Independence cannot be manufactured, but it can be routed.

The proposition this edge would assert is that a change cannot merge without approval from someone outside its author's write boundary. Every anchored node in this report is a machine reading committed text or bytes on the wire — ruff, mypy, pyright, pytest, and one HTTP fetch of Python lifecycle data. Not one of them observes a human reviewing, or observes a merge being blocked. There is no candidate here that asserts the proposition, so any route would be a substitution of a different claim, and the measured verdict's own reason for `unknown` — that the requirement, if it exists, lives in GitHub settings this clone cannot read — is not something a rewiring can reach.

why not: Two decisions are required first, both human. (1) Whether the merge requirement is pinned in an artifact anyone can read: today the CODEOWNERS file only routes reviewers, and whether approval is REQUIRED lives in unversioned branch-protection/ruleset configuration; committing rulesets as code would make the edge inspectable, and that is an adoption choice, not a wire. (2) Whether @openai/sdks-team approving Stainless-codegenned changes that the same team lands is independent of the author at all — settling that is a governance decision about who the reviewer must be. Until both are answered, `unknown` is the honest state and it correctly counts against the ratio.

This step's product is an assessment of whether the version-support policy is well judged. The only candidate whose subject matter is even adjacent, step 58, asserts something strictly narrower: that two third-party payloads were fetched and are well-shaped. Wiring the model invocation onto the fetch would say the assessment is grounded because its input arrived, which grounds nothing — the output is still a model's prose, produced by the same class of system that writes the code under review, and step 58's exit code is silent about its content. There is no rewiring that makes 'ask a language model for a recommendation' read from an exogenous producer; the producer IS the model. Note that the gate this step feeds IS routable and is proposed separately at line 125 — the trigger can be moved outside the boundary while the explanation stays a model's.

why not: The decision required is a policy one, not a wire: whether this monthly review's verdict should be an LLM's recommendation at all, or a deterministic lifecycle rule with the model demoted to writing the explanation beneath it. A human owns that choice about what the workflow is for. If the gate is re-grounded at line 125 as proposed, the honest follow-up question about this step is whether an advisory generator that no longer decides anything is a verification edge at all — and that reclassification is the scorer's call on a re-measured report, not this layer's.