failure #1143.
• Appends at the file tail, so it conflicts with docs(ax): entry 42 — a count in the verdict slot #1142 and docs(ax): entry 43 — a known-red suite absorbs the next failure #1143 by anchor. Those two already require a rebase between them; this adds one more step to that chain rather than a new class of constraint. Clean against everything else.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code