Nineteen pull requests landed across JefeRust, JefeOS, and their release infrastructure during this sprint. JefeRust reached source-feature parity with the JefeOS 1.0 benchmark, an immutable clean-build producer joined the release toolchain, and the JefeOS host-identity gate made it through increasingly realistic validation. The two most useful results, however, were honest stops: the gate found one copied expectation and one real PowerShell boundary defect before either could become release evidence.

JefeRust Reached Parity, Not Release

The frozen parity ledger now records 55 benchmark items done, two explicitly non-gating partials, and no missing feature. That is the feature milestone JefeRust 1.0 was designed around: parity with JefeOS 1.0, not with the broader JefeOS 1.2 roadmap.

Feature-complete is deliberately not release-complete. JefeRust still needs an approved immutable image, an exact Titan/KVM boot result, Hyper-V parity evidence, full test accounting, provenance, and a release candidate that passes the warning floor. Keeping those claims separate prevents a healthy source tree from being mistaken for a proven artifact.

“Clean Build” Now Has Teeth

The merged clean-build producer constructs a disposable Linux environment from a reviewed image digest, records the source and toolchain identity, and emits machine-readable evidence. It refuses mutable image references and unapproved digests. The implementation is now in the tree; operational approval, image publication, and a reviewed live run remain release work rather than implied accomplishments.

Seven Ways the Lab Became Less Trusting

The JefeOS host-identity chain accumulated seven focused Jenkins corrections before reaching its live disposable test: exact source pinning, fail-closed workspace protection, elevated attestation, host-only self-tests, generated-job convergence, stricter string validation, and preservation of failed evidence. Each change narrowed the distance between “the script ran” and “this exact reviewed source produced this exact result.”

One review caught a deceptively small regex issue before execution: a printable-string guard could accept a terminal line feed under .NET matching rules. The corrected contract anchors the entire string, and dynamic tests now exercise both PowerShell 5 and PowerShell 7 with direct strings, boundary lengths, and newline-tainted inputs.

Build #20 Stopped on a Copied Sentence

The first live run never touched a disposable VM. Its self-test compared an expected description copied into the pipeline against the source implementation, and the two had drifted. That failure prompted a better contract: the expected text is now derived from the source syntax tree, so a future wording change cannot silently invalidate the gate.

Build #21 Got Farther and Still Said No

The next exact run passed workspace protection, source pinning, all 66 elevated host-attestation checks, and all 21 host-only self-tests. It then reached the disposable integration and exposed a real boundary defect: a PowerShell object-wrapped string was handed to compiled dispatch code that accepted only a direct System.String. Cleanup encountered the same boundary, so the run failed closed, retained its evidence root, and left no disposable VM behind.

That is a failed build and a successful gate. No schema-v3 release evidence was produced, no automatic retry hid the first failure, and the source fix is being implemented at the boundary and will receive independent review rather than being papered over with broad string coercion.

Two Remotes, One History

The canonical GitHub repository and the LAN Forgejo mirror were reconciled after the sprint. Both now point to the same reviewed master commit. Old local remote-tracking references and completed isolated worktrees were pruned conservatively; unpublished experiments, Claude worktrees, locked evidence, and ambiguous branches were left alone.

What’s Next

• Finish and independently review the strict PowerShell dispatch fix, then rerun the JefeOS host-identity gate exactly once
• Publish and approve the immutable JefeRust build image, then collect exact Titan/KVM and Hyper-V release evidence
• Close the remaining JefeOS high-severity identity gate before moving into the four-hour stability and fenced-failover proofs

The sprint produced a great deal of code, but its strongest result was epistemic: the release gates are finally difficult to impress.