Rule 27 — the milestone was backend-only until this. Four surfaces:
RULE EDITOR — verify_with and expires_when under a legend that asks the
actual question ("Can this rule go stale?") and says empty is the normal
answer, because most rules are decisions and a form that implies a missing
field would get them filled in out of tidiness. When the SAVED rule carries
a check, the stamp shows with Still true / No longer true beside it. The
stamp reads the stored value, not the draft: an unsaved edit to the textarea
has not been run against anything.
SWEEP PANE — its own surface, not a filter on the rule list. That list can
only ever show one topic of one rulebook, and a rule that has gone false
belongs to no one rulebook; filtering it would under-report, which is the
failure this whole surface exists to catch. Reached from the rulebook list,
below the rulebooks, because that is where you go to look at rules.
RULE ROWS — a chip only on rules carrying a check, so its presence is the
signal. PROJECT RULES TAB — the check shows beside `why` when a rule has
one, read-only: that tab is the project's view of what binds it.
NO AGE-GRADED COLOUR anywhere, deliberately. The sweep is already ordered by
urgency, so a red/amber ramp would restate the ordering AND require an
invented "stale after N days" threshold — a magic number nobody could defend
and the first thing to go out of date. --fs-overdue is error red and reserved
for a broken promise like a missed due date; a verification age is not one,
and colouring it that way makes a rule someone just wrote look broken. Only
"never" is marked, because it is categorically different from a date rather
than a worse one — and it is marked by weight, not hue.
An empty sweep says "Nothing to check", not nothing: good news must not read
as a broken page.
Two chips (tier, then verification) turned out byte-identical, so .rule-chip
moves to rules-shared.css and snippet #2906 is updated to match rather than
left describing a file that has moved on. Its header comment counted the
panes it served; that count went stale the moment a fourth arrived, so it no
longer counts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
#2533. theme.css claimed "removing this block is a rename sweep across the
components, tracked separately" — written in 67a529a, never filed, which made
the comment itself an instance of the survey's presence-without-reference
pattern. This is that sweep.
73 alias declarations deleted; 69 files rewritten; every --color-*-style name
now references its --fs-* token directly. Mechanical by construction: the map
IS the alias block, applied longest-name-first with a boundary guard so
--color-text never matched inside --color-text-muted. Zero survivors outside
theme.css, verified by grep rather than assumed.
One deliberate survivor: --color-shadow stays DECLARED, because it was never
an alias — it is a literal value the design system has no token for. Marked
in place as a recorded gap: promote it to an --fs-* token when a second app
needs it, don't copy the line.
Nothing is lost mode-wise: the aliases' resolve-at-use-time trick (which
absorbed 48 dark-mode overrides) lives one layer down in the --fs-* tokens'
own derivations, which is why the sweep is a pure rename. Both CSS checkers
green.
Why now rather than never: check_snippets_against_design_system reports every
--color-* reference as "unknown — renders as NOTHING", and nine recipe
snippets recorded from components.css carried the deprecated names, making
them prior art pointing the wrong way. With the sweep in, the checker's
report over re-recorded snippets should be EMPTY — the acceptance test that
proves the checker was right all along (#2517's correction).
Refs #2533
#2277 counted ~150 "raw colour literals bypassing the tokens". Measuring them
told a different story: 184 sat in `var(--token, #fallback)` position, and a
check against theme.css shows every one of those tokens IS declared. So the
fallbacks could not render. Not drift — vestigial.
They were also not this palette. The most common were Tailwind and Flat-UI
defaults — #6366f1 indigo, #22c55e green, #f59e0b amber, #3b82f6 blue,
#e74c3c and #27ae60 — a second, unsanctioned colour scheme sitting in the
codebase looking like the app's colours to anyone reading it.
Removing them is not tidying. #2319's lesson is that a fallback is WORSE than a
missing token: a missing token renders as nothing and someone eventually
notices, while a fallback renders something plausible forever. These 184 were
one token rename away from silently repainting the app in Tailwind. The design
token check would catch the rename — but the fallback is precisely the thing
that would make it invisible if the check were ever bypassed.
Literal count 152 -> 45, which matters beyond the number: a report that is
mostly unreachable noise is one people stop reading, and then it stops working
while still passing. What remains should be genuinely worth looking at.
Done with a paren-aware transform, not a regex — `var(--x, rgba(0,0,0,.5))`
nests parens and `[^)]+` would cut at the first one and leave `))` behind.
Verified after: every changed line is a fallback strip and nothing else, and
every var() reference still resolves.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UaYUaouG9jjhATyuxCKrQs
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5