find_blockers walked the filesystem with rglob and skipped only a hardcoded SKIP_DIRS that omitted scratch/, whose contents are git-ignored local working space (only scratch/.gitignore is tracked). Agent session transcripts land there and quote historical pyproject.toml dependency lists verbatim, so eight scratch files reddened the canonical release gate on a developer clone while the shipped source carried zero references. The guard also reported RETAIN rather than delete-safe on that basis, so the noise produced a wrong readiness verdict, not just a red. Add scratch to SKIP_DIRS and cover the exclusion with a falsification test: a scratch transcript alone yields no blockers, and a real caller placed beside it still blocks. The test fails without the scope change. Found by the 1.0.16 release train; git grep over tracked files confirmed the only non-scratch matches are the three existing ALLOWED_PATHS.