The orphan queue empties itself when somebody triages it

docir check reports orphan for a document with no related: edge that no other document names. Both halves were readable, and the second half read the prose: an id written anywhere in any body cleared the finding.

So the queue emptied itself the moment somebody wrote down what was in it.

What was observed¶

On a corpus of ~418 documents (2026-08-31), docir check reported 12 orphans. Two were wired properly. The remaining ten were triaged into a section of one architecture document — a list of ids with a diagnosis beside each. docir check then reported zero.

Six of the ten were correctly isolated: a deferred scope decision, a flow whose body explains that no acceptance criterion references it, a decision that wants a code: glob rather than an edge. Four were genuinely unwired and stayed unwired. All ten stopped warning, and the four had no mechanical queue left — only a paragraph in a document nothing checks.

Why the prose signal cannot work¶

The finding asks "has anybody connected this?" and the mention graph answers "has anybody typed this id?". Those come apart hardest in exactly the document that matters: an orphan triage is a list of orphan ids, so writing it clears every id on the list, including the ones it concludes are still unwired. It also clears the triage document itself, which was the third orphan in the reproduction.

The two states are written in the same characters. "This id is fine standing alone" and "this id still needs an edge" are both adr-3f9a2b1c7d4e in a sentence, so no filter over prose can separate them — the distinction is a judgement, and a judgement has to be recorded as one.

Reproduction¶

Three documents with no edges: docir check reports three orphans. Write a body into the third naming the first two. docir check reports none.