A full-corpus audit of the record path against the file path found 75 of 48,905
images disagreeing, and 74 were one gap: the SynthID byte scan for containers whose
manifest no parser reaches lived in `get_ai_metadata`, an extractor the record path
does not run. The record silently reported no SynthID for images `identify` flagged.
Moving the scan into `identify_from_evidence` fixes it by construction rather than by
copying the rule into a second extractor -- the same shape `soft_binding` already
uses. Its byte checks mirror `metadata.synthid_source` literally instead of reusing
the broader `has_c2pa` / `c2pa_source_kind` derived above, so the file path's answers
do not move: verdicts over a 4,000-image sample are byte-identical.
`scripts/record_parity_audit.py` is the audit itself, now repeatable. It walks a
dataset, judges every image through both seams with the record round-tripped through
JSON, and reports disagreements by field and by signal. The rule in
`.claude/rules/development.md` says to re-run both sides of this seam after changing
either; this is what to run.
Both timing and audit scripts now put the package's OWN `src` on the path. From a
worktree an editable install resolves to the main checkout, so the audit imported a
different tree than the one under test -- the failure the same rules file warns about,
reproduced within an hour of writing it down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>