NOW.md is still a surface every PR must write: the doc-checkpoint gate marches them into it

[localai-bot]

Follow-up to #364, which removed .agents/NOW.md's byte budget but left the file itself a surface every PR writes. That is the defect the same change wrote into AGENTS.md as an invariant — "if N concurrent PRs all edit file F, then F is a lock" — so NOW.md is now a documented violation of the rule it shipped alongside.

Why everyone edits it

It is not habit. It is mechanical:

# scripts/check-doc-checkpoint.py
REQUIRED = {
    "lifecycle": (STATUS, BENCHMARKS, NOW),
    ...

Any lifecycle move must touch .agents/NOW.md, so the gate marches every row-advancing PR into one shared file. NOW.md conflicted in 5 of the 16 conflicting open PRs measured at d928e2c3. Removing the byte budget removed the forced eviction; it did not remove the forced write.

What NOW.md actually contains

Almost all of it is a projection of records that already have a per-row home:

NOW.md content	Already lives in
row state, owner	the matrix row
who is working on it	.agents/claims/CLAIM-*.md (added by #364) and open PRs
the row's "next command or step"	nowhere per-row — this is the gap
cross-row priorities, current gate	genuinely authored, operator cadence

Proposal

Relocate the obligation rather than delete it. The live position must stay current; what is wrong is where that is paid.

1. Each row's next step becomes a ## Now line in the row's own spec — a file only that row's author touches. .agents/specs/ took zero conflicts across the whole Shared record surfaces are a lock: 16/29 open PRs conflict, 13 of them in bookkeeping only #364 sample; it is the shape that demonstrably works here.
2. scripts/now.py renders the digest on demand from the matrices, .agents/claims/*.md, each spec's ## Now line, and open PRs (degrading to REMOTE_UNVERIFIED offline, as claim-view.py already does).
3. check-doc-checkpoint.py drops NOW from the lifecycle triple and instead requires the moved row's spec to carry a current ## Now. Same obligation, per-row surface, no lock.
4. .agents/NOW.md keeps only what is genuinely authored at operator cadence — current gate, next actions, the invariants that bite. Its live-claims table is deleted and generated instead, and check-now-current.py gains a rule that the file may not carry a per-row claims table again, so it cannot regrow into the log it replaced.

Net effect: a row-advancing PR writes its own spec and its own claim file, and touches no shared surface at all.

Also in scope

AGENTS.md's new §Records paragraph ends with a dated measurement (16 of 29 ... at d928e2c3 ... third instance after policy.csv 0f3e44ee). That is a log entry in the one file the project says history does not go — "There is no state log", and the reason for a change belongs in its commit, where git log --grep is the record. It is also the accumulating-justification pattern #364 removed from STATUS_RATCHET. Compress to the rule; the evidence is already in the spec and the commit.

Risk

This changes the cold-start ritual every agent depends on (AGENTS.md step 3), so it takes its own row, spec and fresh review. scripts/now.py must be fast and work offline, or it becomes a worse NOW.md than the one it replaces.