ADR 0009 — Treat an HTTP 200 as no evidence that a file exists

ga · floor-software-engineer

Decision

Treat an HTTP 200 as no evidence that a file exists

Why

Status alone is not evidence. A catch-all origin answers 200 for every path, and a crawler trusting that reports discovery files where there are none -- then parses a page shell as robots.txt and gets the right answer for the wrong reason.

Measured

red.anthropic.com returns the same 42,521-byte text/html body for all six conventional paths, while / is 173,573 bytes. claude.ai serves 104,096 bytes of text/html at /llms.txt and declares a sitemap that 403s.

Inputs and outputs

This decision declares none. Every name in this section, when present, resolves against the capability vocabulary or the floor registry -- a typo fails the generator rather than rendering.

Where it is