When it ships wrong anyway
It will. A gate reduces the error rate; nothing zeroes it. The 4.8-star claim clears review because it looks like the kind of number that's true, the page goes live, and eleven days later the client's support inbox produces a customer who checked. This one shipped from the batch before the gate existed — the ship gate you build next step would have held it at rated 4.8 stars: OPEN, which is exactly why you're about to build it. What you do in the next hour is the difference between a professional with a process and CNET with a news cycle.
The correction is prompt and prominent. State what ran, state what's true, place the fix where the people who saw the error will see it. The silent edit — quietly swapping 4.8 for 4.6 and hoping — is the one move that converts an error into a cover-up. Errors are survivable; every working copywriter has shipped one. Cover-ups are what the screenshots are of.
The log entry is for you, and it's the more valuable half. Run the editor. Five fields, two of which most people never write down:
how_it_got_past— the honest mechanism, not the apology. "The number came from the model and no source row was opened" is a diagnosis you can act on. "I should have been more careful" is a mood.gate_strengthened— the only field that changes the future. Every correction ends by making some check stricter: a new pattern in the extractor, a new rule in the pack, a new required field in the table. The log entry isn't filed until this field is filled. That's the culture, encoded: a correction that doesn't strengthen a gate is just an apology with a timestamp. Blame changes nothing about the next batch; the extractor regex does.
This is where lesson 2's batch records pay off. how_it_got_past is answerable in one lookup — batch b3, pack v1, this prompt file — instead of an archaeology dig through your own sent folder. Model, prompt, pack version, claims table, corrections: that's a chain of evidence for every piece you ship. Almost nobody teaches this and almost nobody's portfolio has it, which is exactly why the corrections log is the strangest competitive asset you'll build this chapter: it's a document of your mistakes that makes clients trust you more. Any copywriter can claim they're careful. Yours shows the machinery.