# Bulletin and Controlled Prose routing

Gate provides two disabled policies for the fleet's prose boundary. One validates a complete
caller-owned bulletin section. The other carries a null routing request to Corpus. Neither policy
reads a file, rewrites shared prose, starts a daemon, or registers a native hook.

```python
from gate.admission import AdmissionKernel
from gate.policies import BulletinSectionPolicy, ControlledProseRoutePolicy

kernel = AdmissionKernel([BulletinSectionPolicy(), ControlledProseRoutePolicy()])
```

Constructing this kernel activates nothing. A native adapter still has to prove the lifecycle,
complete candidate, target identity, and supported effects described in
[Action admission](admission.md).

## Bulletin section contract

The adapter may identify the real fleet bulletin as the logical target `fleet.bulletin` only
after it has proved the canonical file target and isolated the complete section owned by the
caller. The candidate field is `bulletin_section`. Any other target or field makes the policy
abstain, so an uncertain adapter cannot inspect or block another agent's section.

One optional blank line may follow the H2 header. One final newline is also optional. All other
lines are mandatory, single-line, ASCII values in this exact order:

```text
## <task> - <agent> - ACTIVE

doing: <one line>
where: <one line>
changes: yes <paths> | no
```

Duplicate, missing, unknown, reordered, empty, continued, or orphaned fields deny with that ASCII
skeleton. `changes: no` is the complete no-change form; otherwise `yes` must be followed by one or
more affected paths. Bare `yes`, `none`, and `maybe` deny. Non-ASCII typography, emoji, combining
characters, and CJK-family characters also deny. The policy never repairs or moves text. Its
feedback contains only stable issue classes and coordinates; receipts retain digests rather than
the section or recovery text.

### Measured byte budget

The 768-byte limit is calibrated, not a prose-quality claim. On 2026-09-02, the 12 active sections
then present in `~/ai/bulletin.md` measured 235 bytes minimum, 431 median, 703 maximum, and 458.583
mean when each section was counted from its `##` header through its separating newline. The limit
is the first 256-byte boundary above the observed maximum, leaving 65 bytes of headroom while
making the three-value shape the primary brevity constraint.

The replay was:

```sh
LC_ALL=C awk '
  /^## / { if (active) print bytes; active=1; bytes=length($0)+1; next }
  active { bytes+=length($0)+1 }
  END { if (active) print bytes }
' ~/ai/bulletin.md |
  sort -n |
  awk '
    { value[NR]=$1; sum+=$1 }
    END {
      median = NR % 2 ? value[(NR+1)/2] : (value[NR/2]+value[NR/2+1])/2
      printf "count=%d min=%d median=%.1f max=%d mean=%.3f\n", NR, value[1], median, value[NR], sum/NR
    }
  '
```

This baseline measures real active entries before promotion. It does not show that those entries
already conformed to the new field shape, and it does not authorize activation. Re-measure after a
representative shaped trial before promoting the threshold fleet-wide.

The optional policy's admission budget is the largest materializable Python candidate rather than
a second, lower semantic limit. Its evaluator checks target and field identity first, then counts
at most 769 UTF-8 bytes before returning the oversize denial. Consequently, adding bytes cannot
turn the 768-byte rule into an optional kernel abstention, while an uncertain target or
caller-owned field still abstains without scanning the candidate.

## Content-free Controlled Prose route

`ControlledProseRoutePolicy` accepts only event `prose.route`, field `route_request`, value `None`,
and the exact logical target `corpus.controlled_prose`. An adapter may mint that target only when
it has evidence for target identity; native paths, suffixes, newlines, and document content in
either candidate or target abstain. The policy emits an observation naming the same Corpus route
and authority boundary. Gate therefore receives no prose bytes through this seam.

The route is not an eligibility decision. Corpus retains every privacy ring, exclusion, parser,
protected-span check, semantic review, compare-and-swap, undo, reins, and inbox rule. Public,
private, and sealed labels all receive the same content-free route observation; Corpus decides
what may proceed.

## Runtime survey and activation frontier

The 2026-09-02 runtime survey found no Controlled Prose user unit or timer:

```text
systemctl --user list-unit-files 'corpus-*prose*'  # no rows
systemctl --user list-timers 'corpus-*prose*'      # no rows
```

Corpus exposes the `prose` and `prose-hygiene` console commands, but no prose daemon or timer was
running. This change creates no second queue and does not activate either command. Native bulletin
enforcement and any Controlled Prose service remain later, explicit rollout decisions with fresh
adapter evidence and representative false-positive measurement.

```{eval-rst}
.. automodule:: gate.policies.bulletin
   :members:
```