The 2026-09-29 session found the merge gate did not exist -- no branch protection, no runner -- while the tree asserted both. This corrects the documents that carried, and in several cases CAUSED, that belief. CLAUDE.md gains section 2b: never infer platform state from this repository. It carries the specific API and kubectl checks for protection, runners, CI status, workloads and Flux revisions, and the rule that a green tick is not proof anything ran (a skipped Gitea job reports success). This is the rule whose absence produced every other finding. .gitea/workflows/README.md and merge-gate.yaml both said "there is no remote git host, this file is dormant". Gitea had been live for weeks. Both were written as plans and never revisited once the plan completed. The Transition section is now marked COMPLETE and says what is genuinely still outstanding (CLUSTER_AVAILABLE unset, so L2/L3 never runs in CI). DECISIONS-LOG 2026-08-31 is annotated IN PLACE. Anyone reading chronologically previously hit "required status check; runner incluster-dind online" with nothing marking it false until a month later. The correction now sits on the bullet itself. ci/README.md, clusters/README.md and both conformance READMEs carry a status banner: they speak as though no cluster exists, which makes a live L2/L3 coverage gap read as an expected phase. That framing is why the gap went unexamined. apps/wave-1/gitea-actions-runner-secret.sops.yaml: fixed a wrong path, replaced advice to `sops -d` into a terminal (which CLAUDE.md forbids) with the rotation script, and recorded that a fresh token alone does not re-register a runner holding a stale /data/.runner. apps/wave-0/plex-claim-secret.sops.yaml: the header claimed the file ships the placeholder. It has not since the claim -- it holds the spent token, which is inert and deliberately left in place. catalog/plex.yaml and the plex secret both asserted a "~4-minute TTL" as fact. It was uncited, upstream documents no expiry, and it was the basis for a since-disproven claim that the pipeline was too slow to fit inside it. Measured: ~2m45s. Both .sops.yaml files were verified to still decrypt after the comment edits (`sops -d > /dev/null`), and render==golden confirms the catalog comment does not propagate into the rendered manifest. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>