Entry 17

An entry that says nothing about what it does not know

2026-09-20speccorecli

Filescrates/cairns-core/src/entry.rslog.rscrates/cairns/src/main.rs

Hellbender's entry 60 asks whether check should refuse an entry with no **Still unknown:** line at all, rather than accepting a log that quietly stops collecting. It should, and the evidence in that entry settles it: twenty-six consecutive entries had dropped the line, cairns open had been reporting the project's state as of entry 33, and nothing complained for months, because a missing convention is not a broken one.

check now reports two faults it used to pass over:

worklog/0034-x.md: has no `**Still unknown:**` line - write `nothing` to close it out
worklog/0035-y.md: `**Still unknown:**` is empty - write `nothing` to close it out

The blank one matters as much as the missing one, and it was the easier of the two to get: cairns new writes the trailer into every entry it creates with nothing after it. An entry nobody filled in and an entry that deliberately closed out read identically to the collector, and only one of them meant it.

So the trailer has four states rather than two - missing, blank, closed, open - and only the last two are things a person decided.

Adoption does not fail on history

Turning this on would have failed hellbender before it was fixed, and fails amber now: 192 migrated entries, none with a trailer, because the format they came from had no such convention.

init writes the relaxation itself, the same way it freezes slugs:

$ cairns init
192 entries have no `**Still unknown:**` line - check relaxed to optional in cairns.toml
$ cairns check
ok

with a comment in cairns.toml saying to set it back once they carry one. The principle is the one adoption has followed throughout: preserve what is there, hold what is written from here on to the better standard. A tool that makes a project fix its history before it can be used is a tool nobody adopts.