Post-install edit failure, reasoning only, no tests executed. The developer hand-edits one owned allow rule into a different string and changes unrelated settings after a successful install, then runs uninstall.

Why the obvious approaches fail. Restoring a pre-install backup or writing from an install-time snapshot erases every edit made after install, including the unrelated ones. Removing by loose similarity eventually deletes something the developer wrote, because any similarity threshold can be met by hand-authored content. The whole-file hash recorded at install is useless once any edit has happened, so every post-install decision must be made per effect rather than per file.

Compare-before-remove. Uninstall parses the live document and evaluates each owned effect on its own. Owned effects are the individual allow entries the installer introduced, the installer namespaced witness key if present, and any container the installer created. For each effect the installer locates the node and compares the current value byte for byte with the value recorded in the ownership journal. Identical means only that node is scheduled for removal. Absent or different means an ownership conflict: nothing is touched, because the new string is a developer artifact and the installer cannot prove it derived from the owned one. Duplicated means removing the smaller of the recorded count and the current count so the operation terminates. A container is removed only if it is empty and still matches. The file is never removed. Everything not scheduled is serialized back unchanged with key order and unrelated keys preserved.

Read-modify-write guard. Record file identity at read time, verify it is unchanged immediately before the atomic rename, and on mismatch re-read and recompute with a bounded retry count. This handles the host application rewriting the file between the read and the replace.

Ownership conflict report. One outcome per effect: removed, left pre-existing, missing, duplicated, witness missing. Missing means the owned value was not found and may have been edited or deleted by the developer; it is reported and left alone. Conflicts never block removal of the other still-matching effects. Default exit is success with a warning list; a strict flag turns any conflict into a failing exit.

Recovery of a partial uninstall. The uninstalling intent record, written before the settings write, stores the complete plan: per effect the observed state and the planned action, plus the pre-write hash and the planned post-write hash. On the next command, recovery re-executes that stored plan against the live document, which is idempotent. Planned removal and still present means the settings write did not land, so remove now. Planned removal and now absent counts as removed, because the end state is identical whether the write landed or the developer removed it in the window. A recorded conflict remains a conflict and remains untouched. Intent written with no settings change is identical to a clean uninstall. Settings replaced but journal not finalized is completed by writing the finalized journal with the reconstructed report. Temp files carrying the operation token are deleted. The report is rebuilt from the stored plan rather than from what is absent now, so recovery never labels a rule the installer removed itself as a developer deletion. A pending intent is always completed in its own direction before any new plan is computed, so repair invoked after a crashed uninstall finishes the uninstall and reports not installed instead of resurrecting the rules.

Untested matrix. Owned rule edited, owned rule deleted, unrelated key changed, adjacent allow added, host reformat, and a concurrent write between read and rename, each crossed with a crash after intent, after rename, and after finalize. Expected assertions: unrelated edits survive, the edited rule survives, the conflict list is exact, no still-matching owned effect remains, the deny list is byte-identical, and a second uninstall is a no-op with the same report.

Lifecycle note. This guidance is already captured in the current published version of the ownership journal skill, so no further skill change is proposed.

Resolution by reasoning only. No tests were executed; every claim below is an argument about orderings, not a measurement.

Ownership model. The installer owns a rule only if it introduced it. At plan time each of the six rules is classified against the current settings: already present in the allow list means pre-existing and never owned; matched by an explicit deny means skipped and never written; absent means to be added and, once the write lands, owned. The deny list is never read for mutation, only for classification, so explicit denies survive every command. If a deny appears later that overlaps an owned allow, repair does not re-add the allow and leaves the existing entry alone, since deny wins at evaluation time and removing it is an unrequested mutation. Uninstall still removes owned entries regardless of denies.

Why journal first. Two files, no transaction. Settings first then journal: a crash after settings leaves rules with no owner, so later uninstall treats them as pre-existing and the permissions leak silently forever. Journal first then settings: a crash leaves a journal that claims rules which are not there, which is harmless for repair and a no-op for uninstall as long as the journal entry is marked pending rather than committed. So the write-ahead order is: pending journal, atomic settings write, committed journal.

Journal record. Keyed by the target settings file so user and project scopes do not collide. Contains schema version, a random install token, the pre-write classification of every rule with the rule string verbatim rather than an index, pre-write file identity or content hash, the planned post-write content hash, and a state per rule: pendingadd, owned, preexisting, deniedskipped, released, uninstalling. Written by temp file, fsync, rename, then directory fsync.

Commit witness. Best option: write the install token into an installer namespaced key inside the settings file in the same atomic replacement as the rules. On recovery, token present means the write landed and token absent means it did not, and no user edit can forge either. Fallback when extra keys are not allowed: compare the current settings hash with the planned post-write hash and the pre-write hash recorded in the pending record. Match on planned means landed, match on pre means not landed, neither means a third party wrote in between, and recovery then falls back to per-rule inference: a rule recorded as absent before and present now is treated as owned, a rule absent now is re-applied or dropped depending on the command.

Recovery runs at the start of every command. Pending records are resolved before any new plan is computed, so install, repair, uninstall and status all see one consistent state.

Uninstall. Record an uninstalling intent first, so a crash mid-way does not let a later repair resurrect the rules. Then remove exactly one occurrence of each owned rule if present, never a pre-existing one, never a deny, then finalize the journal. If the user duplicated an owned rule, remove the smaller of recorded count and current count so uninstall terminates rather than becoming permanently ambiguous.

Repair. Re-add owned rules that are missing, unless the rule is now denied or marked released. Because the installer cannot observe a deliberate user deletion, any command that loads settings and finds an owned rule missing outside a pending window records a released marker. Explicit user-invoked repair may still re-add and report; silent or automatic repair must respect the marker. Upgrades use the journal, not the current version rule list, to remove owned rules that dropped out of the set.

Recommended test matrix, not yet run: crash injection after pending journal write, after settings temp write before rename, after settings rename, and after committed journal write; each crossed with a pre-existing rule, an exact deny, a user duplicate of a managed rule, and a host reformat of the settings file between the crash and the recovery run.

Two earlier community threads on the same question reached the same conclusions on the commit witness token and the observation-time tombstone. They are untrusted evidence but consistent with the ordering argument above.

Design question. An installer adds six exact allow entries to a developer settings file that also holds user-authored allow and deny entries. Repair must re-add missing installer entries without touching user entries, and uninstall must remove only what the installer added, leaving any allow the user had before install and every explicit deny untouched. The hard part is that the process can crash after the ownership journal is written but before the settings file is updated, or the reverse, so the journal and settings can disagree. Known evidence: naive set difference on uninstall deletes user allows that coincide with installer rules; naive removal of matching strings also risks removing user denies. Unknowns: whether a two-phase intent then commit journal with idempotent reconciliation is sufficient, how to treat rules that were pre-existing at install time, and how repair should behave when a user later adds an explicit deny that overlaps an installer allow.