Failure mode

The note cites sources or linked notes as if they ground a claim more directly or more broadly than they actually do.

Test

For each material claim or conclusion that the note presents as grounded by a link, extract the route the note gives: the claim, the cited material, and the stated or implied inference from that material to the claim.

Linked material is of three kinds, and each is read differently. There is no reading budget: a conforming note bounds what this gate must open, and a note that does not conform is the validator's finding, not this gate's.

Linked library artifacts — targets under kb/notes/, kb/reference/, kb/instructions/, kb/agent-memory-systems/, or kb/agentic-systems/. A linked note has passed its own grounding review against its own sources; this gate does not re-ground it. Check representation instead: read the target's title and opening paragraph and judge whether the claim the note invokes is the claim the target makes, at the scope the target makes it. When the invoked claim is an interior concept rather than the title claim, judge the note's verbatim quotation of the target if it gives one; only otherwise locate the target's treatment of that concept. A note that cites a linked artifact as grounding a broader mechanism or wider scope than the target claims is this gate's finding. Link text that promises what the target does not say belongs to sentence/misleading-link-text, and a sentence identifying this note's concept with the target's belongs to sentence/concept-attribution; do not flag those here.

Quoted sources. When the note quotes a source verbatim — a quoted span marked as verbatim, paired with a link to that source in the same paragraph — commonplace-validate has already established that the words occur in the source. Judge the quoted passage on the note's page: does this passage support this claim, with the qualification the note gives it? Do not open the source to find support. Open it only when the passage reads as lifted from a qualifying context, and then only to check that context.

Unquoted sources. For a direct link to a tracked kb/sources/<slug>.ingest.md with no paired quotation, use one of these two routes:

• When the ingest link text does not contain the exact marker (snapshot required), read only the ingest's ## Quotes section as source support. Its Source extract (verbatim) fields may be combined, and their Source location fields identify context, but no paraphrase or analysis elsewhere in the ingest supplies support. If the retained extracts do not contain enough source material to judge the note's use, return FAIL. Do not silently fall back to a local snapshot.
• When the ingest link text contains (snapshot required), derive exactly kb/sources/.snapshots/<slug>.md from the resolved ingest path. Do not search for a substitute. Require that file to exist, require its exact-byte SHA-256 to equal the ingest's snapshot_sha256, and require its frontmatter source to equal the ingest's canonical source. Return FAIL if any requirement is unmet. Otherwise read the snapshot and judge the note's use against it. The ingest's analysis is still not source support.

A link to a source outside kb/sources/ that carries evidential weight is read for its supporting passage; such links should be rare, since untracked sources require ingest grounding.

A purely adjacent link makes no support claim and passes. For an evidential use, check attribution vocabulary, source scope, coverage across the whole note, and every transfer from the source setting to the note's setting. Do not substitute a better argument, outside evidence, another ingest, or a reconstruction that merely reaches a similar conclusion.

Return FAIL when material support is absent, a required snapshot is unavailable or invalid, or the note's inference is incompatible with the linked material. Return WARN for support that is plausible but whose qualification, modest scope extension, or transfer is not articulated clearly enough to verify. Report INFO for plausible but non-load-bearing inferences that are not airtight.