artifact-gateslisted

# Artifact Gates > A step that produces no artifact cannot be enforced, and will be skipped. ## The observation this is built on A long directive is read **once**, before any work exists. Then hours of `tool-result → decide → tool-call` go by with nothing re-presenting it. It stops being *present*. In one recorded failure, a single run of a workflow directive skipped **eight** steps marked `[BLOCKING]` — rubber-ducking, adversarial design review, the QA matrix, TDD, code review, security review, docs, CI preflight — while **every hook-enforced gate in the same session was obeyed without exception.** The difference was not severity. Both said ABSOLUTE. The difference was *when the instruction arrives*: a hook fires at the instant of the action; prose fired hours ago. And the skipped set was not random. It was exactly the set whose output was **unobservable**: - TDD partly survived, because it leaves a failing test — a *thing* the next step needs. - Rubber-ducking did not, because it produces only a better state of mind. **Doing it and claiming it were indistinguishable, so the free option won.** That is the whole mechanism. Not defiance, not ambiguity: an unobservable step is a step where compliance is optional and non-compliance is undetectable. ## The fix Give every blocking step a **file it must produce**, and make the **next action require that file**. Compliance stops depending on disposition and becomes a precondition. Two things follow, and they are the one