the 2026 plan is holed: 5 lit days inside the letters, and start-week 6 is frozen #3

Today — the plan cannot be drawn cleanly, and has not been able to for a while. From the tracking issue, against mossaic 0.5.0:

Cannot be drawn cleanly — 5 day(s) inside the letters are already lit, and nothing takes those away.

| letters bright | 2 of 75 |
| still owing | 73 day(s) · 7,206 contributions |
| a letter day costs | 103 (peak 137 on 2026-08-19) |
| already past | 49 day(s) · 4,734 contributions, back-dating only |

--start-week 7 would leave 4 hole(s) instead of 5.

verdict is holed. A hole is a day inside a letter that is already lit, and nothing unlights a day, so those five are permanent for this start week.

Why it is worth fixing — the repository is currently tracking a plan it cannot complete, and reporting that fact to itself every day. Two costs, and the second is the one that matters:

• 73 letter days still owing at ~103 contributions each is 7,206, of which 4,734 are back-dating only. The plan was steep before the holes.
• More importantly, a tracker whose verdict is permanently holed teaches you to ignore its verdict. The holed state is meant to be the alarm; if it is the resting state, the alarm is off.

Fix — a decision, not a code change, and it is yours. The workflow comment is explicit that these inputs are frozen on purpose — "Keep this fixed for the whole year: the plan is these inputs, and changing one compares against a different plan" — so this is a deliberate trade rather than a bug:

• Move to --start-week 7. Four holes instead of five, and mossaic suggests it directly. Still holed; buys one day and costs the comparability the comment is protecting.
• Accept it and stop treating holed as news. Set fail-on: holed never, keep drawing, and read the tracker for the daily background target rather than the verdict.
• Re-plan for 2027. mossaic-art VYNCINT --year 2027 starts from a clean sheet, and art/vyncint-2027.json already exists in mossaic. The 2026 run becomes a completed experiment with a written-up reason it did not close.

Whatever is chosen, it should be written into the workflow comment beside the frozen inputs, because the next person to read start-week: "6" will otherwise assume it is achievable.

Done when — the workflow's comment says which of these was chosen and why, and the tracking issue's verdict is either not holed or documented as expected.