docs: give every backlog item an owning entry and a checkbox - #605
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Sections 5, 7 and 9 had no ### entries, so their items were invisible two ways: checkboxes with no owner (which a parser misattributes to whichever entry came before) and prose bullets with no box (which can never be marked done). Adds 5.1, 7.1 and 9.1; unowned and unboxed are now both zero. Open went 42 to 59, and that is the finding rather than a side effect. All seventeen unboxed bullets were real work - duplicated CI config, FETCH_HEAD tracked in git, 440 MB of stale etcd files, rotate sudo passwords on n150-1/n150-2 exposed 2026-07-18. Section 9 is titled 'Small, live, cheap': the work most likely to close in minutes was the least visible. A backlog that grows when audited was measuring the wrong thing before. Splits gating into an invariant and a ratchet. --strict alone was useless: it failed on 11 orphans, so CI would have blocked every unrelated PR and the first person blocked would have deleted the check. --strict now fails on unowned/unboxed only, which should be zero and stay zero; --max-orphans N is a ratchet set to today's count and lowered as sweeps close entries. Both verified in both directions.
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Sections 5, 7 and 9 had no ### entries, so their items were invisible two ways: checkboxes with no owner (which a parser misattributes to whichever entry came before) and prose bullets with no box (which can never be marked done). Adds 5.1, 7.1 and 9.1; unowned and unboxed are now both zero.
Open went 42 to 59, and that is the finding rather than a side effect. All seventeen unboxed bullets were real work - duplicated CI config, FETCH_HEAD tracked in git, 440 MB of stale etcd files, rotate sudo passwords on n150-1/n150-2 exposed 2026-07-18. Section 9 is titled 'Small, live, cheap': the work most likely to close in minutes was the least visible. A backlog that grows when audited was measuring the wrong thing before.
Splits gating into an invariant and a ratchet. --strict alone was useless: it failed on 11 orphans, so CI would have blocked every unrelated PR and the first person blocked would have deleted the check. --strict now fails on unowned/unboxed only, which should be zero and stay zero; --max-orphans N is a ratchet set to today's count and lowered as sweeps close entries. Both verified in both directions.