docs: stop telling operators a halt performed nothing after the checkpoint

[abrichr]

The sentence

docs/concepts/durable-runtime.md:

When the run halts (an unhandled screen, a refuted write, an escalation), it writes a pending escalation into the run directory and stops. Work already done is durably recorded; nothing after the checkpoint was performed.

The truth

False for the very case the sentence names.

A refuted write is a write that was delivered and then read back absent from the system of record. A postcondition halt fires on evidence collected after the click. In both cases an action after the last checkpoint was performed.

The engine says so itself — openadapt_flow/transaction.py::_reached_delivery:

A failed postcondition counts — a postcondition is checked after the click, so an over-halt that aborts the run on one is proof the write was already delivered, not proof it was not.

And runtime/durable/controller.py::record only writes a checkpoint when result.ok; the halting step's actuation is neither checkpointed nor rolled back.

The code is right. The prose is wrong. No behaviour changes here.

Why it is worth a PR

"Nothing after the checkpoint was performed" is precisely the sentence that tells a customer they have nothing to reconcile. The engine has a first-class terminal outcome whose entire job is to refuse that claim without positive evidence of absence (RECONCILIATION_REQUIRED, tightened in openadapt-flow #280). This page overrode it in prose on the operator-facing surface.

The fix

States what the runtime actually guarantees:

• everything up to the last checkpoint is verified and durable;
• the halting step is not checkpointed, is not rolled back, and a halt is not a rollback;
• what it may already have done is read from the terminal transaction_outcome — HALTED_BEFORE_EFFECT (absence positively established; nothing to reconcile) or RECONCILIATION_REQUIRED (reconcile before resuming; the runtime will not blind-retry);
• an empty evidence list means verification never ran, not that nothing happened.

Checks

scripts/validate_docs.py (passed) · mkdocs build --strict (clean) · pytest tests/ (101 passed).

Related

openadapt-flow #298 fixes the same class of stale halt claim in docs/EXECUTION_PROFILES.md, which named HALTED_BEFORE_EFFECT for a probe whose own pinned test asserts RECONCILIATION_REQUIRED.

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