A deadline decides nothing about budget provenance, in either direction

The previous commit stopped a deadline from CLAIMING a measured cutoff, but wrote the answer unconditionally — so a deadline that ratcheted the budget also assigned false, erasing a cutoff an earlier unparseable size rejection had recorded. Escalation would then jump past a limit the server had already demonstrated, and an abort at that ceiling is classified permanent: a flaky target turned into a false permanent failure. Strictly worse than the bug it replaced.

The rule is now a named function rather than an inline expression, because getting it wrong in either direction is costly and the two directions are easy to conflate. A deadline preserves whatever was known; a parsed limit means the target stated its own bound and supersedes any measurement; anything else that ratcheted the budget did so from observed bytes, which is a measurement.

Extracting it also made it testable. Two fixtures aimed at this through Execute were vacuous — the runs never reached an escalation decision, so they passed with the guard removed — and I deleted them rather than keep tests that prove nothing. The table test on the function covers all four cases and fails when the deadline branch is removed.