Governance startup failure: Hypatia/K9/DEED workflow finishes with zero jobs #308

Observed on two unrelated current PR heads, 30 October 2026

The fork's .github/workflows/hypatia-scan.yml ("Governance (fork)") creates an Actions workflow run which finishes failure with exactly zero jobs. This is not a failing Hypatia scan with findings; no job ran, so there is no valid K9/DEED/Hypatia/fleet verdict evidence from this workflow.

• PR bench: cluster-aware uncertainty check for null calibration #306 head 9d1a8d0564aa4f35eedae861ceab0a057f62539f: run 41140897776, conclusion failure, jobs API total_count: 0.
• PR policy: make CodeRabbit review-only and block new Python in CI #307 head d6b154a5f43007767e4d57ce65ccac8fdc3b6fa5: run 41140713754, conclusion failure, jobs API total_count: 0.
• Other check runs may be green, but that does NOT establish that governance executed.

Scope and remedy

1. Diagnose why workflow planning/startup creates zero jobs (GitHub Actions policy, disallowed reusable workflow, invalid call graph, permissions or other unsupported context). Do not guess the cause from a tidy PR check list. Use cicd-squabbler zero-job attribution or exact API evidence where available.
2. Fix canonical shared tool/wiring at its owner if general; if the defect is fork-specific, fix the caller in a scoped PR.
3. Plant a negative workflow/refusals test so absent required contexts cannot yield READY_FOR_APPROVAL; report inability to scan as BLOCKED, not green.
4. Preserve K9/DEED/Hypatia independent diagnostics and actual gitbot-fleet report-back checking. Never remove or relax the gate just to make checks green.
5. Test on at least two genuine consumer repos before an estate-wide workflow change; use immutable pins. No impact on Joshua's upstream Julia/R algorithms.

This is tracked separately from statistical evidence PR #306 and review-only/Python language policy PR #307. Neither PR is merge-ready while mandatory governance evidence is unavailable.