prove-the-coverage-denominator

name

prove-the-coverage-denominator

description

Whenever you are tempted to say "done", "complete", "fully reviewed", "all sources covered", or "the migration is comprehensive", force the denominator into the open first. State the full space of cases, sources, branches, or entities under discussion, then label every element. The failure it prevents: declaring exhaustiveness because the largest or easiest visible case landed while the rest of the denominator stayed implicit and therefore unjudged. Triggers on audits, corpus ingestion, test coverage, literature reviews, source enumeration, and any completeness claim that could hide an unlabeled remainder.

prove-the-coverage-denominator

Feynman's insistence on the full case space fused with gap-finding and a persistent ledger: completeness is not a feeling, it is a labeled denominator. Organon: P11 gap-find + P1 enumerate + P30 ledger. Phase: JUDGE / PERSIST, with SENSE doing the enumeration that makes the claim auditable. Respiratory: coverage compresses only after the residual denominator is named.

Procedure

1. State the denominator explicitly. Define the full set whose coverage is being claimed: files, branches, sources, users, pathways, experiments.

2. Enumerate its elements. Materialize the list or the partition that makes every member inspectable.

3. Label every element exactly once. Each member must be one of: covered, replayable-unpromoted, named-gap, or ruled-out.

4. Explain every non-covered label. A named gap needs the missing condition; a ruled-out case needs the reason it is outside scope; replayable-unpromoted means it exists and can be rerun, but is not yet promoted to done.

5. Refuse the word "complete" until the labels close. If any element lacks a label, the work is partial. If the denominator itself is unstable, that is the first named gap.

6. Persist the residual denominator. Carry forward the named gaps rather than letting them vanish under a summary sentence.

The gate

There are zero unlabeled elements of the stated denominator, or the work is explicitly reported as partial with the residual named. A claim of completeness with an implicit or shifting denominator does not pass.

The denominator's source must be stated too — what fixed this as the full space (a spec, a directory listing, a census, a stakeholder)? A denominator chosen by the same move it gates is self-serving until checked against the real target (preserve-the-target); a conveniently narrow denominator passed cleanly is the vacuous firing this clause exists to block.

Example

A corpus ingest says "all government sources are covered." The denominator is made explicit: federal, state, county, and municipal sources on the scoped list. Enumeration shows federal and state are covered, county feeds are replayable-unpromoted, and municipal archives are a named gap because no resolver exists yet. Because the denominator has labeled residue, the honest status is partial, not complete.