A document leaves the staleness queue when anyone edits it

docir check reports stale for a document past its type's review_days cadence, and the clock ran from verified or, when that was absent, updated. Every edit moves updated.

So a document nobody has vouched for left the review queue because somebody wrote in it.

What was observed¶

Observed twice independently on 2026-08-31, on documents one day past a 14-day cadence.

docir check reported six overdue documents. Two were re-checked: both were open asks made of another team, both still unanswered, so neither was stamped --verified — stamping would assert somebody had answered. The re-check was written into each body instead.

Both then read verified: None, updated: 2026-08-31, stale: false, and docir query --stale returned nothing. Nothing had been answered. The queue emptied because it was read.

Why the updated fallback cannot work¶

The queue asks "who has confirmed this is still true?" and updated answers "when was this file last touched?". Those come apart hardest in the document that matters most: the evidence that an ask is still unanswered is a re-check written into the body, so recording the silence is what ends the report of it. The longer a document goes unanswered, the more re-checks it accumulates, and the more reliably it disappears.

This is issue-9ed4905e0db8 one level out. That issue stopped tag rename from advancing updated, because a bulk administrative edit would forge the review clock. The forgery is not specific to mechanical edits: any edit forges it, because the clock was reading the wrong field. The fallback is the room; tag rename was one door.

The scope is every type with a cadence, not one workflow. An edit to a stale decision, architecture, reference or runbook cleared it the same way.

Reproduction¶

A store whose issue type declares review_days: 14. One document, created/updated 2026-08-16, no verified. On 2026-09-05:

docir check                  # 'issue-…' is 5 day(s) past its 14-day review cadence
docir query --stale          # [ the document ]

docir update issue-… --append-section "Re-checks" --body "escalated, still no answer"

docir query --stale          # []
docir check                  # no `stale` finding

Measured¶

On this store (2026-09-05, 196 live documents, 84 carrying a cadence, 1 carrying verified): ageing from created instead of updated reports the same 0 stale documents — the corpus is younger than its shortest cadence — while ageing from verified alone, treating absent as infinitely stale, reports 83 of 84. That last is the shape issue-40d1792bc9f9 rejects: a warning that fires on the product's own defaults.