Only accepted ships count
The lint's most important rule is the one people most want to skip under deadline: unaccepted work does not get a dollar line. The demo works. The token chart is up. Someone in the room says "we're already seeing the savings." You are holding a forecast and being asked to read it as a close.
That pressure is the same shape as the go call from last lesson — a gleaming artifact arriving earlier than a done one — aimed at value instead of launch. The gate's answer is mechanical: if the deliverable has not cleared ACCEPT or ACCEPT-WITH-NOTES, the row is BLOCKED. Notes are allowed; a blocking fail is not. You do not invent a company-wide total to make the week look better. You do not borrow an industry percentage. You do not let a second row without an owner "average out" the first.
What you refuse to sum
Three inflations show up every time a value slide is assembled in a hurry:
- The tool's invoice, offered as the function's return. Tokens and API cost are real numbers. They answer what you spent on the builder, not what a named function returned to the week. A receipt that leads with tokens is still a token chart.
- The unaccepted hour gap. Eight hours to one looks like a win. If the thing never shipped, those seven hours are a plan. Plans do not get multiplied by a loaded rate and pasted into staff-meeting notes.
- The company-wide multiply. One honest row ($255 this week, this function, this owner) gets times-ed across every seat in the building. That product is not a receipt. It is a claim you cannot stand next to when finance asks which seats, which weeks, which accepted ships.
The loaded rate stays an input. If finance has not given you one this quarter, you do not pick $85 because it appeared in a drill. The drill's $85 is a fixture, the way DS-401 is a ticket. A missing rate blocks the row. Filling it yourself is the value version of defining acceptance checks after you have seen the deliverable.
Two drills left: the receipt line, then the table you would paste into the notes — READY rows in, a defendable total out, blocked rows named instead of quietly included.