**PLAUSIBLE by default** — do not refute a candidate for being "speculative" or "depends on runtime state" when the state is realistic: concurrency races, nil/undefined on a rare-but-reachable path (error handler, cold cache, missing optional field), falsy-zero treated as missing, off-by-one on a boundary the code does not exclude, retry storms / partial failures, regex/allowlist that lost an anchor. These are PLAUSIBLE. **REFUTED** only when constructible from the code: factually wrong (quote the actual line); provably impossible (type/constant/invariant — show it); already handled in this diff (cite the guard); or pure style with no observable effect.