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0.15.0 — a rung may cost evidence, and the refusal says which kind of no

· 3 min read
0.15.0 — a rung may cost evidence, and the refusal says which kind of no | AEPA ladder that only says what may follow what models permission, not earning. requires: names what a rung costs, and the refusal distinguishes "on the ladder and not yet earned" from "not on the ladder" — two sentences that lead to different next actions.AEPfield-noteaepfield-noteadopterdevelopertry-spec-driven-developmentunderstand-safe-agentic-codingresearch

Source-owned field note · website/blog/2026-08-25-2258-a-rung-may-cost-evidence.md · revision 8f106fad0926

0.13.0 made the status ladder data. This is the first release that spends it.

A ladder that only says what may follow what models permission, not earning. Anybody could move a story to implemented; the ladder had no opinion about whether anything was implemented.

What a rung costs​

requires:
  cleared:   [{ evidence: approval, at_least: 1 }]
  corrected: [{ evidence: approval, at_least: 2 }]

And the refusal says which kind of no it is, which is the whole design:

$ protocol artifact move outbound-claim:q3-uptime --to cleared
outbound-claim:q3-uptime is draft; cleared is on the ladder and not yet earned: reaching cleared
needs at least 1 approval record(s). Nothing was presented at $args.evidence.approval

On the ladder and not yet earned is a different sentence from not on the ladder, and the two lead to different next actions. One is "go and get the approval." The other is "you are trying to do something this kind of work does not do."

A tool that collapses both into refused has handed you the job of guessing which.

Three-valued, like everything else​

The condition is True / False / Unknown. A rung whose requirement cannot be observed refuses as Unknown, never as False.

Nobody looked is not the same answer as somebody looked and it failed, and neither of them is a pass.

What it does not do​

The shipped story ladder does not declare a cost. The mechanism exists; this repository has not yet spent it on its own most-used kind. That is a choice you can now make in your own tree without waiting for us.