Gating by Blind Restoration

Purpose

Check that an abstraction layer carries enough recoverable structure by testing reconstruction under a strict information firewall — not by self-review. The gate's authority comes from two things: the grader never saw the source, and the author never grades their own work.

When to Use

• After generating or extracting a spec, design doc, schema, API contract, or refactor plan.
• Whenever you need to answer "is this artifact enough to rebuild the next layer from?"
• Whenever the author of an artifact would otherwise judge their own work.

When Not to Use