Before a governed work is agreed, its checks are run against it: for a SOW, ontoref's refutation runs every gate, check and refutation over the draft and reports each contract red now (the pre-image) or green with a refutation that bites, and what blocks a signature (ontoref adr-119). The principal's flow for a SOW (TODO.md, 2026-10-07) puts that pre-flight between the review and the signature: create and validate, review, send and revalidate, pre-flight, review its result, send for signature, send to implement. Today a dossier shows none of it: the person who answers agrees with the report in a terminal or a session note, and the agreement records nothing of what it was agreed on.
Three invariants frame what SpecDossier may do with it. «Accredited, never asserted»: what a dossier holds as met is accredited by evidence that re-runs or re-verifies, shown as whoever produced it produced it — SpecDossier neither produces nor judges it; a criterion without evidence reads as not accredited, one that cannot be evaluated where it stands as unknown. «No judgment on the content»: whether checks and their refutations are adequate is ontoref's. «Priority is decided at a point»: SpecDossier shows at the decision point what is accredited and what is unknown, and records the resolution — who, when, and on what. adr-003 holds the service away from the project; a view of a document that is not Markdown is already a command the project declares and the CLI runs in the copy at each round (sow-read-by-a-guest).
On 2026-10-07 the principal chose: a command the project declares produces the report; the agreement is not refused by it, it is shown and recorded; an ADR before the SOW.
THE PROJECT DECLARES THE PRE-FLIGHT, PER KIND, AS IT DECLARES A VIEW. `.governance/dossiers.ncl` gains `preflight`, a command per kind — or, since adr-009, a record of named commands, each its own report — (WorkOrder, Adr, Biop) with `{path}`, `{stem}` and `{root}` placeholders, whose stdout is a report: an array of rows, each a contract (or gate) with its kind, verdict, refutation, reading and whether it blocks — the row shape ontoref's refutation reports. A kind with no command declared has no pre-flight.
THE CLI RUNS IT IN THE PERSON'S COPY AT EACH ROUND, AND BINDS IT TO THE REVISION. `specdossier round` runs the declared command at the project's root, on the document as it is in the copy, and puts the report with the revision: the command as run, the digest of the document it ran on, the report's bytes and their digest. A command that fails or writes no report refuses the round, naming it: nothing is put. The service keeps the report with the round, transient as the round is, and never runs it (adr-003).
SHOWN AS PRODUCED, AT THE DECISION POINT; NEVER JUDGED, NEVER A REFUSAL. The round's page, the agent's packet and the owner's agreement form show the report as its producer wrote it — each row, how many block — and say who produced it (the command). With no pre-flight declared, or one run on other bytes than the round shows, the page reads «unknown», never met nor failed. Agreeing is not refused by what the report says: the decision is the person's.
RECORDED BY DIGEST, CARRIED AT LANDING. When the person agrees, the agreement records the digest of the report the round showed for those bytes (`preflight`), beside the document's digest — the «on what» of the resolution. A dossier agreed without one records none. Landing carries the report's bytes beside the dossier (`<round id>.preflight.json`), so the recorded digest re-verifies from the project's files.
WHAT THIS DOES NOT DECIDE: which command a project declares (ontoref's refutation is the case in view; ontoref exposing it as a CLI verb with JSON output is ontoref's); whether a report's rows are adequate (ontoref's); signing on a blocking report (the person's, and the project's policy).
A pre-flight report reaches a round only as the output of the command the project declares, run by the CLI in the person's copy on the bytes it puts; no source of specdossierd runs a command of the project
An agreement is never refused by what a pre-flight report says; it records the digest of the report the round showed for the agreed bytes, and a landing carries those bytes
The person attaches a report file to the round
Rejected: Nothing binds it to the revision's bytes: asserted, not accredited.
The service runs the refutation
Rejected: adr-003: the service never reads the project; «Exposes, never acts».
Agreeing is refused while the report has a blocking row
Rejected: SpecDossier would judge the adequacy of the checks (ontoref's) and decide priority (the person's at the point).
The agreement records nothing of the report
Rejected: The resolution would not say on what it was taken; the evidence would live only in a transient round.