The audit record Shipped
The answer to "who approved this?" is a file, not a meeting
Every closed task leaves one record on the branch it happened on: what the work said it would touch, what the diff proves it touched, who opened anything that was shut, and what was overridden with whose name on it.
The unit is the whole argument
Durable provenance for AI-written code already exists and is good: there are tools that write the agent, the model and the prompt into Git Notes per line, surviving rebase and squash. If that is what you need, use one — this is a different object.
A record here is per task, not per line. It is not "who wrote this line" but"was this change authorised, and did it stay inside what was authorised" — a governance question that per-line authorship cannot answer no matter how complete it is.
What is in one
- Declared versus touched — the zones the spec named, beside the zones the change manifest computed from the branch
- Evidence — whatever the task's quality gate asked for: a review, a contract check, a regression run, a sign-off
- Approvals — every access request that opened a shut zone, with who answered and how long it lasted
- Overrides — legal, and never silent. A bypass carries a reason and an owner
- What was not proven — the section that keeps the rest honest
The census, including the part that is unflattering
At the last count (2026-08-21) this repository had 131 tasks closed, 112 of them with committed audit records — and in the first census of 77 closes,34 were closed by a single signed override, a bulk close of work that predated the closing gate, recorded once with a reason rather than fabricated task by task.
That figure is on this page for the same reason it is in the trail: a product arguing that overrides are always recorded, which then hid its own largest override, would be arguing against itself. The record is only worth anything if it is allowed to say something you would rather it did not.
It outlives us, on purpose
The records are markdown in .zones/audit/, in your repository, on your branch, written to be read by a person with no tooling. Uninstall CommitCycle and every one of them stays exactly where it is — the exit is part of the product, and a compliance answer you cannot take with you is not an answer.
Where it stops
- It is written at the close, not continuously. Work in flight has events; the record is the thing the second gate produces, and a task that never closes never writes one.
- Evidence is a URL or a capture you already have. There is no preview hosting here, and inventing one to hold screenshots would be a different product.
- It records; it does not judge. An override with a bad reason is still an override with a reason, and no file can fix that. What it can do is make it impossible to be quiet about.
The record's shape is in the docs, the gate that writes it is the closing gate, and what it measures against isthe zone map.