evidence-ledger

Evidence Ledger — the spine every auditor reads

Infrastructure skill, not an auditor. It produces the only structure the auditor skills are allowed to reason over, so they don't each re-read the PDF and hallucinate a different table and a different list of numbers. It emits no findings and no verdict — only artifact_manifest.json + claims.json. See references/integrity-forensics-contract.md §"The pipeline" (stages [1]–[2]).

Build the ledger for: $ARGUMENTS

🔁 Not verdict-bearing — but not a polling skill either. The deterministic backbone (Steps 1–2) is a pure function of the hashed sources: same source bytes → byte-identical claims.json. Re-run it only when the sources change, never on a wall-clock timer. The only non-deterministic part is the optional enrichment pass (Step 3), which is additive and skippable. Do not wrap this skill in /loop / /schedule / CronCreate; there is no verdict to re-fire and no external event to wait on.

Why this exists

Five language-model auditors each independently parsing a PDF = five different hallucinated tables and five different number lists, none reproducible — and the obvious dismissal, "an LLM grading another LLM's paper is just slop." The structural answer is one deterministic pass that turns the paper into:

• artifact_manifest.json — what was observable; this fixes the observability level L, the ceiling on every downstream finding's severity, and
• claims.json — a list of span-anchored, hashed, checkable claims (schemas/claims.schema.json).

Every downstream finding must cite a claim_id from this ledger and quote a verbatim span of it. No ledger claim → no finding (the single most important integrity rule of the repo, enforced again by tools/adjudicate_findings.py). That is what makes the difference between "a model said so" and "here is the exact sentence, its file, and its content hash" (DESIGN.md §2).

Role in the pipeline (what this skill does and does NOT do)