The Evergreen Harness: Governing Drift Between Technical Papers and Their Proof

Mature technical papers become risky to revise when claims and proof (code, tests, measurements, and supporting artifacts) change on different clocks. Authors may retreat to safe edits when reconciliation becomes unbounded, invisible work; this retreat is termed structural cowardice. This paper presents the Evergreen Harness, an interaction design for governed doubt between paper and proof. A versioned fact set lets a machine watch change and meaningful stillness, stage symmetric repairs, preserve dismissal and disagreement, and apply nothing without human authorization. Two non-pooled strata, a five-day operating record and a self-hosting stress test, show operation and failure: seeded runs detected three of five and one of five discrepancies. This autobiographical case establishes mechanism in one operator's practice, not improved papers or population effects. It contributes a four-layer harness model, the structural-cowardice diagnosis, an authority vocabulary, and failure-forward evidence for keeping claims answerable to proof as both move. Author preprint. This manuscript is under review and has not been accepted for publication.