Commit Graph
65 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 09b48457ff refactor(retrieval): one registry for every surface's floor and budget (#4102)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 50s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 57s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m3s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Groundwork for the step's real change. The operator's decision is that the
floor is chosen and adjusted by the model using it, not shipped as a value
somebody has to defend:

  "we need a model consistent surface for the adjustment of these floor values.
   the user should be able to touch it but the model should be the thing
   handling it 9 times out of 10."

A tuning surface cannot be consistent across six arms that each spell their
configuration differently, so the arms stop owning their numbers.
`retrieval_surfaces.SURFACES` names each one, its floor key and default, its
budget key and default, and — because they are rendered by the tuning tool and
the Settings UI — what it asks, over what corpus, and how often it fires. A
floor cannot be moved responsibly by anyone who does not know those three.

Three things fall out:

- **`k` becomes a real budget everywhere.** Only auto-inject had a configurable
  one; `RULEHINT_LIMIT`, `PROMPTRULE_LIMIT` and `reply_preferences.LIMIT` were
  constants. `k` is what binds under a low floor, so it has to be settable per
  surface — and per surface is the point, since `pre_tool_rule` fires before
  every Bash call while `prompt_rule` fires once a turn.
- **`write_path` gets its own budget, inherited not reset.** It shared
  auto-inject's outright on the argument that "how many titles at once" means
  the same thing on both. It does not, for the same reason. Unset, it still
  reads auto-inject's key, so an install that tuned the shared knob does not
  silently drop to a new default.
- **The duplicated read-and-clamp goes.** That shape is canon #2860 across 295
  of 372 judged siblings. Survivable while the numbers were constants; not once
  they are meant to move.

The long measurement comments stay exactly where they are — #2223's noise-floor
probe, #3853's command-vs-code split, #3851's band measurement. The constants
they annotate now alias the registry, so there is one value and the reasoning
still sits beside it.

Tests build the write-path config from the registry (`helpers.writepath_cfg`)
instead of from hand-written dicts. That is not tidiness: the rule arms read
their numbers inside a fail-open `except`, so a dict missing one key does not
raise where a reader would see it — the arm silently becomes a no-op that reads
exactly like "fired and found nothing". Ten hand-written dicts each looked
complete on the day they were typed.

tests/test_retrieval_surfaces.py pins the identity everything rests on: a
surface's name IS its telemetry source. Nothing in the type system says so —
`record_retrieval(source="pre_tool_rule")` is a literal in another file — and
renaming one without the other yields an arm that can be tuned and not
measured, or measured and not tuned, with no symptom either way.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:17:23 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 825491d859 fix(retrieval): the place arm marks its repeats too, and three tests meet the new contract (#4101)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 2s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 41s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m2s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
CI on 5c64ea0 surfaced a half-measure I had shipped and three tests pinning the
semantics it replaces.

**The half-measure.** Only the semantic arm was marking repeats; the write
path's PLACE arm still dropped a nearby snippet that was on the ledger. One
menu, two rules, decided by which arm happened to find a record — and the
marker would then read as a complete account of what the session has met while
covering half the lines. `seen` now means this call's own menu and nothing
else, so both reuse arms mark and neither withholds.

**test_session_dedup_excludes_ids_from_the_reuse_arms** asserted the drop and
the ledger going into the query. Both are the defect; it is renamed and asserts
the marker instead.

**test_a_pulled_snippet_already_seen_is_evidence_not_menu** asserted #7 was
evidence and NOT menu, with the limit widened by one to pay for the drop. The
premise was the hard exclusion; #7 is now both, and the widening is no longer
needed for it.

**test_a_record_this_arm_withheld_itself_is_not_a_near_miss** is the
interesting one. Its property still holds and its setup no longer reaches it:
a ledger repeat comes back from the search and is rendered, so nothing is
withheld and `best_available` describes the bar. The one post-search filter
left is a PULLED record this same call already listed by place — kept in the
query because `resembles` needs its score, dropped from the menu because it is
already on it — so the test is rebuilt on that, and a sibling test pins the
direction that changed, so nulling the score whenever the ledger matches
cannot pass both.

Also stubs `superseded_ids` and `owner_names_for` in the new test file, which
were reaching for Postgres in a unit job.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 21:16:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5c64ea0b4f feat(retrieval): a repeat on the note arms is a reference, not silence (#4101)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 2s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 42s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 56s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m6s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
#3750 settled this for rules: a record the session was told about an hour ago
is not a record in front of the reader now, so the second time it is the best
answer it is rendered again with a tail saying so. The note and snippet arms
never got that fix, and theirs was worse — the ledger went into
`semantic_search_notes` as `exclude_ids`, so the repeat left the candidate set
entirely. Three things followed:

  - the second time a note was the best answer the session got SILENCE,
    indistinguishable from "nothing matched", on the arms that fire most
    (`auto_inject` alone ran 598 calls in five days);
  - a compaction made that permanent, since the ledger outlived the context it
    described — fixed one layer down in c61f730;
  - and `best_available` was measured against a candidate set the caller had
    already edited, so the bar could be blamed for a record the caller
    withheld (#3739, from the side its fix never reached).

The ledger is now a RENDERING fact. Every repeat is still ranked, still shown,
and carries a `seen` marker; the band is computed over all hits, because
letting the ledger move the cutoff would make "you were shown this" change what
counts as relevant. The marker is one word and deliberately not the rule arms'
phrasing — "before deciding it does not apply" is the voice of a record that
binds, and a dev-log borrowing it would claim authority it does not have.

Telemetry takes the rule arms' contract (#3752): `results` and `record_surfaced`
both take fresh only, the repeat is counted in `suppressed`, so this source's
surfaced set still matches its own log row (#3668). That makes a fact readable
that could not be stated here before — `result_count == 0` with
`suppressed_count > 0` is "everything that matched, the session has already
seen", which is a different claim about the bar from "nothing cleared it".

On the write path this also splits a variable that carried two claims. `seen`
was the ledger plus everything the call had already rendered, and both were
treated as reasons to withhold; `in_menu` keeps the same-call exclusion while
the ledger becomes a marker. That narrows the `best_available` compromise at
its old comment to the pulled-and-already-listed case, and retires the argument
that a suppression count here would be partial — nothing is hidden inside the
query any more.

Deliberately unchanged: the write-path SYNC class still shows once. Its claim
is about an edit in progress rather than a record's continuing relevance, and
repeating it every write to the same file would be nagging.

tests/test_ledger_references_not_silence.py pins both arms — the ledger never
reaching the search, the repeat rendered and distinguishable, the telemetry
split, the all-repeats call being readable, and the two exceptions (this call's
own menu, and the sync class).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 21:08:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ad26b3f458 feat(retrieval): the ledger records what was OPENED, not merely what was shown (#4100)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 50s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 55s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m3s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Milestone 386 made a repeat REFERENCED rather than withheld, and the line it
chose says "You saw it earlier this session". Nothing ever checked that. The
arms emit a TEASER — title, trigger, get_rule(N) — so a session can be shown a
rule twenty times and never read a word of it, and a compaction summarises the
teaser away leaving nothing behind. The server was asserting something about
the reader's context it had no way to know.

Three states now, where there were two:

  never surfaced   "it is not in this session's loaded set"
  named, unopened  "Mentioned earlier this session but not opened — read it…"
  opened           "You opened it earlier this session; pull it… again"

The middle one is the honest one and the one that was missing. It keeps the
full invitation, because a session that skipped a teaser is in nearly the
position of one never shown it.

HOW "OPENED" BECOMES OBSERVABLE. A new PostToolUse hook watches the get_rule
call itself and appends to `<sid>.opened.ids`. PostToolUse does fire for MCP
tools — the event's own output schema carries `updatedMCPToolOutput`, which
would be meaningless otherwise — and the matcher is `mcp__.*__get_rule` so the
server segment, which varies by install, is not pinned.

This is NOT the self-report 386 rejected. That objection was to ASKING a model
whether it holds a rule, which is unverifiable. A tool call is an event the
harness reports whether anyone asks. Recording what a session DID and believing
what it SAYS about itself are different kinds of evidence.

Both ledgers clear together on compact/clear. Keeping `.opened.ids` across a
compaction would have the arms telling a freshly-summarised session "you opened
it earlier" about a rule now nowhere in its context — a more confident version
of the bug being removed. Same reader (scribe_rules_live) for both, so ageing,
last-entry-wins and the bare-id format are defined once.

Also closes two smoke-coverage holes the checker was reporting as SKIP: the new
recorder, and scribe_precompact_preserve.sh from #3680. The latter needed
STATIC_FLOOR to become a set — PreCompact's contract is inverted, its stdout
BECOMES the summarizer's instructions, so silence is its failure mode and a
generic read of it looks like a leak.

Step 2 of milestone 416, and a hard prerequisite for step 4: while suppression
keys on shown, widening k marks records "seen" faster than they are read, and
the ledger would degrade in proportion to the improvement.

Plugin minted 2026.09.16.1232 -> 2026.09.16.2102.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 17:03:39 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5ae60734bb fix(retrieval): the completion-report arm gets its own bar, not the prompt arm's (#3860)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 48s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m30s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 34s
`report_preference` shipped reading PROMPTRULE_THRESHOLD_KEY, so the two arms
were one dial: tuning the bar for an operator's prose silently retuned the
lookup that runs when a task closes.

That coupling is worse on this arm than it would be anywhere else. Every other
retrieval arm scores a query that varies per call, so a mis-set bar shows up as
a changed clear-rate. COMPLETION_QUERY is a fixed string, so this arm's best
score for a given corpus is a CONSTANT — and a constant sitting under the bar is
a dead arm rather than a quiet one. No volume of traffic reveals it.

Found by the first live read for milestone 394 step 9: 69 calls, 69 declines,
every one naming the same record at the same score (0.7194 against a 0.72 bar).
Reading `best_available_id` (#3807) showed the record was about interpreting a
REQUEST, not about report shape — so the declines were correct and the arm is
healthy. The percentile alone would have said "lower the bar", which would have
delivered a false positive on every completion report ever written.

The bar does not move; the key does. Both defaults stay 0.72, so this changes no
behaviour on any install — it makes "leave this one where it is" expressible,
which it was not before. Settings grows the control (rules 25, 27), and the
default-agreement check grows a row.

Deliberately NOT included: a change to PROMPTRULE_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD. The
evidence for moving it is this install's near-miss table, and rule 115 keeps a
shipped default from being justified by one instance's corpus. That bar is a
per-user setting and belongs in the operator's Settings, not in the product.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 13:47:34 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 aa94c73d9e feat(plugin): a directory says which project it belongs to, git repo or not (#4085)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 47s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m1s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
All six hooks scoped their requests one way: `git remote get-url origin`,
resolved server-side through the repo bindings. That key does not exist
outside a git repo, so a session in a plain directory was unscoped in every
hook at once — no project context, no prior-art scoping, no project rules —
and silently, because a missing remote is indistinguishable from a remote
nobody bound.

A `.scribe` file is the second key, read by the shared scribe_scope_query so a
directory scopes the same way everywhere:

    {"instance": "https://scribe.example.com", "project_id": 2, "project": "…"}

`instance` is why the file is not just a number: an id is a different project
on every Scribe, so a marker that travels — a copied directory, a shared
machine, a repo someone else clones — would otherwise scope the session to the
wrong project without a word. Compared host-only, and a mismatch drops the id:
no project beats the wrong project. A bare integer is accepted too, since it
is what a person writes by hand. The marker beats a git remote — someone put
the file there on purpose — which is also how a directory overrides its
binding.

Two things it found on the way:

  * An explicit project_id that did not resolve rendered NO message at all —
    the branch hung off `if project_id` as an `elif`, so a caller holding a
    pointer it believed in got a context that silently omitted the project it
    had asked for. Now reported.
  * The refusal reason was a global set inside a function every caller reads
    through `$( )`. The assignment died with the subshell, leaving the caller
    to read an unset variable under `set -u` — which aborts the hook and costs
    the whole session's SessionStart context, to fetch a warning about a file.
    It comes back through stdout with the id instead, and a test pins it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 08:32:29 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 188e78bbcd feat(rules): retrieval honours a rule's home — global everywhere, a project's rules only in that project (#4074)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 54s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 59s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m37s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 31s
semantic_search_rules searched every rule the user owned, and every hook arm
called it without a project, so each project's rules were injected into every
other project's sessions and a project rule meant nothing a session could feel.

The search now takes a scope: global rules by default (an unbound session, or a
caller that forgets to say), global plus project N when given project_id (N's
rules only if the caller can read that project, through access.can_read_project),
and every owned rule with everywhere=True. The four hook arms and the report
preference lookup pass the session's project; an explicit
search(content_type="rule") scopes to its project_id, or asks the whole rulebook
without one.

Milestone 414 step 1. Guarded by an AST walk that every hook call site passes
project_id, and an integration test on real Postgres that a rule is reached only
from its home.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 12:06:34 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 7f974d9749 feat(mcp): enter_project becomes a small primer: goal, recent work, open work, vocabulary (#4045)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 46s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m44s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 23s
The handshake carried the whole project record, every milestone's plan, full
rule text, the notes most recently edited and ~9k of design guidance. For
project 2 that was ~222k characters, past what an MCP client accepts as a tool
result. Each category was walked through with the operator and sized to what a
session needs on arrival; each names the call that has the rest.

- project: id, title, status and the full goal (session start's "full goal"
  pointer still lands here). get_project keeps the whole record.
- milestone_summary: the 5 most recently touched milestones, any status, most
  recent first, without plans. Summaries gain last_touched_at: the later of
  the milestone's own edit and its newest step update, from the query that
  already counts steps. milestone_summary_omitted counts the rest and points
  to list_milestones. get_project and list_milestones list every milestone,
  also without plans.
- open_tasks: the 10 most recently touched open tasks, with or without a
  milestone, each naming its milestone. list_notes gains sort="touched"
  (the later of updated_at and the newest work-log), because a log doesn't
  bump updated_at.
- recent_notes: dropped. Retrieval surfaces notes by relevance, and
  get_recent covers recency.
- systems: id and name.
- design_system: summary plus guidance_call. get_design_system gains
  resolved_guidance, the chain-merged prose; its own guidance field is only
  the departures, so session start's old pointer to it led to a fragment.
  The session start pointer and using-scribe's "Building UI" section now
  name resolved_guidance.
- rules: rules_payload(brief=True) gives project_rules as id and title plus
  subscribed_rulebooks, and records only what it shows. Retrieval delivers
  rules in full and ignores subscriptions (#4052). Other callers unchanged.
- pattern_coverage, inception and systems_bootstrap: unchanged.

Clients: the plugin's using-scribe skill, the compaction notice and session
start are updated here; the REST project summary only gains last_touched_at.
Plugin version minted.

Tests: a size ceiling on the handshake for a large project; milestone and
task selection and naming; brief rules; resolved_guidance; the session
start pointer; and a real-Postgres test that a work-log touches its task and
a step update touches its milestone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-14 22:04:38 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 21343dc3aa fix(plugin): the session-start Goal line cuts at a word and says where the rest is (#4036)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 54s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 58s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m27s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 26s
A raw 200-char slice ended mid-word with nothing marking the cut, so a
reader took half a sentence for the whole goal. _goal_line flattens the
goal to one line, trims at a word break with an ellipsis, and points at
enter_project(id) when it cut.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 15:34:36 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 76bfd92c21 feat(410): the server orients with a client-neutral index; the live context carries live state only (#4030)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 2s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 12s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 54s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m28s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 27s
Step 3 of milestone 410 "One owner per piece of guidance".

_INSTRUCTIONS is rewritten as an index for every MCP client (1,597 of 2,000
chars): orient, rules, recall, record, plan, ids, reuse, UI, report. Each
line names its tool, and the block says every reflex is stated in full in
the using-scribe skill and in each tool description.
- names no client: CLAUDE.md, auto-memory and "the client injects ~2k
  chars" are gone
- gains the two reflexes it lacked: records that cite each other go through
  create_records with {{ref:N}}, and reports start from `placement`

The comment block above it now explains ownership (decision #4027) instead of
accumulating per-milestone trade history, and keeps the budget and its
reason (#2562).

build_session_context states only what the server knows about this session:
the active project and open work, its design system, an unbound-repo hint,
or that no project is bound. Removed: the "you are not holding the
operator's rules" section, the closing "Reflex: search Scribe" line, the
design-system usage sentence, and the plugin-specific header. using-scribe
owns all of that. The truncation note no longer restates the rules ask.

Tests: a pin that the live context carries no rules reflex; the cap test
drives truncation through the unbound-repo hint, since a bare session is now
one line; the budget test message describes the index.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 12:41:08 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4eebe271ed fix(rules): restore system_ids and clear the imports the deletions orphaned (#394)
Three defects from the sweep, all caught by ruff.

system_ids was REMOVED FROM create_rule AND create_project_rule — a real API
regression, not a lint nit. The parameter shared a signature line with tier,
so deleting the tier deleted it too, and the tools lost the ability to tag a
new rule to an area. Areas are what let a rule reach a project after this
milestone, so the one parameter that decides reach went missing from the two
tools that create reachable rules.

The other two are imports left holding nothing: services/rulebooks.py's
module-level datetime and its IntegrityError were used only by functions this
milestone deleted, and plugin_context lost four (select, async_session,
RulebookTopic, rulebooks_svc) with the preload and _topic_titles.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 16:24:38 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 0e10f6bb8a feat(rules)!: retire the always-on tier — every rule arrives by retrieval (#394)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Failing after 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Failing after 12s
CI & Build / integration (push) Failing after 27s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Failing after 35s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 37s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Milestone 394, steps 5-8. Operator: "remove the always on rule functionality
as the goal was to not have it at all since it didn't seem to work as
expected."

Unconditional preload had three failures the retrieval arms do not. It could
not be MEASURED — a resident rule is in the context whether or not it
mattered, so nothing distinguished "this governed the act" from "this was
scenery", and it was the one surface structurally exempt from the scoreboard
judging every other. It was SUMMARISED AWAY by compaction while the session
went on believing it held the rules. And it CROWDED OUT the few rules that
applied with the thirty that did not.

WHAT GOES

Schema (0100): rules.tier + ck_rules_tier, rule_versions.tier,
rulebooks.always_on, and project_rulebook_exclusions — a table recording a
project's opt-out of something that no longer binds it unasked.

Tools: list_always_on_rules, exclude_always_on_rulebook,
include_always_on_rulebook. Service: the same three plus rules_etag_for,
_valid_tier and the whole etag family. The SessionStart preload and the
write-path staleness arm go with them: nothing is resident, so nothing can
have drifted since a session loaded it.

THREE CALLS WORTH REVIEWING

enter_project got NARROWER, not wider. Its filter was `always_on OR
area-tagged`; dropping the tier arm leaves the deterministic half, so a
project with no canonical-tagged Systems gets no bulk rules and reaches them
by retrieval instead. Dropping the whole clause would have made that payload
bigger than the preload this milestone deletes.

Backups import tolerantly. A pre-394 archive carries tier, always_on and the
retired inception choice; none is read, and the exclusion key is DROPPED
rather than remapped, because restoring it would write data that
validate_inception now rejects as unknown.

The migration is irreversible in the way that matters and says so: downgrade
recreates the columns at their defaults and cannot restore which rules were
always-on. A value invented to fill a hole is not a measurement.

THE INSTRUCTION SURFACES SAY THE HARDER THING

Deleting "call list_always_on_rules()" is easy; replacing it is not, because
the new model asks a session to trust something it cannot see. All three
surfaces now say a session holds nothing, that rules arrive when work matches
them, and — the half that got dangerous — that "no rule arrived" means
"nothing matched", never "there is no rule". Under residency an empty session
was rare and suspicious; it is now the ordinary state of most turns, so
reading it as permission is wrong on nearly every turn rather than
occasionally. That is #3720's defect at session scale.

test_instruction_surfaces_agree is repointed rather than retired: its two
halves collapsed into one instruction, and it gains a guard that every
surface states what absence means. _INSTRUCTIONS is back at 1999/2000 —
the inception clause paid for the longer HOW line.

UI (rule 27, and the opportunity step 8 named)

The tier selector is gone, and what replaces it is the point: `when_to_apply`
is now the field that decides whether a rule is ever seen, so the editor
marks it required, warns while it is empty, and both rule lists badge a
trigger-less rule "never surfaces". A rule without one is not quiet, it is
unreachable.

TESTS

Two files deleted outright — test_rules_etag.py and test_inception_rules.py
tested subsystems that no longer exist. Elsewhere obsolete cases were removed
and the rest repointed. One deserves naming: the wiring test asserted the act
arms pass no `tier`, which had become an assertion that could not fail. It is
repointed onto `kind`, which does still exist and where the same claim is
live — a preference must reach a write exactly as a rule does.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 16:22:17 -04:00
bvandeusen c149ef31a3 wip(394): steps 6+7 — backend path and instruction surfaces 2026-09-11 15:15:33 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 690ca0306e feat(rules): the command arm gets its own bar, measured (#3853)
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 1m2s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m34s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 1m10s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 35s
One threshold served both act arms. The telemetry says they are not the
same problem:

  write_path_rule   2,325 calls, speaks on 37%, near-miss p50 0.6989
  pre_tool_rule    11,768 calls, speaks on  2%, near-miss p50 0.6794

The second is not quiet, it is mute — 11,530 of 11,768 calls said nothing,
with near-miss p90 at 0.7097 against a 0.72 bar. Refused mass piled one
hundredth under the line is what a bar set too high leaves behind, and the
note arms are the control: auto_inject refuses at p90 0.5463, write_path at
0.6738, both far below theirs.

The cause is query shape, not corpus. A write-path query is a code payload,
long and rich — the case 0.72 was calibrated on. A pre-tool query is a shell
command, often under a dozen words: less text, less signal, lower scores for
the same relevance.

MEASURED. Eight replayed queries against the post-#3855 corpus, consequential
acts against innocuous ones:

  0.7571  git push origin dev              consequential
  0.7245  cd ...; git fetch; git add -A    consequential
  0.7193  git pull --rebase origin dev     consequential
  0.6850  docker compose up -d             consequential
  ------------------------------------- 0.68
  0.6735  wc -l src/*.py && date           innocuous
  0.6544  grep -rn useState src/           innocuous
  0.6099  sed -n '120,160p' package.json   innocuous
  0.6056  ls -la && cat README.md          innocuous

At 0.72 three of four consequential acts retrieved nothing, including
`git pull --rebase origin dev`, where rules 153, 1 and 2 all ranked correctly
between 0.7126 and 0.7193 and were all refused.

The separation is 0.0115 wide. That is a direction, not a settled number, and
the comment says so — near_miss_samples on a few days of post-#3855 traffic
is what settles it.

This also corrects an assumption the old comment stated: it argued 0.68 sat
"below where this corpus's noise sits", inferring a higher floor from the
corpus being homogeneous. Measured, the command arm's noise ceiling is 0.6735,
so 0.68 clears it barely rather than sitting under it.

Lowering is safer now than it would have been. Until #3851 this arm had one
slot, so the bar was the only noise control; the band now filters downstream,
so the bar's job shrank and the bar can.

write_path_rule is unchanged — healthy at 0.72 on its own evidence.

Guards: the two bars parse independently, garbage falls back to its OWN
default rather than to the sibling's (which would silently re-merge them),
the command default stays below the write-path default as a direction check,
and each arm both SEARCHES and REPORTS at its own bar. That last one is a
failure the single-bar code could not have had: retrieval_logs.threshold is
what near-miss analysis is read against, so an arm searching at one number
and logging another misreports the refusal and invites moving the bar that
was already right.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 14:36:18 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 40189147d2 fix(rules): a shortened rule line must not decide what it says about holding (#3851)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 52s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m24s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 40s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 26s
CI run 6485 was red. Six failures, three causes, and only one of them was a
stale test.

THE REAL DEFECT. The compact branch dropped the `seen` TAIL along with the
trigger, so a rule the session had already been told rendered exactly like
one it had not. #3750's whole argument is that those are different claims —
a repeat is rendered precisely because the session may no longer HOLD what
it was told — and the tail is the entire difference a reader can act on.
test_a_rule_the_session_already_holds_is_referenced_not_re_offered caught it
within one commit, which is that guard working as intended.

Fixed by keeping the tail and dropping only the trigger, which is both the
cheaper and the safer cut: a trigger runs 300-400 characters after #3855, a
tail about 100. Re-measured on the real renderer — top-full-plus-references
is ~299 tokens against ~568 for five full lines, so about 2x the old single
line rather than the 1.4x claimed before, for four more rules and no lost
information. The comments carrying the old figure are corrected rather than
left to read as a decision nobody made.

THE FIXTURE THAT STRADDLED THE BAND. `_THREE_HITS` spanned 0.81-0.74 against
a 0.05 band, so the act arms dropped its lowest hit and four cases of
test_both_recorders_report_the_same_rules_for_one_call failed reporting a
count mismatch — under a message blaming the exclusion filter. A guard
pointing confidently at the wrong subsystem costs more than no guard,
because it is believed. Scores retightened to 0.81/0.80/0.79 and the
precondition is now asserted by a named test, so a future band change is
told where the problem is instead of through four confusing failures.

THE STALE CONSTANT GUARD. test_the_rule_arm_asks_for_one_rule_not_two pinned
RULEHINT_LIMIT == 1 — a real decision, correctly guarded, for a world with a
resident set. Rewritten to pin what replaced it, as relationships rather
than values (rule 115): the arm can return several, and rules are narrowed
HARDER than the notes menu because they measured flatter, not sharper.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 14:07:32 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 10343a6019 feat(rules): an act surfaces a banded SET of rules, quieter after the first (#3851)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 2s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 53s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 45s
RULEHINT_LIMIT was 1. That was correct while retrieval SUPPLEMENTED a
33-rule resident set — one salient rule beside everything already loaded.
Milestone 394 removes residency, and then this arm is the whole delivery:
`git push origin dev` is governed by rules 1, 2, 9 and 140 simultaneously,
and each alone permits the mistake the others catch.

A cap plus a band, not a bigger cap. The old argument's real content is that
a fixed k invents lines — it fills slots whether or not anything deserves
them. A band keeps only what scored close to the top, so one clearly
relevant rule still shows one and four competing rules show four. The corpus
decides; the cap is a ceiling on the worst case, not the usual answer.

MEASURED, AND IT CORRECTED THE PREDICTION. The expectation was that rules
would rank sharply, since rule_document() shapes them like snippets and note
2485 measured snippets separating their top hit by 0.153 against 0.010-0.023
for every other kind. Three probes against real act queries say otherwise:

  `git push origin dev`      top 0.757, gap 0.022
  `docker compose up -d`     top 0.685, gap 0.016
  a bare-owner-filter query  top 0.656, gap 0.020

Dev-log territory, not snippet territory — rules arrive as a packed block,
so shaping alone did not buy separation. The band is therefore narrow: at
0.10 (the notes menu's value) every one of the top eight on the push probe
falls inside, including a CI-registry rule and another project's branch
policy. 0.05 admits about three ranks.

COST, MEASURED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. The old comment claimed a line costs
~40 tokens. It is ~143 once the trigger is rendered, and #3855 roughly
tripled trigger lengths, so five full lines are ~646 tokens before EVERY
Bash call. Hence rank decides volume: the top hit keeps the full rendering,
later hits are cited (~198 tokens total, 1.4x the old single line, for four
more rules). The old paragraph's instinct — a fourth voice at full volume is
where a reader stops reading — is answered by making later lines quieter
rather than by refusing to have them.

Band before dedup, deliberately. The band is a statement about scores;
letting the ledger reorder it would make "you were told this already" change
what counts as relevant. Same axis independence the renderer already keeps
between `kind` and `seen`, and `rule_ids` stays fresh-only (#3752) so
#3668's identity between logged results and surfacing rows survives.
`suppressed` now covers both causes and says so.

Both act arms take the same band: their score distributions are the same
shape, and only the query differs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 14:00:36 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d5f96563fd feat(rules): a slot a preference cannot lose (#3894)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 1m1s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 1m7s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m44s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 35s
Milestone 399 step 4. A rule and a preference are not equally served by one
ranking, because their losses are not equal:

  - a RULE crowded out at the prompt boundary still fires at an act arm. A
    push reaches pre_tool_rule, a write reaches write_path_rule. The prompt
    hit is a preview of a second chance.
  - a PREFERENCE about how to answer has no second chance. The response IS
    the act, so crowded out there it is never delivered at all.

A straight ranking therefore favours the record whose loss is recoverable
over the one whose loss is total, and does it INVISIBLY: the rule that won is
a legitimate hit, the telemetry reads healthy, and the only symptom is a
preference that quietly never arrives. reuse_slot exists for the same shape
one corpus over (#2463).

`semantic_search_rules` gains a `kind` filter, so the slot's query can only
answer with what the slot is for. Verifying afterwards would be weaker — an
unfiltered search that happened to return a rule would spend the slot on it,
and that line would be indistinguishable from one that earned its place.

THE SLOT BUYS POSITION, NOT A LOWER BAR, matching reuse_slot. A weak
preference cannot buy it, so silence stays the default. The task asked for a
separate threshold; I did not add one, and the reason is that the worry
behind it — reading a miss rate as a fact about preferences — is answered by
`preference_slot` being its own logged source, where best_available_id names
which preference was refused. A knob added on a guess is a way to
misconfigure the surface; a bar moved on evidence is an argument. The
evidence arrives on its own now.

IT EXTENDS, IT NEVER DISPLACES — and here it parts from reuse_slot, which
evicts its menu's weakest hit. A displaced hit sits in prompt_rule's
retrieval_logs row while never being surfaced, so that source's two tables
stop agreeing and #3668's identity breaks for a reason nothing in the data
explains. Milestone #379 is what losing that identity costs: five steps
planned against two counters disagreeing, not a write path dropping rows. One
extra line in a rare case is the cheaper price.

It also runs BEFORE the bail-out. An empty general result is not proof no
preference qualifies: that search overfetches by distance then collapses, so
a preference ranked below the window is invisible to it while a kind-filtered
query finds it at once. Bailing first would make the slot dead in exactly the
corpus it exists for.

One existing assertion repinned from a bare call_count to a per-source
filter: the slot logs its own query on the same call, and a count would pin
the number of arms rather than the property — going red the next time one is
added, which is rule 167's false alarm about the thing it protects.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 08:44:24 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 44e0b0541f feat(rules): rules retrieve against the operator's message (#3852)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 1m1s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m35s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 38s
The third rule arm, and the one the other two cannot reach. `write_path_rule`
is keyed on code, `pre_tool_rule` on a command — both things the session is
about to DO. A rule that governs what to SAY has no such trigger: extract
intent from loose phrasing, raise a conflict before acting, hand off an
action with its reason, end a finding with an offer all bind on a RESPONSE,
and no tool call precedes one.

The operator's message is the only query that exists before a response is
composed. That hook searched notes alone, so no rule had ever been retrieved
against a thing the operator actually said — and residency was the only
surface those rules had, which is what milestone 394 removes.

A SEPARATE FUNCTION, not a branch in build_autoinject_hint, because of its
early returns. That arm bails when auto-inject is disabled, when the query is
blank, when nothing clears the note bar — every one a statement about NOTES.
Folded in, an operator who turned the awareness menu off would silently lose
their rules, a coupling with no symptom since both look like a quiet hook.
Two functions, two sets of gates, composed in the route. Guarded as "the rule
arm never asks the notes arm's config", which is the structural fact.

Joins _ARMS rather than getting its own test file. #3497's history is that
the pre-tool arm inherited a defect from its sibling by being MODELLED on it
instead of sharing with it, and a third arm modelled on two is two chances to
repeat that. Repeat rendering, fresh-only counting, log-before-bailout, the
kind register and the two-recorders identity are properties of every arm or
of none.

The bar is INHERITED and says so. 0.72 was tuned against code and commands;
prose is a different query shape against the same documents, and triggers are
written in the vocabulary of the moment — which for most rules is act
vocabulary. Starting at the only number with evidence behind it and logging
every call from the first deploy is what makes it settleable; guessing lower
would put an unmeasured bar in front of a corpus that binds.

k=3, anchored on this hook's own budget rather than the act arms'.
RULEHINT_LIMIT is 1 because that arm fires before every Bash call; this one
fires once per turn, beside a notes menu already spending three slots. And a
prompt genuinely contains more than one act — "merge to main and then start
on X" is two — where a command is one thing.

`prompt_rule` added to RANKED_SOURCES: a ranker picked it, and a ranked
source missing from that tuple is silently counted as bulk delivery and drops
out of the pull-through denominator.

The hook reads and writes the SHARED rule ledger under scribe-priorart, not a
private one — one session keeps one list, aged (#3751), so a rule named here
is not re-announced before the next Bash call.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-11 07:56:19 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 26e0dff706 feat(rules): a preference does not speak in a rule's voice (#3849 step 3)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 53s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m27s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 1m31s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 41s
Two independent axes on one hint line. `kind` decides the head, `seen`
decides the tail, and neither reads the other — which is what let a second
kind arrive without reopening #3750's repeat question. Whether a record is
already on the exclusion ledger has nothing to do with how much force it
carries, so the seen branch is shared verbatim.

The noun carries the whole visual difference, deliberately. A reader skimming
an injected block gets one word to place the register, so the word that moves
is the one naming force: "Standing rule" / "Preference". Everything
structural after it is identical, so the kinds read as one set rather than
two formats.

Force is asserted in exactly one other place, and that moves too. A rule's
line says to read it BEFORE DECIDING IT DOES NOT APPLY, because dismissing a
rule unread is how the thing it prevents happens. A preference makes no such
claim: it says where to find HOW THIS HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE, and following it
buys consistency rather than correctness.

Guarded on both places at once. Pinning the noun alone would pass a line
reading "Preference … before deciding it does not apply" — label swapped,
instruction kept — which is worse than not distinguishing them, because it
looks handled.

And a guard on the independence claim itself, exercising all four
combinations: the way this breaks silently is a seen branch that grows a kind
test, leaving one combination rendered by nobody's intention.

Noted, not fixed: plugin/skills/using-scribe/SKILL.md still says "Standing
rules are binding" with no room for a kind that does not. That surface is
step 6's.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-10 22:04:14 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 c4908f093f feat(rules): a repeat is referenced, not withheld (#3750, #3752)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 40s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m9s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 37s
Both arms used to drop a hit already on the session's exclusion ledger
and emit nothing. That is correct only while the session still HOLDS
what it was told, and a compaction breaks exactly that: the earlier
injection is summarized away while the id stays on the ledger, leaving
the rule absent from context AND unreachable for the rest of the
session. #3749 closed the compaction half by clearing the ledger; this
closes the ordinary half, where a session simply stops holding a line
it read an hour ago.

Only ONE CLAUSE of the existing line is false on a repeat — the claim
that the rule is not in the session's loaded set — so only that clause
changes. The fresh line is byte-identical to what it was.

Both tails now come from one `_rule_hint_line`. The arms phrase their
heads differently on purpose; everything after must not differ, and
#3497's history is that the pre-tool arm inherited a defect by being
modelled on its sibling rather than sharing with it.

THE BUDGET DECISION, recorded at RULEHINT_LIMIT. A repeat competes for
the single slot on rank alone: nothing is fetched behind it, and it
never rides alongside as a second line. Promoting a fresh rule past a
better-ranked repeat would reinstate the withholding one rank deeper,
and a second line is the one thing the limit exists to forbid. The
consequence is deliberate — a rule that keeps ranking first for a
recurring situation keeps being referenced, and its decay belongs to
exclusion ageing (#3751), not to a first-place rule being demoted for
having won before.

THE TELEMETRY, decided before shipping rather than after a number moved
(#3752): nothing changes. A reference is a RENDERING decision, not a
retrieval outcome. `results` stays `fresh`, `suppressed` stays
len(hits) - len(fresh), and `record_rule_surfaced` still counts only
what the arm freshly chose. This matters more than it reads: the naive
implementation drops the `fresh` filter and takes suppressed_count to
zero everywhere — and #3739's near-miss fix identifies repeat-caused
zeros by `suppressed_count > 0`, so the contamination corrected on
2026-09-08 would return by a different route, in the same field, with
the fix still in the code and no longer working. A test asserts the
counters as unmoved, because "nothing changed" is only worth something
if it is checkable.

Also corrects two comments that outlived #3702 — both arms still
claimed CONDITIONAL ONLY while the module-level note above
RULEHINT_LIMIT said the opposite, in the exact code this change edits.

GUARDS

- an already-held hit produces a rule line at all (the regression),
  asserted on `get_rule(<id>)` rather than a truthy context: the
  write-path arm fills its context from four other sources, so
  truthiness passes under the OLD behaviour and pins nothing there.
- the two tails are distinguishable, each excludes the other, and
  neither injects the rule statement — the budget claim, both branches.
- the counters are unmoved, per #3752.
- test_a_rule_the_session_already_holds_is_not_re_offered asserted the
  old contract (`"161" not in context`). Repinned rather than deleted:
  the telemetry half of what it protected still holds.

Repinned the #3497 log-placement guard on structure (rule 167). It
read `body.index("if not fresh:")` — a local variable NAME, not the
property. This change renames that guard to `if not hits:`, so the
old assertion would have raised ValueError and reported #3497 as
back while the arm was entirely correct. Now walks the AST for the
first early return after the search and asserts the call row is
written before it. Falsified both ways: it fails on the #3497
mutation, and it refuses to pass when no early return exists at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-09 21:48:50 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d5ac8408f6 feat(telemetry): record WHAT the bar turned away, not only how close it came (#3807)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 16s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 40s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 43s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m14s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 2m59s
#3670 added `best_available_score` so a threshold could be judged from its
rejections. It records how CLOSE the bar came to firing and not WHAT it
refused, and that is the half a decision actually needs.

Live, pre_tool_rule sits at a ~0.72 bar with a near-miss p90 of 0.7071 —
about 117 declines a day within 0.013 of firing. Dropping to 0.707 would
take that arm from 22 hits a day to roughly 139: six-fold, on a surface
that runs before every Bash call. The percentile says the mass is there.
Nothing said whether it was worth showing.

NEITHER OBVIOUS INSTRUMENT ANSWERS IT. Pull-through cannot: the injected
rule line already carries title and trigger, so a session can comply
without ever calling get_rule, and rule pull-through understates
usefulness by construction. Reading the rejected records can — and
`result_ids` holds only what was RETURNED, so on a zero-result call the
near-missed record had no name at all.

So the id, from the SAME ranked candidate as the score. Both searches
unpack `best` once and read both fields off it, because splitting that
into two expressions is exactly how a later edit pairs a score with its
neighbour's id — and a score attached to the wrong record is worse than no
id, since it invites judging the wrong one and concluding the bar is fine.

write_path withholds the id on the same condition it withholds the score
(#3739): a surviving id beside a null score names a record without saying
what it scored, the pair disagreeing in the other direction.

THE READ PATH IS A LISTING, NOT A STATISTIC — an id cannot be percentiled,
and a reader tuning a bar needs to go and read the records. Opt-in via
`near_miss_samples` (0-20, default 0) so the ordinary readout keeps its
size, and deliberately NOT a window function: this module's one production
outage was a grouped query Postgres rejected, swallowed by the broad
except, every counter reading zero while the mocked tests passed (#2663).
One flat ordered query, overfetched, bucketed in Python — the shape that
lesson prescribes.

Migration 0097, nullable and unbackfilled. Not a foreign key: the table
spans record types and `source` says which, exactly as result_ids works.

The integration guard pins the listing as PER SOURCE. A global LIMIT would
let a noisy source eat the whole quota and leave the surface being tuned
showing nothing — which reads as "nothing was close", the misreading this
milestone has spent itself correcting.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-09 21:24:32 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 623464323e fix(telemetry): a search that never ran is not a decline (#3765)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 13s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 46s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 52s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m21s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 36s
`best_available_score` was added by #3670 so a bar could be judged from
what it rejected, and it arrived null on four unrelated causes: the corpus
offered nothing, the query was empty, the embedder was down, or the
DATABASE QUERY FAILED. Only the first is a measurement. The fourth is the
#2663 shape — a swallowed failure rendering as a clean zero — inside the
field added to fix an instance of the #2663 shape.

Found while trying to explain why reuse_slot returned nothing on 45 of 45
calls, and auto_inject on 153 of 161. That investigation is still open;
what it established first is that the readout could not answer it.

THE FIX IS NOT A NEW COLUMN. A call that never searched writes no row, so
every remaining null means one thing: searched, and nothing came close.
That is the convention the pre-tool arm already follows for a blank
command — "a row here would report a call that never happened and drag the
clear-rate down with phantom declines" — extended from the case a caller
can see in advance to the ones only the search knows about.

Both searches stamp `report["searched"]` FALSE before anything can return
and True only where a real result set exists, so every early return leaves
it false. It has to be the first thing done to the dict: a return added
above that line would leave the key absent.

ABSENT IS A THIRD STATE AND IT DEFAULTS TO TRUE. A caller that passes no
report cannot know, and the safe reading there is the old behaviour. Only
a real search can report False, so absent means "nobody asked" and never
"it failed" — which is also why 66 existing mocked searches across twelve
test files keep working unchanged rather than being rewritten to simulate
a flag they do not care about.

A FAILURE IS NOT MADE INVISIBLE. semantic_search_notes already logs a
WARNING on a query failure, which is where a broken search belongs: a
counter cannot say "I am broken" without a reader already trusting it.

Three tests, and the middle one is what makes them discriminate — a
blanket `return` passes the first and fails the second, because a call
that searched and came back empty is the only evidence a threshold is too
high (#3497).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-09 12:47:46 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 277f5df515 fix(telemetry): write_path reported records it withheld itself as near misses (#3739)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 33s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m5s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 24s
Found by verifying the previous fix on live data — the check that fix was
meant to make possible.

    write_path   near_misses.max  0.822    p90 0.7521
                 top_score.min    0.6857   so the bar is at or below this

A "rejection" that outscored every acceptance, and not one outlier: the p90
is above the bar too.

#3739's fix keyed on `suppressed_count`, and I justified its NULL branch as
"null means the caller passed its exclusions INTO the search, so the score
is already post-exclusion". That holds for auto_inject and reuse_slot, both
of which log the RAW search output and do their Python filtering after. It
does not hold for write_path, the one note arm that filters TWICE:
`exclude_ids` takes `seen - pulled_seen` into the search, but the
pulled-and-seen ids stay in the query on purpose — the arm's query doubles
as the resemblance test — and are dropped afterwards in Python. So the row
carries a POST-filter count beside a PRE-filter score.

The suppression column cannot rescue it the way it does for the rule arms.
This arm's count would be PARTIAL — covering the drops made here and not
the ones `exclude_ids` made inside the search — and a partial number under
a name that reads as complete is the substitution this milestone exists to
stop.

So it reports null whenever its own filter removed anything: not measured
on this call, because the bar was not the only thing that turned something
away. Calls that withheld nothing keep reporting, which is most of them.

Both directions are asserted. Without the second test, setting the field to
null unconditionally would pass the first while deleting the measurement
#3670 was built for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-09 00:34:11 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 e7c1af32a0 fix(telemetry): the bar can only be judged from what it rejected (#3670)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 23s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 33s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m6s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 28s
`cleared_threshold` was documented as the number to read first. It was a
tautology. The search applies the threshold before returning, so every
returned result cleared it by construction and a call with no results has
no top_score to compare — the condition was true exactly when
`result_count > 0`. It was `calls - zero_result_calls` under a name that
promised a second opinion, and `zero + cleared == calls` held on all
nineteen source/window readings ever taken, today's live seven included.

The reading procedure built on it asked the reader to compare a number
with itself, and a threshold change was unobservable through it: raise the
bar and both numbers move together, so the field could never show a bar
set too high.

REPLACED, NOT JUST REMOVED. The question the table exists to answer is
whether the bar is in the right place, and that is only answerable from
the calls that returned NOTHING: how close did the best rejected candidate
come? A 0.72 bar turning away a stream of 0.71s is set too high by a hair;
the same bar turning away 0.30s is working. Both render as a zero-result
call today and nothing separates them, because the losing score is
discarded inside the search.

So both searches now rank WITHOUT the bar and apply it in Python. The
qualifying set is provably identical — rows arrive ordered by distance, so
every above-bar row sorts ahead of every below-bar one, and an over-fetch
that returned N above-bar rows returns the same N plus some losers. What
changes is that the losers are visible instead of dropped in the query.
`report` carries the score out without changing what a search RETURNS:
eight of eleven call sites want hits and nothing else.

New column (migration 0096), nullable and unbackfilled. A row written
before this genuinely does not know, and a 0.0 would read as "the corpus
held nothing remotely relevant" — a claim invented out of a caller's
silence, which is the substitution this whole milestone corrects.

The new aggregate is a percentile_cont WITHIN GROUP over a CASE, one step
from the shape that produced #2663, where a rejected query was swallowed
by the broad except and every counter read zero. It carries an integration
guard for that reason: only real Postgres can say it parses, and the
symptom of failure is silence.

Also adds a guard that no int field in a bucket equals
`calls - zero_result_calls`. That identity is what `cleared_threshold`
satisfied for its whole life, and it survived because it had its own name
and nobody added the two numbers beside it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-08 13:50:05 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 277aea58e4 test(telemetry): pin the identity that falsified this milestone (#3668)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m6s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 27s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 23s
Reverts the deliberate break from 5e19a1b. `plugin_context.py` is now
byte-identical to before it; the only change against that baseline is the
guard itself.

FALSIFIED, not argued (rule 167). CI run 6046 with `results=hits` in both
arms failed exactly the predicted four cases —

    [one-already-held-write_path]   FAILED
    [one-already-held-pre_tool]     FAILED
    [all-already-held-write_path]   FAILED
    [all-already-held-pre_tool]     FAILED
    [nothing-held-*]                passed

— and the nothing-held cases passing is the point, not a gap: with no
exclusions both recorders see the same list however wrongly they are
wired, so that case can never discriminate and a guard built only from it
would read as coverage while catching nothing.

WHAT IS PINNED. Both arms build one `fresh` list and hand it to two
recorders in one function, so the call log and the surfacing log cannot
disagree about what a single call showed. Ids, not counts: equal counts
drawn from different lists is a real way for this to break, and a count
comparison would call it agreement.

Three hits, where production returns at most one. The identity holds at
any limit because both recorders read the same list, and stating it that
way survives RULEHINT_LIMIT moving again — it has moved once already
(2 → 1, 2385100), and that move is half of why the original
reconstruction misread its own numbers.

NOT DONE, deliberately: the readout-level self-check the task also
proposed. `cleared_threshold` counts CALLS that beat the bar while
`surfaced` counts RULES, so that identity holds only while the limit is
1 — it would fire on a healthy system the moment the limit rises. The
arm-level form has no such coupling, which is why the guard lives here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-08 13:36:03 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5e19a1b028 test(telemetry): FALSIFICATION — prove the identity guard can fail (#3668)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 23s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 34s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 45s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Deliberately broken, reverted in the next commit. Rule 167 requires every
guard be falsified against the regression it names before it is trusted,
and rule 10 puts CI as the only place that can run it — so the failure has
to be made to happen here rather than argued for.

The guard: both rule arms feed one `fresh` list to two recorders, so the
call log and the surfacing log cannot disagree about what one call showed.

The regression: `results=fresh` becomes `results=hits` in both arms, so
the call log counts what the ranker found while the surfacing log counts
what was shown. That is not a hypothetical shape. It is exactly the
divergence that would make a correct system report a lost write when the
two tables are later compared in aggregate — the reading that scoped this
milestone at five steps against a defect that did not exist.

Expected red: the one-already-held and all-already-held cases on both
arms. The nothing-held case must still PASS — with no exclusions both
recorders see the same list however wrongly they are wired, which is why
it could never have been the discriminating case.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-08 13:31:49 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 dd1e6e2645 feat(rules): the rule arms stop filtering the corpus to one tier (#3702)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 1m3s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 33s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m7s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 1m29s
Both arms passed tier="conditional", on the reasoning that an always-on
rule is already in the session so re-surfacing it is pure noise. That
conflates two different things:

  PRESENT IN CONTEXT    the rule was delivered at session start
  SALIENT AT THE MOMENT the rule is in front of the reader when the action
                        it governs is about to be taken

A rule handed over in a list at turn zero is present while a session writes
a config value three hundred turns later. It is not surfaced. So the filter
did not skip a redundant hint — it made a whole class of rules permanently
ineligible for the only mechanism that puts a rule in front of an agent AT
the moment, and the more important a rule is, the likelier it sat in that
class.

Underneath, the filter was doing the THRESHOLD's job. Whether a rule belongs
in a hint is a relevance question and a similarity bar is the control for
relevance. A categorical exclusion standing in for a relevance judgment
cannot be tuned, cannot be measured, and cannot be wrong in a way anybody
notices.

MEASURED, NOT SETTLED. The old comment's fear is real: a hint that fires on
every write and says obvious things teaches the reader to skip the block. It
had simply never been checked, and retrieval_logs already records the scores
to check it with. Rules clearing often and high means the fear was justified
and the BAR is the work; rules clearing rarely in a thin band means relevance
was always sufficient.

Only eligibility moved. The bar stays at 0.72 and k stays at 1, so the
resulting distribution has one cause — and k=1 bounds the blast radius: a
wider pool can change which rule surfaces and how often, never how long a
single hint gets.

The threshold rationale's first premise ("the eligible corpus is TINY —
tier=conditional only") is updated rather than deleted: a larger pool makes
clearing the bar mean MORE, so that argument weakened, and the bar was left
alone anyway rather than move two variables at once.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-08 00:24:02 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 8be555d6dd feat(telemetry): tell a ranker decline from a repeat before the observation window opens (#3497)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 31s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 37s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m4s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 28s
Making the rule arms log every call exposed a second ambiguity in the same
row. `result_count == 0` is two unrelated events wearing one number:

  - the ranker found nothing above the bar — the only evidence a threshold is
    set too high; and
  - the ranker found only what this session had already been shown — which
    says nothing whatever about the bar.

A long session excludes its way into the second, so the arm reads worse the
longer it runs correctly. Rows written now carry the ambiguity permanently,
which is why this lands before any watch period rather than after.

`retrieval_logs.suppressed_count` (0095, nullable) holds what the caller
dropped as already-shown. Both rule arms report it; they filter in Python and
always know. The note arms pass exclusions INTO semantic_search_notes and
never see what was dropped, so they store NULL.

THE NULL IS LOAD-BEARING. It means "not measured here", and the readout
renders it as `suppression: null` rather than a zeroed dict. Defaulting to 0
would let an unmeasured surface read as a perfectly clean one — the same
substitution of an artifact for a measurement that #3311 made. No backfill,
for the same reason: existing rows genuinely do not know.

`retrieval_telemetry`'s `sources` gains `suppression` with `measured_calls`,
`calls_with_suppression` and `zero_because_already_shown`; subtract the last
from `zero_result_calls` for the true ranker declines. The MCP tool docstring
says to read the two together and warns against reading the null as a zero.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-03 21:12:38 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 154a5de13e fix(telemetry): both rule arms logged only their hits, so the clear-rate could only read 100% (#3497)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 22s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 33s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 48s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
`write_path_rule` reported `zero_result_calls: 0` and `cleared_threshold:
133/133` — a perfect record no other surface comes near (`write_path` 421
zeroes of 613, `reuse_slot` 124/199, `auto_inject` 114/326). #3311 read that
as a measurement and milestone 333 was scoped on it.

It was an artifact. Both arms called `record_retrieval` inside a guard on
having results — the write-path arm behind `if fresh:`, the pre-tool arm
below `if not fresh: return out` — so a call that found nothing wrote no row.
The statistic was a fact about the shape of the code, true at any threshold
whatsoever.

The call log moves out of the guard in both arms. The surfacing log stays in
it: nothing was shown, so no surfacing occurred. `results=fresh` is kept
deliberately — the note arms pass exclusions into `semantic_search_notes`, so
what they log is already post-exclusion, and logging `hits` here would make
this row mean something other than every other row in the same readout.

The defect bites hardest on the pre-tool arm, which fires on every Bash call:
with no rows at all, a ranker that declined is indistinguishable from a hook
that never fired — the silent failure the arm exists to stop.

Tests cover both arms behaviourally (found nothing; found only what the
session already held; searched nothing at all, which must stay silent) plus a
structural guard, because this was one level of indentation and it appeared
independently in two places.

#3311 and the `rule_usage` docstring corrected rather than quietly rewritten.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-03 06:57:13 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 2ee24b9d2b feat(rules): rules before tools — a PreToolUse arm keyed on the action (#3476)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 35s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m9s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 25s
The only just-in-time rule surface was registered on `Write|Edit` and queried
with `code or path`, so a rule could be retrieved at the moment of a code
write and nowhere else. Every rule about which tool to reach for — don't curl
the forge, don't stand up a stack, don't run the suite locally, don't branch —
was unreachable exactly when it mattered, and residency in the always-on
preload was the only surface it had. That is the pressure that grew the
resident set to 31 against #3089's ceiling of ~23; it was never a judgment
anybody made.

A reflex generates no query, so an instruction to check the rules cannot catch
one. A mechanical trigger can: the tool call IS the query, and a reflex has to
become a tool call before it can do anything.

`build_tool_rule_hint` is deliberately tool-agnostic — a name and a string —
so widening the matcher later is a hooks.json edit with no server change. The
hook starts on Bash, which is where the action reflexes live.

The two pre-tool arms share ONE session ledger of already-named rules
(`<state>/<sid>.rules.ids`). Two ledgers would mean a rule named by one arm
gets re-offered by the other, and the hint that fires most often is exactly
the one that must not repeat itself. A test asserts both scripts build the
same path, and another checks the shell hook and the Python route agree on
every query-arg name (rule 33) — a rename there fails silently, looking like
a surface that never finds anything rather than a broken one.

Deliberately silent on outage, unlike the prior-art hook: a write is
occasional, a Bash call is not, and an outage line before every command is
what gets a channel muted.

`tier="conditional"` matches the write arm and is the transition point — an
always-on rule is already resident, so re-tier one and it starts arriving here
instead of in every session's preamble. `pre_tool_rule` joins RANKED_SOURCES:
this arm chose what it showed, so a pull can settle whether the choice landed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-02 23:31:22 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 8b9b3a1d9b feat(telemetry): the preload emits, and the always-on set stops being unfalsifiable (#3473)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 23s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 31s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m6s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 27s
The ranked rule arm became measurable in M333. The preload did not — and
that is the surface whose value is actually in question. `list_always_on_rules`,
the SessionStart block and every `rules_payload` caller handed rules over
wholesale and emitted nothing, so the resident set's token cost was certain
and its usefulness could not be tested even in principle.

Bulk deliveries now record as AMBIENT, beside the ranked count and never
inside pull-through. Folding them in would mean growing the always-on set
depressed the arm's measured precision and trimming it flattered the arm,
neither for any reason to do with the arm.

`RANKED_SOURCES` inverts the note twin's `AMBIENT_SOURCES` deliberately: there
is one ranked rule source and this change adds seven bulk ones, so naming the
rare half makes a forgotten surface default to ambient — under-counting it —
rather than padding the denominator with surfacings nobody chose.

Two lookalike call sites are deliberately left silent, with a test to keep
them that way: the write-path etag arm and `rules_etag_for` read the rules to
build or compare a MARKER and show nobody anything.

No migration — `event` and `source` are plain Text with no CHECK (rule 36
does not apply). Snippet #2858 updated to the new `rules_payload` contract.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ
2026-09-02 23:06:40 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 238510080e feat(retrieval): the standing-rule arm gets its own bar, and asks for one rule not two (#3318)
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 7s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 31s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m4s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 35s
Milestone 333 step 4 — the split #2223 made one surface down, now made for the
third corpus. The arm inherited WRITEPATH_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD = 0.68, a number
measured against code-vs-note-PROSE and never re-derived for code-vs-RULE-TEXT.

THE DEFAULT IS ARGUED STRUCTURALLY, NOT READ OFF A HISTOGRAM (rule 115). Two
facts hold on any install, including one with six rules and no telemetry:

- The eligible corpus is tiny — conditional rules only, a handful to a few
  dozen against thousands of notes. A top-k over forty candidates always
  returns something, so "the best match cleared the bar" stops meaning "a good
  match exists". A bar calibrated for best-of-thousands is cleared by
  best-of-forty as arithmetic, not relevance.
- Rules are short imperative technical English, far more homogeneous than note
  prose. #2223 put the code-vs-prose floor at 0.55-0.63 and set 0.68 above it;
  a more homogeneous corpus has a HIGHER floor, so 0.68 is not merely
  inherited, it sits below where this corpus's noise lives.

0.72 errs deliberately toward silence on an asymmetry that is also structural:
this hint fires on EVERY write. A missed rule is recoverable — it is still in
Scribe and the agent can search it. A hint that cries wolf is not: it teaches
the reader to skip the whole block, and the true positives go with it. The
arm's own comment already said "noise on a hint that fires on every write is
how a hint gets ignored".

Pinned as an INEQUALITY, not a value: test_the_rule_bar_defaults_above_the_code_bar
asserts RULEHINT > WRITEPATH, so tuning the number stays free while inverting
the relationship — which would silently reinstate #3311 — does not.

RULEHINT_LIMIT = 1, and deliberately not a knob. With a corpus this small, k=2
means the second line is almost always the second-best noise wearing the same
confident framing as the first; halving k halves that regardless of the bar.
It stays a constant because it is a decision about how loud one hint may be,
not a per-install tuning question — and a knob nobody turns only adds a way to
misconfigure the surface.

Reachable from Settings, no restart (rule 25), with copy that says which way to
move it and points at retrieval_telemetry's rule pull-through — which step 3
made readable — to tell "arriving unread" from "never arrived".

Every config stand-in in the suite gained the key, not just the one that
noticed. The arm reads `rule_threshold` while BUILDING its search arguments, so
a missing key raises inside its fail-open except and turns the arm into a
silent no-op — indistinguishable from it running and finding nothing. That is
the same vacuous-pass shape that bit step 2, one layer down (rule 33).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TcCs1CcQ1ormdnzSshKqvN
2026-09-02 18:05:00 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 8901c904a9 feat(telemetry): retrieval_telemetry reports rule pull-through where it reported nothing (#3317)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 7s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m5s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 29s
Milestone 333 step 3, the read half. Steps 1 and 2 built the table and filled
it; until now nothing read it, and `usage` — sourced entirely from
note_usage_events — described notes only while `sources` happily listed a
write_path_rule row above it. A reader takes the aggregate as covering
everything named above it. It did not.

A SEPARATE `rule_usage` BLOCK, not folded into `usage`. Two reasons, and the
second is the one that bites: the corpora differ by orders of magnitude, so a
blended ratio would be the note ratio with noise on it and the rule arm would
stay invisible inside it; and `usage` is what existing callers already read and
compare across windows, so silently changing what it counts would move a number
nobody was told had changed meaning. There is a test asserting rule events stay
out of the note block.

No `ambient` key, unlike the twin. Nothing surfaces a rule un-ranked —
list_always_on_rules and enter_project hand rules over wholesale but emit no
event — so there is no ambient class to subtract. The absence is a fact about
the data, not an oversight, and it returns when a bulk loader starts emitting.

Guarded separately, like `by_source`. This table did not exist a commit ago,
and an instance running upgraded code against un-migrated schema would
otherwise take down two readouts that work perfectly in order to report a third
that cannot. On failure the FLAG is added and the SHAPE is kept — a caller must
not have to choose between crashing on a missing key and quietly rendering
zeros it has no right to.

`pull_through` is None rather than 0.0 on an empty window, matching the note
block. A ratio of zero asserts "rules were shown and none opened"; with an
empty numerator and denominator that is a claim the data does not support, and
it is the reading that would make a brand-new install look like a broken one.

Also fixed, from #3311: the rule arm never timed its search, so it was the one
source in the readout reporting a null p90_duration_ms — a gap that reads as
"this surface is somehow not measurable" rather than "nobody passed the
number".

Both docstrings updated in the same change. The tool's is the agent-facing
contract (rule 119) and it explicitly said rule surfacings were absent and had
"no usage counter at all". Leaving that would have had a reader conclude the
arm has zero pull-through rather than a separate one.

Tests are integration for the reason the block above them is: real GROUP BYs
and count(distinct) against a table a commit old, in a module whose one
production outage was a SQL shape the database rejected inside a broad except.
A mock would agree with whatever the code does, including nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TcCs1CcQ1ormdnzSshKqvN
2026-09-02 17:25:11 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 8f7f447fda feat(telemetry): the rule arm records what it showed, and get_rule records the read (#3316)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 24s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 37s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 53s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Milestone 333 step 2. Step 1 built the table; a counter nobody calls reads zero
and looks exactly like a surface nobody uses, which is #2663's shape.

SURFACED — the standing-rule arm in build_write_path_hint, beside the
record_retrieval it already made. Two tables, and the split is not arbitrary:
retrieval_logs is one row per CALL keyed on the score distribution a threshold
is tuned from; rule_usage_events is one row per RULE per event, the grain "was
this hint ever acted on" needs and the grain a JSONB result_ids array cannot be
indexed at.

The comment there said rule ids had nowhere to go — that note_usage_events
remaps ids on restore, so a rule id would return attached to whatever note took
that number. Still true of the NOTE table, and precisely why step 1 built its
own. Rewritten to say the gap is closed rather than leaving a stale rationale
that would have someone re-derive the same dead end.

Records `fresh`, i.e. AFTER exclude_rule_ids. A rule the session already holds
was considered and not shown; counting it would inflate the denominator with
claims the agent never saw, and the ratio would then fall for a reason that has
nothing to do with whether hints land.

PULLED — two doors, both after their access check so a refused read is not a
pull. mcp_get_rule is the one that matters: the arm's own message ends "Read it
with get_rule(N)", so that call is the exact action a landed hint produces.
rest_rule carries the other prefix, and the prefix is load-bearing — "is this
rule dead weight?" is served by any pull, "did that injected hint land?" by
agent pulls only.

NOT a pull: rule_history. It loads the rule for its title and its own output
says "The current wording is on the rule itself — get_rule(N)", so counting it
would credit a read of the history as a read of the rule and double-count
anyone who then follows that pointer. list_always_on_rules and enter_project
are likewise bulk resident loads, not somebody choosing to open one record.

tests/test_rule_usage_wiring.py is cross-cutting on purpose: the surfaced end
is in plugin_context, the pull end in two other modules, and "both ends meet"
is a property no module-shaped file asserts. It covers the exclusion boundary,
that a failing recorder cannot break the write, that a refused read records
nothing, and two completeness guards — every door records, and the bulk loaders
still do not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TcCs1CcQ1ormdnzSshKqvN
2026-09-02 17:15:03 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 efabba58dd fix(rules): the staleness signal must not wait for prior art to match (#3244)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 12s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 24s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 52s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
CI caught two things, and the first is the feature not working rather than a
test being wrong.

THE SIGNAL WAS GATED ON A COINCIDENCE. build_write_path_hint returns early
when no prior art, stamp, divergence or derive matched, and that guard sat
ABOVE the new arm — so a session whose rules had changed was told only if the
file it happened to be editing also matched something else. A staleness
signal that fires on that coincidence is not a staleness signal. The arm now
runs above the guard, collecting into its own list that `lines` is seeded
from, and the guard accounts for it.

The standing-rule arm (milestone 307) is deliberately LEFT below that guard,
and this is a finding rather than a fix: it has the same gating and probably
should not, but it runs a SEMANTIC search, so lifting it would put an
embedding query on every write in every session. That is a cost decision, not
a bug fix, and not this task's to make.

THE MARKER MUST NOT BREAK THE PAYLOAD IT DECORATES. rules_etag is computed on
the SessionStart path, where `max()` raising costs the whole context payload
— every rule title, the project, all of it — to save a hint. A row with no
usable timestamp is now skipped and a set with none degrades to a count-only
marker, which still catches a rule added or deleted and only loses edits.
That is the right way round to lose information. CI found it because
build_session_context's tests pass MagicMock rules and `max()` over those
raises TypeError.

Also: list_always_on_rules on an install with no always-on rulebooks returns
`rules_etag: "empty|0"`. Its exact-dict test is updated rather than loosened
— the key being present on an empty install is the behaviour, not noise.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 13:10:04 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5c9bb40777 feat(rules): a session is told when its rules move under it (#3244, milestone 323 step 5)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 6s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 35s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m0s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
The rules payload carries a marker; the write-path hook hands it back; the
server says which rules moved. Nothing is said when nothing moved.

THE COUNT IS NOT DECORATION. max(updated_at) alone cannot see a DELETED rule
— it moves no timestamp — and that is the single change that takes an
instruction OUT of force, which is the one a session most needs to hear
about. The marker is `<max updated_at>|<count>`, and a deletion is reported
through the count because there is no row left to name.

THE HOOK IS THE CARRIER because it already fires before a write, which is the
moment acting on a stale rule costs something. One comparison, no payload,
no extra round trip.

WHERE THE MARKER IS CAPTURED, and it could not be anywhere else: the
SessionStart hook, from /api/plugin/context. The model also receives one from
list_always_on_rules, but a hook cannot see an MCP tool's result — so the
value the write path compares has to be stored where a shell script can
reach it. Keyed by session id in the state dir the prior-art hook already
uses, so "changed since" means since THIS session loaded its rules.

NOT ON rules_payload, against the task's letter. Those are applicable_rules —
a different, subscription-derived set. One key name over two sets is how a
comparison starts reporting phantom changes, and the write path compares
against the always-on set.

WHAT IT CANNOT SEE is stated in both the service and the write-path arm as a
table, because a reader who finds an etag will assume it covers staleness
generally:

  another session edits a rule mid-flight             | caught
  the session is misremembering a rule read hours ago | caught
  compaction summarised the rules out of context      | NOT caught

The third is the most common, and the marker is blind to it — the etag was in
context too and went with the rules. The SessionStart nudge is that case's
only mechanism and must not be softened because this shipped. A test asserts
both modules still explain that.

Instance-agnostic (rule 115): an install with no rules produces a stable
marker rather than an error, and "no rules" reads as a state rather than as a
change. An unreadable or absent marker reports nothing — a signal that cries
wolf is worse than none, because it trains a reader to skip the line that
will one day be true. The arm fails open like every other arm on this hook.

The delivery is tested through the real build_write_path_hint rather than the
helper alone: the feature IS a line arriving in a session, and the arithmetic
being right proves nothing about that.

Live acceptance is deploy-gated and not yet recorded on the task.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-30 13:02:00 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 02c1e37620 feat(rules): the write path can notice a standing rule it was never given (#3031, milestone 307 step 5, hook arm)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 26s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 33s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m7s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 24s
A conditional rule is not resident, so a session can be about to violate one it
was never handed. This arm notices: when what is being written resembles a
rule's trigger, the hint names it and says to read it before deciding it does
not apply.

A SUGGESTION, and the plan was wrong about why it could be more. It claimed the
hook "already resolves a path to an area" — it does not, and nothing in Scribe
maps a path to a System or a canonical area (build_write_path_hint resolves
paths against snippet LOCATIONS, a different index; the learned-alias idea
belongs to another project). Correction logged on the task. Rather than invent
path→area inference to make a stale claim true, the arm does what D7 already
decided and what this surface already IS: tags bind at enter_project, meaning
suggests here. The header of the hook says NEVER BLOCKS; dressing a hint up as
binding would have been the actual mistake.

CONDITIONAL RULES ONLY. An always-on rule is already in the session, so
re-offering it is noise — and noise on a hint that fires on every write is how
a hint gets ignored.

Telemetry goes to retrieval_logs, NOT note_usage_events, and that is a
correctness call rather than a preference: note_usage ids are REMAPPED on a
backup restore, so a rule id written there would come back attached to whatever
note took that number — silently corrupting the evidence the next true-up is
supposed to read. retrieval_logs is never restored and `source` already
separates surfaces. record_retrieval's `results` type widened to match what it
actually needs (an `.id`), instead of passing a Rule to something annotated Note.

The rule dedup gets its OWN state file and query parameter, like the three
channels before it — #2708's lesson was that one shared channel lets a hint of
one class silence a different class that had never been shown. Plugin version
bumped: a hook change clients cannot see did not ship (#1040).

The stub is autouse in conftest rather than added to forty-odd call sites: the
arm loads an embedding model, and every existing test that stubs the NOTES
search would otherwise pull a real model in through the one arm it had no way
to know about.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-26 16:35:36 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 8664d8ad14 feat(ledger): the consumer map surfaces — every css row carries used_by on list_shapes, flag="unused-css" (the map's negative space, surfaced never deleted), derive groups and the write-path family carry consumers, the derive line says "used by N template(s)", coverage payload unused_css + the standing block; docs, SKILL, plugin 0.1.44; the two step-2 tests expected 5 edges where fan-out makes 6 (milestone 302 step 3, #2936)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 38s
CI & Build / integration (push) Failing after 44s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m26s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 31s
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-23 14:03:35 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 85111442a6 feat(ledger): CSS derive families are names, never bodies — name floor 2 for css, dup: grouping sym-only; derive line says "repeated name" and dismisses scoped-css; plugin 0.1.41 (note #2917)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 25s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m0s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 25s
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-23 00:21:17 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 2324c15418 feat(write-path): the derive arm — the hint names a duplicate family (no canon) or a canon elsewhere for the shapes being written; exclude_derive channel (#2900, milestone 299 step 2)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Failing after 9s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 25s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 58s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 23s
shape_ledger.write_time_derive asks the ledger what it knows about each
named (kind, symbol): a derive-grouped family (identical body / same name
in N other files) -> "derive it now, do not add a copy"; a canonical row
at another path -> "canon #N at <path>, reuse". Judged rows at the path and
the canon own file stay silent. Rendered by _derive_line beside the
divergence line; keyed (group id / canon:<id>) on a third per-session dedup
channel in the hook (.derive.ids -> exclude_derive=).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-22 13:30:33 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 ff5f6438c4 feat(inception): always-on exclusions reach every rule surface — list_always_on_rules(project_id), get_applicable_rules, rules_payload.excluded_always_on, session context, exclude/include tools (#2880, milestone 297 step 2)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 36s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 1m3s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 1m12s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
A project that opted out of an always-on rulebook at inception must not see
it anywhere: list_always_on_rules(project_id=) and the subscription-derived
set skip it (an exclusion is total), get_applicable_rules / rules_payload
carry `excluded_always_on` as the seventh key so the departure is visible
wherever the rules are, and the SessionStart block built for a bound project
names it ("Excluded for this project by its inception decision …"). MCP:
list_always_on_rules takes project_id; exclude_always_on_rulebook /
include_always_on_rulebook mirror suppress/unsuppress (owner-only; the
rulebook must be always_on — subscribed rulebooks are left by unsubscribing).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-21 22:00:50 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 efc650390e fix(plugin-context): the empty write-path payload carries the divergence key too
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 7s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 19s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 22s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m3s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 42s
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-20 23:19:00 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 d74a244b3a feat(ledger): divergence readout — button B where button A is canon, shape history, and judged-shape recheck (#2793, milestone 294 step 7)
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Failing after 2s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 28s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 37s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Every judgment now goes through one helper that remembers the fingerprint
judged (classified_sha) and writes a code_shape_events row; the sync writes
vanished / reappeared / drifted events and flags recheck_at when a body
moves under an instance/variant. The refresh flags diverges_from on shapes
new since the previous computation that sit where one canon dominates the
judged siblings of their directory+kind and were not proposed as that canon
(a first seed flags nothing); the write-path hint asks the same question
in-band for the shapes the hook names. list_shapes(flag=divergence|recheck),
shape_history(project_id, path, symbol) (read-only), coverage line/payload/
card carry divergent + recheck. Backup v8 carries the history. Plugin 0.1.36.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-20 23:13:39 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 475f0857c9 feat(ledger): write-path stamping — a pulled canon the session then instantiates lands as a hook instance row (#2791, milestone 294 step 5)
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Failing after 2s
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / integration (push) Failing after 28s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 36s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 1m5s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 39s
The prior-art hook now names the shapes being written (shapes=kind:name —
every definition in the payload, or the one enclosing an Edit found by
walking the file upward) and the server stamps them as instance rows when
the session PULLED a snippet inside PULL_WINDOW that the payload references
by symbol or that the semantic arm scored for this very payload.
classified_by=hook, evidence in reason; never overrides a judgment or a
canonical row, overridable by classify_shapes. Offered-but-unopened stamps
nothing. Pulled-and-already-seen snippets stay in the semantic query as
evidence without re-entering the deduped menu. A brand-new shape gets a
provisional row the next sync confirms or vanishes. Read-scoped keys get
the hint, never the stamp. Plugin 0.1.34.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-20 20:19:45 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 3162332a13 feat(prior-art): edit-time record-sync nudge — the sync class (#2708)
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 11s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 24s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 26s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 56s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 43s
A snippet recorded AT the exact file being edited is not a reuse
suggestion — it IS the record of the file being changed. The write-path
hint now renders those as their own SYNC class: 'snippet #N records this
file — updating the record is part of the edit (update_snippet /
verify_snippet)'. Nearby and semantic hits stay the reuse menu.

The two classes dedup on separate per-session channels (exclude_ids vs
exclude_sync_ids, .ids vs .sync.ids in the hook), so a reuse hint shown
early in a session can no longer silence the record-sync nudge when the
recorded file itself is edited later. Sync surfacing is measured under
its own note_usage source (write_path_sync) — its pull-through rate is
the scoreboard for whether edit-time sync actually happens, per decision
#2707 (no forge connection; records stay current in the session that has
the context). Plugin 0.1.31.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 20:05:01 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 9c68faa0bd feat(processes): composition contract — the process is the skeleton, the conversation supplies the parameters
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 4s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 14s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 47s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 24s
Extends #2582's fix per the operator's direction: a stored Process must
incorporate the context it was triggered with, not displace it. No new
plumbing needed — the live context is already in the session; what was
missing is the stated contract. get_process now carries it: live
constraints/scope/focus fold into the procedure and override its
defaults where they disagree; a clarify step asks only what the
conversation has NOT already answered (confirm interpretations, don't
re-ask); stated concerns become lenses the procedure applies, not text
it discards. The sync-generated skill stubs state the short form.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 08:39:02 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Fable 5 66c4fd1b88 fix(sync): process-skill triggers invoke by name only — resemblance offers, never substitutes
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 18s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 22s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 47s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 26s
Scribe issue #2582: the sync wrote "Use when {title}-type work is
requested" into every generated process skill, so a bespoke live prompt
that merely resembled a stored Process got the Process's canned
procedure — and inherited approvals embedded in its body (the Drift
Audit's fan-out opt-in) that the conversation never granted. Observed
live: an explicit systems-review request with its own constraints was
answered with the Drift Audit clarify menu recommending ~15 parallel
auditors.

New trigger contract, both variants: follow verbatim only when invoked
by name; on mere resemblance the live instructions govern — offer the
process, ask before following, and never inherit embedded approvals the
operator hasn't granted in this conversation.

(The Drift Audit process record itself was also rewritten to a
sequential in-context walk — data change, live already, recorded in
the same issue.)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 08:33:40 -04:00
bvandeusen 2d1e26f38f feat(telemetry): ambient surfacings count, apart — enter_project and the skill sync emit
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 5s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 16s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 32s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Successful in 47s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Successful in 25s
#2477, option (a) as decided, with the readout changed in the same commit.

## The two silent surfaces

enter_project returns open tasks + recent notes on every project entry —
probably the largest surfacing by volume — and emitted nothing, so the pulls
it caused floated unattributed and the surfaced:pulled ratio ran against a
denominator missing its biggest contributor. Now source "enter_project".

build_process_manifest installs every reachable Process as an auto-surfacing
skill on the operator's machine — its own docstring calls it the most
consequential passive surface Scribe has — and emitted nothing, so a Process
matched on every relevant turn and never opened was indistinguishable from
one never installed. Now source "process_skill_sync": the honest event is
"installed", which is a surfacing in effect since the description sits in
front of the model each session.

## The readout, same commit — the condition option (a) carried

Both surfaces are AMBIENT: top-N-by-recency and install-everything are not
ranked choices. Pooling them into surfaced_count would make a note's number
dominated by "recently updated in a project you opened", and dead-weight
detection would read that as popularity — the wrong number read confidently,
which is the corrupts-data tier the survey ranked above everything else.

So usage_for_notes splits: surfaced_count stays RANKED-ONLY (every existing
consumer's reading — "surfaced often, never pulled → dead weight" — keeps
meaning what it meant), and ambient_count is new. Classified in SQL via a
CASE on AMBIENT_SOURCES so the group count stays three rows per note, not one
per distinct source. Pulls stay pooled: "did anyone ever open this?" does not
depend on how it was found.

#1038 and #2085 read agent pulls and ranked surfacings; both are unaffected
by ambient volume, which is the point.

Refs #2477
2026-08-08 22:39:13 -04:00
bvandeusen 45ba4aab25 fix(telemetry): the two invisible retrievals log, and /api/search takes scope
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 9s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 28s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 18s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 22s
#2463, the remaining findings (finding 3 landed with f11a547).

## The reuse slot logs (source: reuse_slot)

A real semantic query competing for an auto-inject menu slot, and the ledger
was asymmetric: the scored hit it DISPLACED was in retrieval_logs, the query
that displaced it was not — so the slot could never be evaluated against what
it replaced. #1038 and #2085 are gated on this ledger being complete.

## Browse search logs (source: browse_search)

The human's main search surface, and it logged nothing — so retrieval_logs
claimed the web's search was /api/search. Measured while fixing: /api/search
has ZERO frontend consumers; the web UI searches through /api/knowledge
exclusively. The table wasn't just under-describing the UI, it was describing
a surface the UI never touches.

The task's check — does folding human queries into the corpus skew the
precision signal thresholds are tuned against? — is answered by the source
column: distinct values (browse_search, reuse_slot beside the existing four)
mean tuning includes or excludes human traffic deliberately rather than by
accident. Same resolution as the mcp_/rest_ split in note_usage_events.

## /api/search takes project_id (and logs it)

The route logged project_id=None unconditionally while the MCP tool insists
the agent pass the active project. Now optional, default global: with no
frontend consumer, this route serves API callers, and an API caller states
its scope explicitly — the default-scope UI decision the task flagged is moot
until a UI actually consumes the route, which is recorded rather than guessed.

Refs #2463
2026-08-08 20:00:22 -04:00
bvandeusen f20c019f2a feat(supersession): demote what a later note overtook, and label it
CI & Build / Python lint (push) Successful in 3s
CI & Build / Plugin hooks (push) Successful in 8s
CI & Build / TypeScript typecheck (push) Successful in 10s
CI & Build / integration (push) Successful in 18s
CI & Build / Python tests (push) Failing after 30s
CI & Build / Build & push image (push) Skipped
Step 3 of #278. First step with visible effect.

## Where the demotion happens, and why not in SQL

Applied AFTER the pgvector fetch, over an over-fetched candidate set, not as
part of the ORDER BY.

Ordering by `distance + penalty` would be exact and would turn an indexed
top-k into a scan-and-sort of every embedded note — the HNSW index from
migration 0067 can only serve a raw-distance ordering. So the query fetches
3x the requested rows by raw distance and the re-rank happens in Python.

Demoting after a LIMIT k with no over-fetch would have been theatre: the cut
already happened, so a superseded record pushed down still sits in the results
and the live record that should have replaced it was never fetched.

The cost is stated in the code: a live record outside the over-fetch window
cannot be promoted in. With a 0.05 penalty against neighbours ~0.014 apart,
that needs the true answer more than three ranks down, which no observed query
approaches.

## Demote, never hide — enforced in three places

The penalty applies to the RANKING score, not to the relevance threshold. The
floor decides whether a record is relevant at all; the penalty decides which
relevant record comes first. Applying it to the floor would drop a superseded
record out of the results entirely, which is the one thing this must not do.

It is small on purpose. Supersession is a claim about SOME of a record's
content, so one that strongly answers a question nothing else answers still
surfaces — just behind anything comparable that is current. Its test asserts
both bounds, the upper one citing the operator's constraint rather than an
optimisation.

And every test here that could be satisfied by dropping a record instead
asserts the record is still present.

## The dedup gate opts out

A superseded record is still a duplicate of what you are about to write — the
claim is that it is no longer current, not that it is gone. Demoting it there
would let the same note be recorded a second time, and the second copy would be
the one nothing warns about.

## The label

Auto-inject marks a superseded line SUPERSEDED with a pointer to check the
later record. One query for the whole menu. An agent handed stale material with
nothing marking it acts on it with full confidence, which is worse than never
having surfaced it — the ranking is only half the fix.

Fails open: a supersession lookup error returns unpenalised results rather than
none, because unpenalised ranking is the behaviour that shipped for months and
a broken search is not.

Refs #278
2026-08-08 02:00:06 -04:00