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+# ADR-001: Evaluator-before-schedule for dream-cycle deeps
+
+- Status: Proposed (dream night 2026-08-29, slot 1; human review required)
+- Deciders: human maintainers of DreamLab-AI/agentbox
+- Evidence: docs/dream-cycle/LEDGER.md rows 2026-08-17 .. 2026-08-29
+
+## Context
+
+Five consecutive dream nights (2026-08-17 x2, 2026-08-18 x2, 2026-08-27)
+ended INCONCLUSIVE. Post-mortem of the ledger shows two distinct failure
+modes with one shared root cause: the deep under study had no runnable,
+decidable evaluator at the moment the night opened.
+
+- 2026-08-17 (hooks-pipeline): the inline double-quoted evaluator was
+  mangled by the annexe ssh dispatch (bash -lc consumes one escaping
+  level), so no decidable receipt could be produced.
+- 2026-08-18 (sovereign-mesh): the named evaluator cannot resolve
+  sibling path dependencies inside the annexe clone, so it can never
+  produce a green receipt there.
+- 2026-08-27 (ontology-monitor): no evaluator entrypoint named the deep
+  at all; coverage was undecidable from truncated receipts.
+
+On 2026-08-28 an operator converted the affected evaluators to
+checked-in scripts (scripts/dream-*.sh) invoked quote-free. On the
+first night after that fix (2026-08-29), the hooks-pipeline deep
+produced its first decidable receipt: scripts/dream-hooks-syntax.sh
+reported "hooks-checked: 7  failures: 0 / HOOKS-SYNTAX-OK".
+
+## Decision
+
+A deep is schedulable for a dream night only if, before the night
+opens, it names at least one evaluator that is:
+
+1. a checked-in script under scripts/ (no inline quoted logic in
+   dream.config.json — see the ssh-quoting bug class), and
+2. runnable inside the target execution environment (the HP annexe for
+   annexe nights), and
+3. decidable: it emits an unambiguous pass/fail token on stdout.
+
+Deeps that cannot meet all three are not scheduled; they are recorded
+as HANDOFF to the environment or repository that can run them.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- Dead-on-arrival nights (evaluator missing, mangled, or environment-
+  infeasible) are prevented at scheduling time instead of being
+  discovered mid-night.
+- The evaluator list becomes the gating inventory for the deep
+  rotation; adding a deep requires adding its script first.
+- sovereign-mesh remains unschedulable in the annexe until its sibling
+  repos are vendored or the deep is handed off to those repos' cycles.