`when_to_apply` is not metadata. `rule_document` embeds a rule as
`{title} — {trigger}` / `When to apply: {trigger}\n\n{statement}`, the trigger
appearing twice so purpose dominates a short vector — the shape note 2485
measured on snippets (a 0.153 top-to-second gap against 0.010–0.023 for
everything else). Without one the document silently becomes title + statement:
a DIFFERENT shape, ranked against a corpus it does not match, with nothing to
report it. Every bar and every rank in the system assumes one shape.
`create_preference` has refused an empty trigger since it shipped. The two rule
creators defaulted it to "" — so the shape was enforced for the record kind
that guides and optional for the kind that binds.
The guard lives in the SERVICE, because both doors reach it: the MCP tools and
the frontend's fast path in routes/rulebooks.py. Written in either alone, the
other could still create a rule that never fires. The route keeps a matching
check for the STATUS CODE only (400, not the 404 it maps ValueError to).
update_rule refuses to EMPTY an existing trigger, checked after the mutation so
it covers `clear=[...]`, an emptied form input, and any route added later.
Deliberately asked as "did this edit remove one" rather than "does one exist":
a rule predating the guard has none, and refusing to save it would freeze
precisely the unreachable records that most need fixing.
Deliberately not following arose_from_id, which the human door exempts itself
from because provenance is about auditing what the AGENT changed. That reasoning
does not reach this field — a missing trigger is not a missing explanation, it
is a rule that does not work, and it fails an operator as badly as a session.
15 test fixtures across 6 files were creating rules with no trigger. They now
pass one; that they did not is the point — curation is not a guarantee.
Step 1 of milestone 416 "Retrieval stops guessing a bar". First because every
later step assumes one document shape, and it is much cheaper to guarantee
before a corpus grows than to backfill after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
