/milestone-score — make the milestone climb + roadmap retirable, then retire it

What this does. The milestone report (fak milestone report) RECORDS the project's position — the M0..M7 maturity grid and the tracked-epic roadmap — but a trend report does not grade a retire-able debt, so the RSI loop could not drive it like it drives code-quality or stability. This pass gives the report its scorecard surface: a deterministic milestone_debt integer and a worst-first worklist, then retires that debt one real climb or epic-close at a time.

It is an instance of the generic scorecard doctrine pointed at one surface: the milestone program's climb to MATURED and its roadmap convergence. The tool is the Go verb fak milestone-scorecard (cmd/fak/milestonescorecard.go over internal/milestonereport), and it folds into tools/scorecard_control_pane.py next to the rest of the family — registered as milestone (debt milestone_debt) alongside the milestone_climb ratchet gate.

The two dimensions (and why this is NOT a parallel maturity scale)

milestone_debt = climb_debt + roadmap_debt, folded from the SAME two dimensions the report already folds — no re-derived scale:

• climb — climb_debt = sum over every cell below the MATURED floor (M4 Correct) of (M4 - current_rung) rung-steps. One defect per owed rung-step, so the kernel's len(Defects) count fold equals the rung-weighted shortfall. This is the report's OWN matured-floor framing (raw distance-to-MATURED across the grid), NOT the declared-target/regime-ceiling framing support_maturity_debt uses — so the two scorecards stay distinct: support-maturity fences each cell to its regime ceiling and scores the declared-target shortfall; milestone scores the headline project climb to a single MATURED bar. They COMPOSE, they do not duplicate.
• roadmap — roadmap_debt = sum over the MEASURED DISCRETE tracked epics of their open children (total - closed). An ongoing PROGRAM (kernel-optimization, cache-optimization) has no 100% so it never owes roadmap debt; an UNREADABLE epic is excluded — you cannot retire what you cannot measure, and that gap is the report's ACTION verdict's job, not the scorecard's.

The worst-first milestone_worklist orders climb cells by rung shortfall (lowest rung, biggest gap, first) ahead of roadmap gaps by open-child count — the climb is the deeper, structural debt, so it retires first.

Run it as an RSI pass (the five steps)

1. Run it — fak milestone-scorecard --json for the control-pane payload (read corpus.milestone_debt + corpus.milestone_worklist); fak milestone-scorecard for the rendered snapshot. Save a baseline first: fak milestone-scorecard --json > /tmp/milestone-before.json. The roadmap half resolves each tracked epic's children live via gh; to fold hermetically (offline / no gh), pass --epics-from <file> with a data file carrying a pre-resolved counts block.
2. Retire milestone_debt worst-first — drain corpus.milestone_worklist top-down: climb the lowest-rung cell up to MATURED (M4) — fence it, run it, then prove it correct — then close the most-open DISCRETE epic's children. Never move a cell to M4 by re-labeling; a rung climb is witnessed by the cell actually meeting the rung's bar.
3. Re-pin the climb ratchet on a REAL climb — the two witnessed climb KPIs (matured_cells, milestone_progress) are pinned in docs/milestones/baseline.json and a regression in EITHER reds CI via the milestone_climb control-pane gate. After a genuine climb improvement, re-pin: fak milestone-scorecard --pin. Never --pin to silence a regression — that ratchets the floor DOWN.
4. Re-measure + prove — fak milestone-scorecard --compare /tmp/milestone-before.json prints the debt delta; the worklist must have shrunk and milestone_debt must not have risen. There is no per-surface markdown snapshot to regenerate (the report itself is the snapshot); the proof is the --compare delta plus the re-pinned baseline.
5. Commit only the milestone lane, by explicit path — run fak sync reconcile --apply, then commit via fak commit --path:

   fak sync reconcile --apply
   fak commit --path docs/milestones/baseline.json --path <the cell/epic evidence you moved> -m "<subject>" [--push]
   fak sync push
   

   End the subject with the (fak milestonereport) trailer (or (fak <leaf>) for the concrete code a rung climb touched). Never git add -A.

The anti-gaming law

Retire a defect by moving the real cell or closing the real epic, never by editing the grid labels or the tracked-epic set to flatter the number. A climb defect is retired by a cell genuinely meeting the next rung's bar (witnessed by the report's own collection), and a roadmap defect is retired by a child issue actually closing — not by un-tracking the epic or redefining MATURED. If "fixing" a defect would mean relaxing a rung's definition or dropping an epic from the tracked set, stop — that is not a real retirement.

Re-pinning the climb baseline (handle with care)

The climb ratchet (milestone_climb, debt climb_ratchet_debt) is a DISTINCT gate from milestone_debt: a cell count that holds while milestone_debt rises still reds the control pane here. Do not blindly --pin after a milestone-score pass: confirm matured_cells did not decrease and milestone_progress did not regress FIRST, then re-pin only the genuine climb. A blind re-pin blesses a regression the way a portfolio re-pin hides a per-metric one.