Inbound signature verification was removed on next (#279), so the
Future Step proposing a Stripe HMAC scheme "landed with inbound
verification" proposed extending a subsystem that no longer exists, and
the Status section still counted #67 among the deployability gaps it
had closed. Both are gone.
Status and Next Step now carry no statement whose truth depends on
something being unmerged, in review or in progress. Out go the issue
counts, the commit-ahead count and head SHA, the enumeration of open
follow-ups, and the description of the milestone PR's labels and
assignee. Every one of those had to be maintained by hand against a
tracker and a branch that both move faster than this file does, and
each had already drifted: the milestone was recorded as complete with
zero open issues, one of the four listed follow-ups had closed, and a
fix described as awaiting review merged while this commit was being
written. The milestone page is linked instead. What remains is the
durability defect that gates the tag, phrased to point at #256 rather
than at the state of any branch.
Completed Steps gains the units that landed since the file was last
touched: #268 and #226, #250, #254, #261, #221, #211, #262, #269, #253
and #279, plus the 2026-08-20 units that were only ever summarised in
Status prose or missing entirely (#201, #200, #205, #206, #207, #234,
#202, #203, #209, #210, #208, #204, #233, #127).
