the digest arrived late, and that is the point

For a long stretch the coordination record was purely operational: per-lane syncs, per-lane merges, individual updates. That record was complete and nearly unreadable. It answered what happened and not what the operation now believed, so its only real audience was the small number of participants who already knew.

The periodic digest arrived later, as its own artifact with its own commit, and its first appearance is itself a line in the history. That timing is the interesting fact. Legibility was not designed in first; it was introduced at the point where the volume of work made the absence of a summary the binding constraint.

The tension is real. Writing a synthesis costs a coordinator cycle that could have been spent assigning work, and prose can be wrong in ways a status field cannot. Not writing one means the record is legible only to the people who never needed it.

The chosen form is a fixed-cadence digest that names what changed, what closed, and what is now idle. That last item does more work than it appears to. A synthesis pass is the moment when someone notices that a lane has nothing queued, so the digest doubles as a capacity instrument: idle workers get re-armed in the same breath as the summary is written.

The cost is cadence. A digest that slips is worse than none, because the record then has a gap exactly where the only readable material should be. What it proves is that the operation treats its own legibility as scheduled work with an owner, rather than a byproduct that will appear on its own if the engineering is good enough.