Intent

Make filing a backlog row before dispatch a structural fail-closed mechanism in firstmate. A genuinely new ship or scout spawn must refuse before endpoint creation unless its ID is in the active home's In flight or Queued backlog, reading through the configured tasks-axi backend with an explicit HOME-scoped backlog file and falling back to manual section parsing when configured or unavailable. Secondmates, account recovery paths, and relaunches with existing metadata must remain exempt; batch dispatch must check each pair and continue after one refusal; the refusal must print the exact tasks-axi add repair command. Do not add a reasonless opt-out: permit only a small closed set of sanctioned exemption categories and record the chosen category in metadata. Resolve the AGENTS.md versus operating-fundamentals ordering contradiction so both say the row precedes endpoint creation. Add regression coverage for all of these paths. The existing fm-account-routing.test.sh session-sync race failure is a documented clean-main failure outside this change and must not be fixed or mistaken for a regression.

What Changed

• Require new ship and scout tasks to have an active-home In flight or Queued backlog row before endpoint creation, using tasks-axi with a manual parsing fallback.
• Preserve secondmate, account-recovery, and existing-metadata relaunch paths while restricting new-task exemptions to recorded, sanctioned categories and checking every batch entry independently.
• Align dispatch documentation with backlog-first ordering and add regression coverage for enforcement, repair guidance, exemptions, backend selection, and batch behavior.

Risk Assessment

✅ Low: The fix-round adds successful rowless coverage for resume, continuation, ordinary existing-metadata relaunch, and retains direct-account-recovery and secondmate coverage; the complete change now conforms to the stated intent without material source risks found.

Testing

Completed 1 recorded test check.

• Outcome: ⚠️ 1 error across 2 runs (3h48m55s)

Pipeline

Updates from git push no-mistakes