Committing

You are writing a commit message. Enforcement (D-004): advisory — no gate inspects a commit message; each rule's exact status is in its label below.

• The body of a non-trivial commit tells the story in four short parts: symptom (what was wrong or missing) → cause → fix → and, where a test now guards the behaviour, a closing Pin: <test path> line naming it. For a change to anything load-bearing, add one sentence on why the guarantee still holds (e.g. "the check now fires in more cases, never fewer"). (Advisory — no gate inspects commit-body quality; upheld by review, per D-004.)
• Exceptions are trailers. A deliberate bypass of a convention is declared as a git trailer — a labelled line at the very end of the commit message, e.g. Skip-Registry-Sync: typo-only fix in the ADR page. The reason is mandatory. Trailers are permanent, searchable, and machine-checkable — a PR label or a chat-only approval is none of those. Any automated check added later verifies exactly these trailers, so the convention costs nothing now and becomes enforcement-ready. (Advisory for now — only the Unlock-ADR and Skip-Registry-Sync trailers are gated today, by adr-gates.yml; the general "declare bypasses as trailers" convention is review-upheld until a trailer-checking gate exists, per D-004.)

The trailer machinery is the exception channel the other rules point at — the fourth enforcement layer, the Test-Adjusted trailer (Testing changes), and the ADR gates (Writing ADRs) all declare their bypasses here.