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 and role in the pipeline (summary)

One deterministic pass gives every auditor the same span-anchored, hashed claims; no ledger claim → no finding. This skill is stage [1]–[2] only: it states what the paper says, never whether it is right, and writes no finding. For a PASS/FAIL, run /anti-autoresearch. Read reference/rationale.md for the full why and the pipeline-stage table.

Core principle

Deterministic first; the model may only add, never invent, never judge.

1. The numeric/citation/table backbone comes from code (tools/), not a model — that is what makes the whole pipeline reproducible and defensible.
2. The optional LLM pass is an additive claim-extractor: it may add a span-anchored semantic claim whose text_span is a verbatim substring of a hashed source file; it may never introduce a number, alter an extracted value, propose a finding, or assign a severity/verdict. The executor validates every added span (Step 4) and rejects anything it cannot locate. Its surface is deliberately broad — beyond method/scope/baseline it also captures theorem statements (with their assumptions), definitions, proof/derivation steps, equations, conclusions, the motivation span, and reproducibility-artifact references — but every one of those rides on an existing claims.schema.json type (scope/method/comparison/artifact_ref); enrichment widens what content is anchored, never the type vocabulary, the Step-4 gate, or the deterministic backbone.
3. No span → no claim. Every text_span in the ledger must be locatable in a hashed source. This is the same gate the adjudicator enforces on findings, applied one stage upstream.