DEBT-DESIGN.md

@@ -408,3 +408,36 @@ which is the priority function slice one deliberately omitted.
 
 None of these required a schema commitment to discover. That was the point of
 making the first slice read-only.
+
+## The invariant slice B was written against
+
+**A projection must never manufacture provenance to make evidence easier to
+classify.** `task=None` is better than a confident lie.
+
+Both defects the first live run of durable observations exposed were failures
+of exactly this rule, and both looked perfectly reasonable in code:
+
+- **False attribution.** The worker's ring outlives the work it describes, so
+  binding its entries to whatever task the worker is running now produced a
+  clean, well-formed, wrong association between an old failure and an unrelated
+  task. The task is read from the observation itself, and only an observation
+  that names no task belongs to the current lease.
+- **Manufactured recurrence.** Treating "still present in the ring" as "it
+  happened again" turned one failure into four incidents. Presence is not
+  occurrence: an incident opens only when the entry advances past what has
+  already been accounted for, and that high-water mark survives the close.
+
+Either one would have corrupted the ledger while every number in it stayed
+plausible, which is the specific way this repo's bugs have always presented.
+
+## Signatures are frozen at write time
+
+The signature is computed when an incident is recorded and stored in the event.
+Re-projecting an old log with a newer normalizer therefore changes nothing:
+running one history through the build before and after the pane-name fix
+produced identical output.
+
+That is the intended behavior. An event must not silently change meaning
+because normalization code changed. Repairing historical signatures is an
+explicit migration or reclassification event, never a different projection
+result from the same log.