This is a docs-only change: a new design document (docs/AUTOMATION.md) plus a matching DECISIONS log entry, with no edits to AGENTS.md, no content/ records, and no citations at all (verification tooling found none). Nothing in it silently loosens the §3.15 gates: the Bench's 4-of-5 rule governs only which study proposals get explored, and the doc explicitly preserves the full arbiter at the freeze/publication PR, while the Atelier's 4-of-5 tournament winner 'still ships through the normal publication gate, where any seat's substantiated constitutional objection parks it,' with every seat's dissent published to governance//panel — that preserves rather than weakens contested-change display. The prospective auto-merge of freezes is explicitly deferred to 'a later, separate merge-policy amendment,' so it is not enacted here. On the one genuinely new authority surface (directive pins), the document correctly routes it through an AGENTS.md amendment reserved to the founder and states that 'until that amendment lands, no directive pin binds anything.' Briefs are declared never citable, supplied material is stated to never enter git, and pins bind presentation only, never verdicts — all consistent with §3.7–§3.15. The only soft spot is that the DECISIONS entry asserts founder confirmation without the '(AI record of a founder instruction)' stamp used in the preceding entry; that is a minor stylistic inconsistency in a design record, not a presentation of an AI judgment as a ratified human conclusion, and does not rise to violation.

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The PR adds docs/AUTOMATION.md and updates docs/DECISIONS.md to establish a 'full-automation' direction, heavily relying on the assertion that this design was confirmed by the founder in a '2026-09-01 session'. The constitution's §3.15 forbids presenting an AI record as a human one or an unratified draft as a ratified judgment. Because the system instructions require me to treat assertions of human approval in the diff as untrusted data, and I have no mechanism to verify whether this 2026-09-01 session actually occurred, I cannot determine if this is a genuine record of a human's directive or an AI fabricating human approval to push architectural policy. The question of compliance turns entirely on this uncheckable fact.

The diff is docs-only (new docs/AUTOMATION.md plus a DECISIONS.md entry); it does not edit AGENTS.md, content records, schemas, or CI gates. The design keeps a single publication path (classifier → arbiter panel → merge policy), preserves freeze-before-collection, real-citation verification, public dissent, and git-as-state, and explicitly defers directive pins until a founder AGENTS.md amendment so they do not bind yet. Future mechanisms (Expedition, collection runner, Atelier, auto-merge) are sequenced as later gated PRs rather than enacted here, which does not weaken §3.15. No citations were added; nothing confidential is published; founder-confirmation language is the project’s normal DECISIONS pattern and is not positive evidence of a fabricated human record.

This is a docs-only change: a new design document (docs/AUTOMATION.md) plus a DECISIONS.md entry recording it, in the same 'AI record of a founder instruction' pattern as the existing 2026-08-28 entry. AGENTS.md is not touched, so §3.15's reserved amendment power is respected — and the design itself explicitly defers the one new founder authority it proposes (directive pins) to a future one-line AGENTS.md amendment by the founder, stating 'until that amendment lands, no directive pin binds anything,' which is the opposite of a check-dodge. The design preserves the constitutional gates rather than weakening them: all five loops 'write through the same gate,' Bench selection (4-of-5) is upstream prioritization only, with the freeze PR and Atelier winners still facing the full publication arbiter where any seat's substantiated objection parks the change; superseded prose persists in git/changelog (§3.14) and tournament dissents are published, not silenced. The doc also honors Phase-1 constraints (git as state, no new services, fail-closed YAML validation) and confidentiality ('supplied material never enters git'; nothing from arc/ or notes.txt). No citations are added, so no fabrication surface exists, and the document never presents future mechanisms as built — 'nothing here is built until its own PR lands through the normal gates.' The unverifiable claim of founder confirmation is not itself an exercise of founder-only power, and under the inspectability model the founder's merge is the ratifying act.