Ledger Factory: agents that read the spec first

Ledger Factory is a four-seat software factory in Band Desktop. Its premise: the verifier, not the generator, is the bottleneck. Only part of each stage's checks ship and every hidden test is written in the specification, so before any code exists the analyst seat turns the spec into a numbered requirement ledger (559 rows, 344 starred as what a minimal build would skip) and writes black-box probes from the spec alone, never from the shipped checks. The implementer builds each stage as small modules with unit tests and never opens the checks' source. The reviewer commits its own blind reading of the spec first, then verifies only the exact commit: clean build, unit tests, isolated harness, probes, diff. Every review note gets an owner: a fix commit, or a written waiver, plus a ledger row in the next stage. In the submitted run one human message started the band and nothing else was sent. Pocketful stages 1 to 4 were accepted in 2 h 39 min for $60.32 of model spend (list-price estimate); every stage folder claims its stage in isolated mode. These mandates are version 3: the previous run of the same factory was audited and each fault became a mandate line. FACTORY.md documents seats, costs, the bugs it caught, what this run's audit still found (a load-test crash graded as a note, a test read through a failure traceback) and how to stand the factory up on another problem by changing only the task message.