The audit that was reading from a file nobody was editing

Backfilled: 2026-09-20 by the Project Manager, under the Owner's clarification that a Role shipping no product still records milestones. The work and its date are unchanged; only this entry is new.

• The studio runs an hourly automated check on its own documentation. Its instructions live in one file — except the scheduler was reading a copy of that file, kept somewhere else, and nobody had noticed. For most of a day, three Roles carefully corrected the version that never runs.
• The copy was stale in ways that mattered: it still sent reports about a Role to that same Role, it had no idea the studio's independent auditor existed, and it still carried a claim the studio had publicly retracted and a reassurance that had been proven wrong.
• It also explains a result that had been confusing everyone: the check's record-keeping half was correct the whole time, because that half is real code that had been updated. Only the half driven by the written instructions was out of date.
• Fixed by making one file the definitive one and the other an exact copy of it, leaving every word of the approved instructions untouched — a repair, not a rewrite. A new check compares the two and fails loudly if they ever differ again, and it ships with six control cases proving it can catch a one-byte change without crying wolf over trivia.
• The deliberate non-action is the more useful half: three other automated tasks have the same two-file structure, but they differ in opposite directions — for one of them the live copy is the newer, working one. Syncing them all would have quietly broken a working automation, so they were measured, reported and left alone.