When Does an Audit Expire? Dependency-Triggered Revalidation for Rapidly Changing Agent Systems

Can a typed claim-dependency graph automatically mark only the assurance claims affected by code, configuration, data, or external-contract changes as stale, preserve historically valid results, and require the right revalidation?

Proposes the Change-Triggered Assurance Graph (CTAG). Between the Round 21 commit and the inspected commit, 127 files changed; a manually audited set of 17 changed files can affect the scope of Round 21's current-state claims. D22-A is deterministic routing against a manually audited actual diff plus authored mutation fixtures. It made zero model/provider/production-database calls. It is not a model-quality benchmark, automatic dependency-discovery result, production integration test, security audit, product reliability claim, production change, or deployment. E22-B and H22-1 to H22-6 are proposed and untested. CTAG is proposed only, not implemented in production.

• On the actual 127-path diff, the measurement-only watchlist selected 0 of the 17 audited critical paths, the filename heuristic 12 of 17 with 25 false positives, retest-all all 127, and the authored CTAG manifest exactly the 17. The 17-path set and tags were manually authored from the same change set, so this is not discovery accuracy or compute savings.
• On 32 authored mutation fixtures CTAG routed 32 of 32 exactly (direct watchlist 9, filename keyword 7, retest all 3). Specification tests on authored fixtures, not evidence of out-of-sample accuracy.
• Two historical claims preserved; five current claims made stale, then restored after direct inspection; two hypotheses left untested.

• D22-A Deterministic code-change routing diagnostic (D22-A) Executed (diagnostic)
• E22-B Prospective CTAG evaluation on unseen Encevra changes at controlled verification compute Proposed

• H22-1 Under equal total verification budget, CTAG will produce a lower stale-claim escape rate than no invalidation, fixed-file watchlists, filename heuristics, and periodic expiry.
• H22-2 At matched affected-claim recall, CTAG will revalidate fewer unaffected claims than retest-all and periodic expiry.
• H22-3 Execution-path closure and unknown-path fail-closed rules will reduce misses for negative claims compared with direct-file watchlists.
• H22-4 Separating historical_frozen from current states will reduce misleading carry-forward while preserving reproducibility and citation stability.
• H22-5 Change-triggered revalidation will achieve equal or lower stale-claim escape than fixed time-to-live refresh at lower total revalidation cost.
• H22-6 Comparing authored dependencies with runtime or static dependency evidence will catch manifest omissions that either method alone misses.

CTAG is proposed only, not implemented in production. No Noetis code, routing, release, or deployment change.

• Does a prospective CTAG shadow gate reduce stale-claim escape under fixed verification budget on unseen real commits?
• Which independent dependency view adds unique catches?
• Can unknown execution paths be caught and historical claims kept immutable in a shadow slice?

Builds on Round 21, Round 20, Round 10, Round 9. Continued in Round 24, Round 23.