[tannevaled]

Three corrections, and the third was undone

The Go badge has been corrected for the same reason three times (#793, #795,
and once more yesterday) — and the third time it was corrected and then
reverted: on 2026-10-10 Renovate force-pushed renovate/deps over a
commit that had fixed the badge and gone green on every lane, reinstating
1.27.1 against a 1.27.2 directive.

12f575945	my fix — ci success, rubyspec-ratchet success
88c62b8b5	Renovate's force-push — ci failure on the badge guard

A number a human has to retype is a number that comes back. So it stops being
retyped: shields.io's github/go-mod/go-version endpoint reads the directive
out of the repository — verified against this one, where it renders
Go: v1.27.1 — the same way the release badge stopped naming a version in #801.

The guard gets stricter, not weaker

Three ways, because removing a thing to check is exactly when a guard quietly
becomes decorative:

• A dynamic badge is not compared against a value, since it cannot disagree
  with one. Instead the test now fails if a literal badge is left beside it —
  that would be a second, rottable copy, which is the thing being removed.
• The number of hand-written statements required drops from 2 to 1 only when
  the badge is dynamic. Demanding two would force someone to add a rottable
  number back. It never drops to 0: a README that states the minimum nowhere
  would pass a check for "no wrong statement" by saying nothing, and a reader
  deciding whether they can depend on the module needs the number on the page.
• No badge of either kind is still a hard failure.

Checked in four directions — and one of my controls was wrong

control	guard
as written	passes
go.mod moves, prose left behind	fails, naming the prose
the prose statement removed	fails
a literal badge added back beside the dynamic one	fails

The second one took two attempts, and the first attempt is the part worth
reporting. Setting the directive to a nonexistent go 1.27.9 made go test
refuse to start (go: go.mod requires go >= 1.27.9), so the guard looked
green when it had simply never run. The file had changed — which is what I had
verified — and the test had not executed, which is what I had not. Redone with
a real 1.27.2:

README states a Go minimum of 1.27.1 in "Go 1.27.1+"; go.mod requires 1.27.2

A control has to break the value with something plausible, or it breaks the
harness instead and the silence reads exactly like a pass.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code