Record Drew's approved reduced design after the second staff review. Limit preflight to the mutating bump path, cover audit's independent read path, and require byte-for-byte proof that deterministic YAML failures cannot partially update earlier JSON manifests.
Provide one TDD implementation task for the Hermes registry entry, jq/yq dispatch, focused preflight, and three behavioral checks. Explicitly defer rollback, audit-status changes, nested YAML, runtime changes, and broader release-tool refactoring.
Incorporate the adversarial design review without turning the Hermes wiring follow-up into a general release-script refactor. Keep the existing jq path, add Mike Farah yq v4 only for .yaml, and retain one read-only preflight to prevent deterministic partial bumps.\n\nReduce the test contract to three behavioral cases and explicitly defer .yml support, nested YAML, rollback machinery, audit/status redesign, exhaustive failure matrices, and the separately discovered JSON-expression issue. This follows Drew's direction to avoid ceremony and overengineering.
Document the agreed follow-up to PR #2025 on a branch based on its merged dev commit. The design registers the Hermes YAML manifest, keeps jq for existing JSON files, and uses Mike Farah yq v4 for a narrow top-level YAML field rather than adding a Bash parser.\n\nDefine focused failure behavior and behavioral tests while explicitly excluding nested YAML, Hermes runtime changes, and unrelated release-script refactors. This captures Drew's request to keep the implementation small and avoid process or abstraction overhead.
