workflow-fix: close-miss escalation clause for the on-policy yield floor

Overview / Motivation

Auto-filed from an orchestrator-observed gap on task #1947 (2026-08-02): the sycophancy arm (16 cells + 2 controls) was dropped at 232/240 accepted positives — a 96.7% fill — after a one-tranche retry budget.

Goal

Add a close-miss escalation clause to the on-policy-completions yield floor: fill ≥ 90% of floor after the registered retry budget triggers ONE automatic escalation tranche (sized remaining-need/measured-acceptance-rate × 1.3) before the drop fires.

Workflow gap

• Bug observed: a whole behavior arm was dropped eight rows short of its floor after one retry tranche, silently removing 18 planned cells and blinding the fleet's most context-dependent behavior; the elicitation itself was healthy (96.7% fill — not the #906 collapse class).
• Why it is a workflow gap: the 80%-floor + drop rule (.claude/rules/on-policy-completions.md) was written against catastrophic yield failures (#612/#906: 17%, 1%); it has no proportionality between miss size and consequence, so a near-miss costs the same as a collapse. The anti-silent-backfill intent is preserved by making the escalation an ON-POLICY same-construct tranche, never a template/LLM backfill.
• Confidence: high on the incident; medium on the exact 90% threshold (planner calibrates against historical fills).
• verified-at-filing: grep -n "80% floor\|Floor = 80\|retry budget" .claude/rules/on-policy-completions.md → the floor + retry-budget + drop mechanics present with no close-miss clause (context read of the § quota bullet, 2026-08-02); incident numbers from #1947 body Design section ("232 judge-accepted positives against the 240 floor after one retry tranche").

Proposed change (candidate diff sketch — refine in planning)

diff_sketch: | In on-policy-completions.md § pre-registered yield quota:

• Close-miss escalation: a source finishing >= 90% of floor after the registered retry
• budget gets ONE automatic same-construct escalation tranche (sized remaining/rate x 1.3)
• before the drop fires; the escalation is recorded in the datagen manifest. Below 90%,
• the drop fires as today. The escalation is never a template/canned backfill. Mirror one line in planner.md §4 (quota statement names the close-miss clause).

Scope / surfaces

• Primary targets: .claude/rules/on-policy-completions.md, .claude/agents/planner.md (§4 quota line); grep for other floor restatements (experiment-guidelines.md item 7).

Constraints / invariants

• Anti-silent-backfill intent preserved (escalation = on-policy, same construct, recorded); workflow-surface only; recursion guard applies.

Provenance

• workflow_fix_target: .claude/rules/on-policy-completions.md
• fingerprint: e632c3535116 Origin: orchestrator observation during the #1947 promote review; the recovery round (inline, 2026-08-02) is the empirical companion — its realized tranche yields will inform the threshold.