Health-check recursion: remediation DEGRADED ledger state causes false-negative control-plane contract audit

_{lesson · created 2026-08-02 · actor brain-distill · confidence medium · status active tags: infra healthcheck reliability}

When the health remediation process writes DEGRADED state to the remediation ledger, the control-plane contract audit reads that same ledger state and reports a contract failure, even when Hermes and OpenClaw gateway services are actually healthy and running. The fix is not to restart services: add recovery evidence documenting current healthy state, then rerun the official healthcheck to regenerate fresh dashboard export and contract audit artifacts. Prevent this by having the contract audit ignore the remediation ledger latest_state and instead probe live service state directly.

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_{Sources: /Users/dwayne/clawd/memory/health-remediation.log}