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bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 b47dc97ca8 fix(tests): the round-trip guard needs fake_lesson, not fake_note (#4272)
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Run 7208 failed 5 of 23 in the new file, all with a `**Learned from:** #1`
that no shape asked for.

`lesson_sources` falls back to `arose_from_id` when neither the mirror nor
the body names a source. `fake_note` leaves that field to MagicMock, which
auto-creates it truthy and coerces to 1 — so every no-sources shape
recomposed with a provenance line and the round trip failed for a reason
with nothing to do with the trigger. `fake_lesson` pins `arose_from_id` to
None and its docstring says why; it is also the truthful stand-in, since
these are lessons.

Worth recording separately: the local harness that cleared this change used
a plain stub class, so it was kinder than the real fixture and could not
reproduce the truthiness. The stub has been given the same None. A
stand-in that is more forgiving than the one the suite uses will verify a
change that CI then rejects — note #2109's point, arriving from the other
direction.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 16:39:31 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 9883b010b3 docs(lessons): give the round-trip guard the measured growth, not a remembered one (#4272)
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The module docstring said the defect grew the worst real body by 520
characters over ten edits. That number was recalled, not measured, and it is
wrong — as was the 2500 I then got by deriving it on paper instead of
running it.

Replayed lesson #4207's actual stored shape through the old code: 607
characters per edit, exactly the length of the trigger's paragraphs 2 and 3
with their separators, taking the body from 1291 to 7361 over ten edits.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 16:37:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 8de97b3190 fix(lessons): strip a lesson's trigger by what was stored, not by matching a line (#4272)
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`update_lesson` is field-wise: an edit that touches only `system_ids`, or
only the title, passes `insight=None`. The service then derives the insight
from the stored body and hands it straight back to `compose_body`, which
re-adds the trigger and the provenance line. The derivation and the
composition have to be inverses, and they were not.

`_strip_composed_lines` filtered out body LINES matching the trigger
marker's pattern. That pattern is `re.M`, so it matches one line.
`when_to_apply` is free text and is routinely several paragraphs —
`compose_body` writes all of it after the marker, so paragraphs 2..n were
ordinary lines the filter had no reason to touch. They came back as part of
"the insight", the whole trigger was prepended again on top of them, and the
record gained (n-1) paragraphs per update. Silent, compounding, and in the
half of the document that does the retrieving: a lesson edited a few times
ends up stating when it applies several times over and burying the insight
below it.

No marker could fix this. There is no end-of-trigger marker in the body, and
adding one would not repair a row already written without it. What makes an
exact strip possible is that the trigger is mirrored in `data[TRIGGER_KEY]`,
so the composed head can be rebuilt byte for byte and removed by subtraction
rather than matched by pattern. Hence `lesson_insight(note)` rather than
`_strip_composed_lines(body)` — it takes the record because the body alone
does not say where the trigger ends. The line-wise removal survives as the
fallback for a row whose mirror is missing, where it is right for a
one-paragraph trigger and is the best available without one; a mirror that
disagrees with the body falls back rather than cutting into the insight.

tests/test_lesson_insight_round_trip.py asserts the property rather than the
strip: `lesson_document(what, trigger(n), insight(n), sources(n)) ==
(n.title, n.body)` across six shapes, and again over ten consecutive no-op
edits. Falsified against the old code before committing: 11 of 23 fail on
HEAD, the headline one reporting a body grown by 3230 characters over ten
edits.

The one damaged row in the corpus (#4207, two paragraphs duplicated by a
`system_ids` edit) was repaired by hand against its authored text. #4221 is
the only other lesson with a multi-paragraph trigger and has never been
updated, so its body is intact — its derived `insight` was wrong, its
storage was not.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 16:35:51 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 43ed7f4db7 fix(access): tag a record as the user doing it, not as its owner (#4249)
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`set_record_systems` is not a dumb setter. It runs its own `can_write_note`
and then links only the Systems the given user can READ. Four of twenty
call sites handed it the record's owner instead of the acting user, which
did two quiet things at once: the access check became trivially true, since
an owner can always write their own record, and the System filter used the
owner's visibility rather than the actor's.

On a single-user install neither is observable. With a share it is an
editor acting with the owner's reach — the shape rule 47 exists to prevent,
and the same reasoning routes/notes.py already spells out for
`set_supersedes` two lines away.

This is NOT a permission change. Every one of the four sites establishes
the caller's write access first: routes/lessons.py and routes/snippets.py
call `can_write_note(uid, …)`, mcp/tools/processes.py does the same, and
mcp/tools/snippets.py reaches `set_record_systems` only after
`update_snippet` has raised PermissionError if the caller may not write. So
nobody gains or loses the ability to edit anything. What changes is whose
reach the tagging runs with, which is exactly the kind of difference that
survives review because every call site reads fine on its own.

The four:

  routes/lessons.py:243      owner_uid      -> uid
  routes/snippets.py:211     owner_uid      -> uid
  mcp/tools/snippets.py:486  note.user_id   -> uid
  mcp/tools/processes.py:196 note.user_id   -> uid

The last one was written earlier in this same session, an hour before the
sweep that found it, with a comment confidently explaining why the owner
was correct. That is the argument for the guard rather than for care: the
unified stance was known and still got it wrong at the next opportunity.

So the guard is the point again. `test_every_tagging_write_acts_as_the_caller`
walks every `set_record_systems` call in src/ and asserts the first argument
is a bare local named `uid` or `user_id` — an attribute access is a record's
owner by construction. Verified against `git show HEAD:` as well as the
working tree: clean now, four offenders on the code it replaces.

Reads are deliberately untouched. `list_record_systems(owner_uid, …)` gates
on reading the NOTE, which the caller can do anyway, so it returns the same
list either way; it is a different operation and churning it would add noise
without changing behaviour.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 16:09:41 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 e2e1ea3667 fix(systems): a record can be filed under a System from whichever door wrote it (#4249)
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A System tag is how `list_system_records` gathers an area's pile, so a
record that cannot be tagged is reachable by search and by nothing else.
`update_lesson` did not take `system_ids` while `create_lesson` did, which
made tagging available exactly once — at the moment of least information.
A lesson is usually written at the end of a piece of work, which is
precisely when that argument gets dropped, and after that the record could
never be filed at all.

Filling in the rest of the table found three more gaps, and the issue's own
generalisation was wrong. It read as "the REST door can do something the
MCP door cannot", on three instances in a row. In fact:

  * `create_preference` is the exact MIRROR of the lesson bug — update
    takes `system_ids`, create does not. The same capability missing from
    the opposite end of the same lifecycle.
  * `routes/notes.py` handled `system_ids` NOWHERE, while the MCP door
    handled both ends. That runs the opposite way round from the premise.
  * `create_process` / `update_process` took it at neither door, though a
    process is a note and has always been taggable in the data model.

The real pattern is that whichever door nobody exercised for a kind is the
one that never grew the parameter — which is a better statement of #4248
than the one recorded there, and is not something a reviewer reliably
notices, because each door is only ever read on its own.

Milestones are NOT a fifth gap. `RecordSystem.note_id` is a ForeignKey to
`notes.id` and milestones are their own table, so they cannot be tagged at
any door by construction. Pinned in the test so the next pass does not
re-open it.

So the guard is the point, not the four parameters. `update_lesson` alone
would have left the shape that produced it intact. The new test asserts the
TABLE — every kind taggable anywhere is taggable everywhere it is written —
and keys the registry-coverage check on the SIGNATURE rather than on a
grep, so a module that only names the argument in prose is not swept in and
no hand-kept skip list can go stale. A fifth kind fails there rather than
shipping half-wired, the same reasoning test_derived_mirror_generic_door.py
records for derived mirrors (#3734).

One inconsistency found and deliberately not changed here: for the same
operation `routes/tasks.py` scopes `set_record_systems` by the caller while
`routes/lessons.py` and `routes/snippets.py` scope it by the owner. The new
notes code follows tasks.py and says why in a comment (#47 — an editor-share
holder should tag from what they can see rather than inherit the owner's
reach). Recorded in #4249 rather than fixed as a drive-by.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 16:02:16 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 42360f616c fix(telemetry): silence is only an answer where the ledger was watching (#4268)
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`band_hugs_floor` compares an arm's weakest tenth against its floor, and
#4225 made it SUSPEND rather than soften when the floor moved inside the
window — because across a change the scores and the bar come from two
different populations. It reads `floor_moves_since`, which answers "did
this arm's floor move", and it read an empty answer as "no, it held
steady".

Those are the same answer only where the ledger was watching. Before an
arm's first floor row there is nothing to move, nothing to report, and no
way to tell a steady floor from an unrecorded one. The suspension was
reading absence of evidence as evidence of absence, and the symptom is the
one #4225 documented: a band "-0.0208 above its floor" — an impossible
negative distance, printed with the suspension silent.

Every install passes through this. The ledger's first row for an arm is
written when that install first boots the release that records baselines,
so any window longer than the install is old reaches back past it. The
lowered-floor direction hides: the gap comes out comfortably positive and
reads as a clean bill of health.

`floor_history_gaps(since)` answers the question its companion cannot:
which arms' floor history does not REACH the start of the window. Arms
come from `surface_names()`, not from the ledger — an arm the ledger has
never heard of is exactly the one at risk, so it cannot be the ledger that
decides which arms get asked about.

Baselines count here, which is the one place the two deliberately
disagree. A baseline records a default without changing it, so it is not a
move and `floor_moves_since` filters it out. It IS the ledger beginning to
observe the arm, and from that moment silence genuinely means the floor
held — filtering it out here would suspend the band check forever on every
install that has never tuned.

`floor_history_unknown` sits between the known move and the band, so an
arm with a date to give gives it. Two sentences, because the remedies
differ: a date says ask again with a smaller `days`; no history at all
says there is nothing to wait for, and names what starts the record.

Why now: #4261 measures the work-log change by reading these warnings, and
every window for the next month opens before this ledger's first row.
Measuring against an instrument that prints a number it cannot support is
the #4225 trap one level up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 14:38:16 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 a58a225d7b fix(embeddings): a backfill reads text when it embeds, not when it scanned (#4264)
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Every backfill selected the text alongside the id and then iterated that
snapshot, sleeping between records. Over a real corpus that is minutes, and
anything edited inside the window was re-embedded by its own write path and
then OVERWRITTEN with the pre-edit text the scan had captured — stamped at the
current chunker version, so the next boot considered it current and never
repaired it. The record stayed findable by what it used to say, indefinitely,
until someone happened to edit it again. Nothing reported it, and no existing
signal separated it from a correct record: the version was right and the
vectors were there.

All four backfills had it. Three were pre-existing; I wrote the fourth an hour
ago for #4251 by copying the third.

#4251 also widened the exposure. The race used to need a note-body edit; now
every add_task_log re-embeds its task, so any session recording work during a
backfill can hit it — which is exactly what "forward work continues while the
backfill runs" means.

TWO HALVES, SEPARATE ON PURPOSE.

Stopping it: the scan takes IDS ONLY and `_current_row` re-reads each record at
the moment it is embedded. One indexed primary-key read, negligible beside the
forward pass that follows, and it turns a backfill from "replay a snapshot"
into "repair to current truth". The residual race shrinks from the length of
the run to the width of one record, which the parent-row claim and the
single-transaction replacement narrow further.

Repairing it: `_vectors_older_than_their_record` adds a third staleness
condition beside "no vectors" and "old chunker" — vectors older than the text
they encode. A guard that refuses to write a bad value does not undo the bad
values already stored (#4202); the rows are what has to change.

That check earns its place beyond the bug that prompted it. It equally catches
a record whose `embed_note` never ran — no event loop, a swallowed refresh, a
process that died between the commit and the index. Every one of those looks
identical from the version column and identical from outside.

And a work log is part of a task's document while living in its own table, so
writing one never moves `notes.updated_at` and the timestamp comparison cannot
see it. `_tasks_logged_since_embedding` covers exactly the records the race was
most likely to have hit.

The live instance has already run #4251's backfill — the prior-art arm is
surfacing `## Work log —` passages, which is the thing itself rather than a
banner about it. Whether that run clobbered anything is unknown and was not
measured; the repair half picks up whatever it did on the next boot, without
needing it diagnosed first.

The structural guard in the tests was checked against the old shape, not just
the new one: reintroducing `select(Note.id, Note.title, Note.body)` makes it
fail, so it can catch the next copy of this rather than only agreeing with
today's code (#167).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 13:38:12 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1fca8c2808 feat(retrieval): a System's charter becomes an answer, not just a filter (#4251)
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Step 2 of #4251. A System's `description` is a charter — several hundred words
saying what belongs in that area and what does not — and it is the answer to
"which part of this codebase does X live in". There was no semantic path to
one: `list_systems` enumerates, and `search(system_id=…)` uses a System as a
FILTER over notes. So a System could narrow a search and could never be the
answer to one, and an agent asking where a record belonged had to read every
charter or guess.

ITS OWN SEARCH, not a `content_type` over notes, for the reason note 3163
gives about milestones: the row could be shared, the search cannot. A charter
competing with the whole note corpus for one top-k is outranked by the records
filed under it — the right answer crowded out by its own contents — and "where
does this belong?" is a different question from "what prior art is there?",
which a caller asking one should not have to read past answers to.

So `system_embeddings` (0107) joins note_, rule_ and milestone_embeddings as
the fourth sibling, with `system_document`, `upsert_system_embedding`,
`semantic_search_systems`, a startup backfill and `search(content_type=
"system")`. Scoped like milestones: with a project_id, that project's Systems
if the caller can read the project (rule 78); without one, the caller's own.
Archived Systems are excluded — an archived area is one the operator has said
is no longer where things go, which is exactly the question being asked.

`system_document` is the plainest of the four shapes on purpose. A charter is
already written as the thing this search has to match, in the words someone
asking would use — so there is no trigger to synthesise as `rule_document`
must, and no second record to gather as `task_document` must. The stored
charter IS the sharp document, the way a snippet's is. `color`, `status` and
`order_index` stay out: presentation and bookkeeping, and a vector carrying
them would be answering a question nobody asks of a charter.

The search publishes `report["best_chunk"]` from the start rather than being
retrofitted, which is what #4251 asked of any fourth search. It matters more
here than anywhere: a charter runs long and a result shows its NAME, so a match
on the paragraph that actually decides where a record belongs would otherwise
be previewed by two words that cannot say.

The id that comes back is the one `system_id`, `system_ids` and
`list_system_records` already take, so the answer to "where does this belong?"
is directly usable as "show me what is there" and as "file it here".

`embed_system` sits beside `notes.embed_note` at the service for #2056's
reason — every door gets it by construction. Not called on delete: that is a
soft delete and the search joins through `System`, so the vectors are already
unreachable, and leaving them means a restore is findable again immediately.
`system_embeddings` is declared in backup's `_NOT_INCLUDED` as derived, beside
its three siblings.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 11:25:53 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 aa95c109ea feat(retrieval): a task's work logs join the document it is embedded as (#4251)
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Step 1 of #4251. A work log is the richest prose Scribe holds about WHY
something is the way it is — written during the work, recording what was tried
and ruled out. #4241 made it readable from the agent's door. It was still not
findable, so "has anyone tried this approach?" — precisely the question a log
answers — could not reach one. The cost is not hypothetical: #4208 was rebuilt
in this session because its logs were unreachable.

THE DESIGN QUESTION the issue left open was whether logs embed as part of their
task's document or as rows of their own. As their own rows, a hit has to be
resolved back to a task to be worth anything, and it needs a fourth search, a
fourth result shape and a fourth arm. As part of the task, the objection is
that a long log drowns a short title.

That objection was true before #280 and is not true now. Chunking made one
record into one vector per section, so each log becomes its own title-anchored
chunk, scored separately, and the task's own prose keeps the chunk it always
had — a task is as findable as its best-matching log rather than as the average
of everything in it. The other half is this session's other build: a search
hands back the chunk that won (#4243), so a hit earned by a log shows that
log's passage under the task's title. Without that a reader would have got
body[:240] of the task — the opening of a record whose relevance lives three
hundred lines further down.

So `task_document(title, body, logs)` sits beside `rule_document`: a
synthesised embed-time shape, because the stored record is the task row and the
logs live in their own table, so the document that should be searchable exists
nowhere until it is built. A task with no logs is returned untouched — most
notes are not tasks and most tasks carry no log, and their vectors are the
corpus every tuned number here was measured against.

CHUNKER_VERSION 1 → 2, and its comment now says what the version actually
means. It used to read "whenever chunk_document's output can change for the
same input", which this change would slip past: `chunk_document` is untouched
and every task with a log now embeds differently while its title, body and the
chunker all stand still. The invariant is the document a record is embedded as.
The startup backfill re-embeds on that.

Create, edit and delete of a log all refresh the task through `embed_note`, the
one path every writer shares — an edited log whose vectors still carry its old
wording keeps matching what it no longer says.

No new kind enters the auto-inject menu: tasks were always in it, and this
makes recall on them better rather than changing what the menu spans. The
calibration stamp will now report shape_version 2 against numbers measured at
1, which is exactly the report #4104 built it to make.

Also promoted `session_returning` into tests/helpers beside `make_mock_session`
(#2834) — two files had spelled it out identically and a third was about to.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 11:20:27 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5fb41af9b0 feat(search): the agent's search can ask for every kind the corpus has (#4250)
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The engine took `note_type` and `task_kind` all along. What was missing was a
way to say them: the MCP tool's `content_type` knew `note`, `task` and `all`,
and `/api/search` knew the same two — so an agent could not ask "has this
snippet already been recorded" or "what lessons apply here" without searching
everything and reading past the rest. Browse offered nine kinds from the same
data.

The cause is that each door kept its own map. `_FACETS` in services/knowledge
is where a kind is declared, and #3161 made adding one a single edit by
generating the SQL filter, the Python predicate and the door's validation from
it — but the two search doors were written before that and never joined. So
this adds the third dialect, `search_filters_for`, and one composition over it,
`content_type_filters`, and both doors now derive instead of listing.

Two names keep a meaning of their own, and the docstrings say so: `all` is no
filter, and `note` is BROAD — any non-task, snippets and lessons included —
where the browse facet of the same name is narrow (`note_type == 'note'`).
They are left different deliberately; narrowing this one would stop returning
snippets to every caller that already asks this way.

An unrecognised kind is now refused rather than answered. Both doors used to
fall through: the MCP tool into a filter matching no row, the route into no
filter at all, so `?content_type=snippets` returned the whole corpus while
looking like a narrowed search. An empty result set is a claim — "the corpus
holds nothing like this" — and an agent acts on that claim by building the
thing it could not find, so a typo must not be able to make it.

The docstring is the agent-facing contract (#2846), and a test now holds it to
the table: every kind `_FACETS` declares has to appear in it, because a filter
an agent has not been told about is unreachable however well it is wired.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 11:12:48 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 0ec499d9b4 test: the milestone result shape moved, and its fake had a mock for a body
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test_milestone_search_is_its_own_shape asserts the result dict exactly, so
adding `matched` / `matched_is` / `body_length` broke it — which is the test
doing its job.

Its fake was a bare MagicMock, so `m.body` autovivified: `matched` came out as
a mock object and `body_length` as 0, and nothing in the old assertion touched
either. Lesson #2833 is about exactly this, and the failure output is what
surfaced it. The fake now carries a real body string and a report with the
chunk that matched, so the assertion is about the product rather than about
MagicMock's attribute behaviour.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 09:46:33 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 253fb974f3 feat(retrieval): every semantic search hands on the passage that matched
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#4243 fixed one door. Scribe has three semantic searches over three chunk
tables, and all three collapsed chunk rows to the best one per record — each
of them KNEW which passage earned the hit, and each dropped it. Every surface
downstream then previewed the head of the document instead: a span the search
had already scored lower, with nothing saying so.

Mechanism, one place:
  - embeddings.record_best_chunk publishes {id: {index, text}} into `report`.
    Carried in `report`, NOT the return value: all three return
    list[tuple[float, Record]] and ~30 sites unpack that pair (lesson #4207).
  - semantic_search_rules and semantic_search_milestones now select
    chunk_index/chunk_text and publish the winner, as notes already did.
    semantic_search_milestones gains `report`, which it had no way to take.
  - services/text.matched_excerpt is the one choice of span, and
    excerpt_fields the one result block. Doors keep their own field names —
    the web renders `snippet`, MCP returns `excerpt` — because renaming a
    field a frontend reads is a different change from fixing what goes in it.

Surfaces:
  - knowledge.query_knowledge, whose own comment calls it "the human's MAIN
    search surface", was `(note.body or "")[:200]` on every row alike. Now the
    matched passage on a search, the opening on a browse, and `snippet_is`
    saying which. KnowledgeView renders that snippet, so this was live.
  - search(content_type='milestone') gains `matched` — the plan body stays
    out, but the passage that matched comes along, because recognising a plan
    means recognising the part you asked about and a description written at
    the start need not mention it.
  - The auto-inject menu and the write-path prior-art menu put the passage
    under their line. Both were title-only, which answers "does this apply?"
    for a lesson or snippet (the trigger is IN the title) and not at all for
    an issue or dev-log. No fallback to the body's opening: on a menu that is
    preamble dressed as a reason, and once indented it cannot be told apart.

Left alone deliberately: the rule arms. A rule hint already renders the rule's
TRIGGER, which is written to answer exactly "does this apply to me" and beats
a matched chunk at it; and that line's budget was measured at #3851. Adding a
passage there would duplicate the trigger and spend the budget twice.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 09:44:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 6abedb0168 test: two tests that had to move with the chunk-carrying select (#4243)
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test_chunking::test_search_collapses_chunk_rows_to_best_chunk_per_note feeds
rows straight into the real semantic_search_notes, so widening the select to
carry chunk_index/chunk_text broke its 2-tuple fakes. I had claimed no unit
test did this after grepping test_embeddings.py, which was the wrong file.
Rows are 4-tuples now, and the test additionally asserts the winning chunk is
REPORTED and not merely used for scoring — the property #4243 exists for, and
this is where it belongs, beside the collapse it comes from.

test_task_work_log_surface's ACL test asserted "task_logs.user_id" was absent
from the compiled statement. It is present in every SELECT as a projected
column; the claim was about the WHERE clause. Asserts on stmt.whereclause now,
which is what was actually meant and still fails if an owner filter returns.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 08:54:15 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 fdc07f2a2b fix(search): show the passage that matched, not the opening of the body (#4243)
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Raised by the operator: are we limiting what comes back by character count,
and how do we verify the pertinent part is the part displayed?

We were not. mcp/tools/search.py sent (note.body or "")[:240] — a head cut,
with no marker that anything had been removed, so a 240-character preview of
a 4000-character record was indistinguishable from a complete short one.

The opening is the wrong span. The match is semantic and per chunk, and
semantic_search_notes collapses to best-chunk-per-note — its own comment at
the collapse says "the first appearance of a note is its best chunk". So the
system identified the passage that earned the hit and then discarded it:
select(Note, distance) kept no chunk column. A record could rank first on its
sixth paragraph, be previewed by its first, and be judged irrelevant on a
span the search had already scored lower. That biases against long records,
and it is self-concealing — the caller who does not open it never learns the
preview was misleading.

  - embeddings: chunk_index/chunk_text ride along in the select, and the
    collapse records the winner in report["best_chunk"]. Carried in `report`,
    NOT by widening the return tuple: ten callers unpack (score, note) at
    ~18 sites and nothing would catch the misses (lesson #4207). `report` is
    the side-channel this function already uses for best_available_score.
  - search(): excerpt / excerpt_is / body_length, and read_full when there is
    more. A caller that cannot tell a matched passage from a document opening
    cannot judge whether to look deeper, which is the only decision the field
    supports.

elide() moves to services/text.py so both callers share one copy, and it
keeps BOTH ends with a stated gap — it is the fallback for when nothing
identifies a better span than "all of it", not the goal.

Also fixes a guard that produced a false failure on the previous commit:
test_pull_telemetry checked `"project_id: int = 0" in body.split("\n")[0]`,
which sees only the first line, so wrapping get_task's signature over four
lines made it report a function that does take the project as one that does
not. Parsed with ast now, and proven to still reject an absent or
wrongly-typed parameter rather than being appeased by reflowing the code.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 08:50:16 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4f2977b848 fix(tasks): add_task_log wrote to a surface no agent could read back (#4241)
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The work log reached the web UI through routes/task_logs.py and nothing
else. get_task returned only the body — a claim written once, before the
work — with the record written during it invisible beside it. So a stale
body arrived with nothing to contradict it, and this session rebuilt work
that had already shipped, with the evidence sitting in the task's own logs.

Read side, scoped through the access layer (rule 78):
  - logs_for_task / count_logs_for_task / log_counts_for_tasks in
    services/task_logs.py. Scoped by who may read the TASK rather than by
    who wrote the entry: list_logs filters TaskLog.user_id == user_id,
    which hands a shared collaborator an empty list reading as "no work
    has been done". The page query folds readable_notes_clause into the
    same statement so the permission does not become an N+1.
  - get_task returns work_log; list_tasks and get_milestone steps carry
    log_count, zero-filled so "none" is a count and not a missing key.

Elision keeps both ends. The newest entry arrives whole to 4000 chars
because it answers "where does this stand"; older ones are shortened from
the MIDDLE, never the head. A head cut selects what a reader sees by
character position, which is uncorrelated with what matters — an entry
closing with "so this shipped in 04775c3" loses the one sentence that
answers the question, and a truncated flag says something went, never
whether it mattered. The gap states how many characters it covers.

conftest gains an autouse stub for the new read arm, same reasoning as
_no_rule_arm: three widely-called tools grew a database read, and the
existing call sites should not each have to learn about it.

Raised while reviewing this: search() has the same shape and worse —
body[:240] with no marker at all, while the chunk that actually matched
sits unused in the row that won. Filed as #4243, not fixed here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 08:45:43 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 f8e53c1c35 fix(telemetry): a warning fired on an arm whose decline rate is arithmetic, not evidence (#4232)
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Found by reading a live `retrieval_telemetry` readout after milestone 419
deployed, not by inspection. The readout said:

    cannot_decline / report_preference — "45 calls, 0 of them returned
    nothing. An arm that fires unasked has to be able to say nothing; this one
    never has. Check that it applies its floor at all."

And printed, beside it, that arm's band: p10 = p50 = p90 = min = max = 0.791.

FIVE IDENTICAL PERCENTILES IS THE TELL. That is not a ranking, it is one
record at one score on every call — because `report_preference` searches a
fixed string (`reply_preferences.COMPLETION_QUERY`, a module constant, and
deliberately so).

For a fixed query against a stable corpus the top score is a CONSTANT, so the
arm's decline rate is 0% or 100% and never in between; which of the two it is
depends only on where the bar sits relative to that one number. "Never
returned nothing" is therefore arithmetic, not evidence, and the warning's own
remedy — check whether it applies a floor — cannot be answered from it.

The arm already knew this about itself; the warning did not:

    "a fixed query makes this arm's score a constant and a floor a hair above
     it produces a dead arm no amount of traffic will ever reveal"
        — services/reply_preferences.py

THIS CLASS OF BUG ALREADY HAS A GUARD, which is the argument for the shape of
the fix. `Point.logs_unconditionally` exists because of #3497: both rule arms
once logged only their hits, so their zero count was structurally 0 and this
same warning would have fired on a LOGGING property while sending the reader
to move a threshold that was never involved. This is that one step over — a
QUERY-SHAPE property — and gets the same treatment: a declared field on
`Point`, and exclusion rather than trust.

AND THE WARNING THAT WOULD BE INFORMATIVE HERE DID NOT EXIST. For a fixed-query
arm the dangerous state is the mirror image: every call empty, meaning the bar
is above the constant and no further traffic will ever move it. The arm is off
rather than quiet, and nothing in the readout said so — `expects_traffic`
covers an arm with NO calls, not one with calls and a 100% decline rate. That
state is real and reached: `report_preference` once logged 69 consecutive
declines at 0.0006 under its bar.

So `fixed_query_never_clears` sends the reader to `near_miss_samples` and not
to the dial — because that incident is also the one where the statistic and
the correct action pointed opposite ways. Every percentile said lower the
floor; opening the refused record showed it was rule 77 arriving as a false
positive, and lowering it would have delivered that rule on every completion
report ever written.

Guards in tests/test_retrieval_warnings.py, including the falsifier that
matters most here: `cannot_decline` must still fire on an arm whose query
varies, or this change is a disabled check wearing a narrowed one's clothes.
Both boundaries tested from both sides, per that module's own standard.

The new code is documented in the `retrieval_telemetry` tool docstring beside
the others (rule 33) — an undocumented code in a readout is a reader meeting a
verdict with no way to disagree with it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 08:05:52 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 029692945e fix(hooks): the by-name duplicate arm confirms its grep hits against the real extractor (#4227)
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#4222 fixed one end of this defect — the extractors that decide what a payload
DEFINES now blank comment and string spans before any line matcher runs. This
is the other end: `scribe_local_dups`, which decides which OTHER files already
define that name, and which was still a plain `git grep`.

A grep sees lines, not spans, so the sentence

    class with only modifier rules is a deletion that went half-way.

— real prose from a module docstring in this repo — matched the arm's pattern
for `name=with`. Writing a genuine `change`, `beside` or `wrapped` would be
told it already existed, and pointed at a docstring.

EVERY HIT IS NOW CONFIRMED by running `scribe_defs` over the candidate file and
keeping only names it actually reports. That is the only check that cannot
disagree with the other end of the pipe, which is the whole point.

MEASURED, NOT ASSUMED — both numbers the task reasoned from turned out wrong.

  - WHAT IT REMOVES, across 141 payload files of this repo: 15 of 210 report
    lines. Every one a string literal, a comment, a TypeScript `import { type
    Foo }`, or Vue's `const emit = defineEmits()` boilerplate. No real
    definition was lost. Where a name had both — `create_note` — the phantom
    in a test's `shape_form("async def create_note(...)")` argument dropped out
    and the definition in services/notes.py stayed. `with` went from four files
    to none, which is the correct answer: nothing here defines it, and it is a
    keyword in several of these languages.

  - WHAT IT COSTS: mean 193ms -> 222ms, worst 569ms -> 572ms. The task feared
    "over a second added to a PreToolUse hook" from 48 confirmations. It is
    about 15%, because the arm was already dominated by its twelve `git grep`
    calls, and because confirmation runs once per DISTINCT candidate file
    rather than once per (name, file) pair. A deliberately pathological payload
    — nine names that are ordinary English words — reaches 28 distinct files
    and 947KB; `scribe_defs` runs at ~33ms per 250KB.

THE CANDIDATE CAP IS RAISED FROM FOUR TO TWELVE, and that is load-bearing.
Confirmation REMOVES hits, so capping before it runs lets phantom matches crowd
a real definition out of the window — hits dropped before anyone looked at
them, which is #4042's bug in a new place. The display cap stays at four and
now applies to CONFIRMED hits, which is where a cap belongs. #4042's own `||
true` inside the substitution is untouched, and its regression case still
passes.

The task's own advice not to fix this by tightening the grep pattern is
followed and written down: requiring `(` or `{` or `:` after the name rejects
`class with only…` and also `class Foo extends Bar {`, `class Foo : Base()` and
`type Foo struct {`. This arm exists because it works with no server, no index
and no binding (#2280, #2682), which makes a miss here invisible — a visible
false positive is the better failure.

Guards: tests/test_hook_duplicate_confirmation.py, against real git repos
because what is pinned is the interaction between `git grep`, `head` and the
extractor. Seven of the eight fail against the previous implementation; the
eighth is #4042's regression case, whose job is to keep passing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:49:07 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 edbc31f8ca feat(lessons): the kind whose whole question is "is this trigger right" was the one kind that could not see its own counts (#4196)
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The lesson slot has recorded surfaced-vs-opened since it shipped. Nothing
showed it. `get_lesson`'s REST door attached `usage` to the payload and no
view rendered it; the listing did not attach it at all, and neither MCP door
did.

#4196 asks when a lesson that keeps getting followed should become a rule, and
names the trap in the same breath: raw frequency cannot separate "this should
bind" from "this trigger is too broad", and the second is the commoner reading
by a wide margin. Surfaced-AND-opened can separate them. Neither question is
answerable by a reader who cannot see the numbers, which is why this is the
first step and not the threshold.

NO THRESHOLD IS PROPOSED HERE, deliberately. The corpus today is 10 lessons
with 7 recorded surfacings and 3 opens, over about fifteen hours of usage
data. A promotion rule fitted to that would be fitting noise — #3311's failure,
and the warning lesson #4228 was written to carry. `UsageBadge` already
declines to render a verdict under three surfacings for the same reason. So
#4196 stays open: its subject, the promotion path, is still unbuilt. What
lands is the evidence it needs.

  - REST `GET /api/lessons` and MCP `list_lessons` attach `usage` to every
    row, from one aggregate per page rather than a per-row read, which would
    be N+1 by construction. Every row carries the key zero-filled, so "never
    surfaced" is a state a reader can see rather than a missing field they
    have to interpret.
  - MCP `get_lesson` attaches it too, and reads it BEFORE recording its own
    pull. That door records a pull on every open — it has to, or the kind sits
    permanently at zero — which makes the order load-bearing in a way it is
    not for a kind that only counts. The REST detail door already ordered it
    this way; the two now agree about what the number means.
  - `LessonDetailView` renders `UsageBadge` (snippet #3460) rather than
    re-spelling the chip, with the advice keyed to this kind: a lesson that is
    repeatedly offered and never opened is usually keyed to a situation nobody
    is in, so it points at re-keying `when_to_apply`, not at deleting the
    claim.

Guards, in the two styles this pair of doors already uses: the MCP side driven
behaviourally through mocks, including the call ORDER for `get_lesson`; the
REST side on structure like its siblings in test_lesson_rest_door.py, because
the route is decorated and returns a Quart response. Rule 167's falsifier is
included.

KNOWN GAP, not fixed here: `KnowledgeView` is the only lesson LIST in the UI
and it reads `/knowledge`, not `/lessons` — so the REST listing change reaches
`frontend/src/api/lessons.ts::listLessons`, which currently has no consumer.
The agent-facing listing does reach a reader today.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:33:33 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5d06b74599 test(backup): prove the three restored code_shapes columns survive real Postgres (#4197)
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The column guard is a claim about kwargs; "the value comes back" is a
different claim, and only a round trip settles it. This drives the real
`restore_full_backup` over a judged shape carrying all three of the columns
that were going missing.

`diverges_from` gets the harder assertion. It is a FK to notes.id, so the
tempting fix — carry the exported id across — produces a row pointing at
whatever note holds that number in the target database: not dropped,
REATTACHED, with the restore reporting success and the divergence about the
wrong snippet. So the test asserts WHOSE note the pointer landed on rather
than which integer it holds, and it refuses to run at all if the restore
happened to reuse the source id, which would let it pass without proving
anything. Same shape as the assertion in the rule_usage round trip, for the
same seam.

Also corrects this module's own docstring, which said the round-trip module
"is not written yet". Three existed; this is the fourth.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:18:51 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 33346da381 fix(backup): a restore could lose a column and still report success — code_shapes lost three (#4197)
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The column guard (#3182) makes a dropped column unexpressible on the way OUT.
Nothing watched the way back IN, and that is the worse half: an export gap
leaves an obviously thin backup, an import gap means holding a complete,
correct file and restoring an incomplete database from it, with a success
message.

WHAT IT FOUND, the first time it ran. `code_shapes` was exporting
`reason_code`, `recheck_at` and `diverges_from` and importing none of them.
A restored ledger would have carried every judgment's verdict and not the
code for WHY — the column the accounting reads to tell a scoped-css
exemption from convention-plumbing — with every recheck flag cleared and
every divergence pointer gone. `diverges_from` is a FK to notes.id, so it is
re-mapped rather than carried: the raw source id would point at whatever
snippet took that number in the destination, which is wrong rather than
missing and is the milestone 333 trap one table over.

WHY THE GUARD WAS ONE-SIDED. Not an oversight — the code was. Export goes
through per-table pure helpers, so a test can hand one a stand-in and read
which keys came out. `_restore_v2` built all 26 models inline in one 690-line
procedural function, and there was no per-table unit to hand anything to.

So the construction moved out, into a `_build_*` helper per table taking the
exported row plus the id maps built so far. What deliberately did NOT move is
the loops, the flushes and the id-map bookkeeping: that is the
order-dependent part, where a mistake is a restore that half-works, and it
gains nothing from being split. Returning None is "skip" and a None field is
"degrade" — which one a table wants stays the table's own call, because both
are right somewhere: a shape event without its project says nothing, while a
usage event without one is still a real pull and dropping it would deflate
the pull-through the table exists to report.

The refactor was checked to be behaviour-preserving before the guard went in:
all 26 constructor kwarg sets identical to HEAD, and all 28 skip conditions
accounted for — 25 now in builders, 3 in loops that construct nothing (the
rule_systems raw insert and the two in the final project patch).

The guard then composes the two halves end to end: export a stand-in row,
feed THAT dict to the builder, read which columns the model actually
received. `test_the_usage_importer_restores_the_reading_project` read the
source of `_restore_v2` with `inspect.getsource` because there was nothing to
call; it is replaced by tests that call the builders and assert the
skip/degrade behaviour directly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:15:10 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d309fd7f0f test(drafter): pin the rest of #2990's verify list to the span scan (#4222)
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#2990 asked for three cases. The wrapped-comment-continuation one shipped
with #4222; these are the other two — a comment holding a whole rule defines
nothing, and an unterminated comment does not swallow the file. Both already
pass on both sides; the vectors are what stops a later change to the scan
quietly taking them back.

The phantom #2990 was filed for is among the twenty-two #4222 removes:
`.editor-body` in TaskEditorView.vue, a persisted `code_shapes` row whose
signature ends in `*/` and whose `used_by` count is zero — so it has been
sitting in the unused_css number the operator is meant to act on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:04:06 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 84476d7ecf fix(drafter): a wrapped docstring line beginning "class AND the" defines a shape called AND (#4222)
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The definition extractor is line-oriented and knows nothing about what a
line is INSIDE. A docstring that wraps onto a line starting with a keyword
announces a definition: `AND` reached a live session as a divergence prompt
asking it to justify a symbol that does not exist, and `is` reached it as a
repo-wide duplicate of four files that define nothing of the kind.

Measured, not assumed: running the extractor over every scannable file with
and without the scan differs by twenty-two phantoms. Two of them — `with`
and `nobody`, both out of the module docstring in check_dangling_styles.py —
are persisted `code_shapes` rows that have been judged. Those need no
migration: sync_shapes marks a row it no longer extracts as vanished.

`ast` would be the honest tool for .py and is not what this uses, because
the extractor is mirrored rule for rule by an awk program in the hook, awk
cannot parse Python, and a fix only one of the pair can run is the drift the
mirror exists to prevent. Both sides now run the same left-to-right scan and
blank comment and string spans to their own newlines before any matcher sees
a line. Three things the scan has to get right, each of which cost real
definitions while it was being written:

  - a string that HOLDS a marker is not a marker. `"red /* "` in
    test_design_stylesheet.py and a triple quote inside a single-quoted
    regex in plugin_context.py each ate every definition below them.
  - `#` is a colour in CSS and a comment in Python, and the extractor is
    handed no path. An alphanumeric straight after it settles it.
  - an unterminated opener blanks NOTHING. The scan rewinds past it and
    continues, so a stray marker costs one span rather than the rest of the
    file.

The comment claiming the two extractors agree has been the only thing
holding them together, and a comment cannot fail. The mirror test now RUNS
the hook's awk over the same vectors: with the old program it reports the
phantoms, which is what a guard that can fail looks like. Across all 631
scannable files in this repo the two now agree line for line.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 02:01:56 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 04775c3496 fix(drafter): the base rate counted a dataclass and an async service unit as comparable things (#4208)
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A CORRECTION TO THIS ISSUE'S OWN PLAN, first, because the plan was wrong in
a way that would have cost the acceptance case.

#4208 recommended widening `kind` past `css | sym` to carry the form, calling
the denominator the deeper win and a migration the price. Two things:

1. THE MIGRATION IS NOT NEEDED. The issue says density "is computed from
   stored rows and `shape_form` only runs on read". `canon_density` does
   `select(CodeShape)...scalars().all()` and filters to the directory in
   PYTHON; `signature` is a stored column; `canon_form(siblings, ...)` on the
   next line already derives form from those rows. Bucketing the denominator
   costs a list comprehension.

2. WIDENING `kind` WOULD BREAK MILESTONE #2793's ACCEPTANCE CASE. If `kind`
   separated `fn` from `async-fn`, density would bucket them apart — which
   does silence #4204's four `def` helpers, as claimed. Apply it to a
   hand-rolled SYNC `confirmDanger` in a directory where an async confirm
   helper is canon: the canon leaves the candidate's denominator, nothing
   dominates, no flag. That is the flag the milestone exists to produce, and
   it is the same inversion the first form gate made, one layer down.

So option 1 is not expensive-but-right, it is wrong; and option 2 (compare
meaning) is not the interim, it is the only lever. `confirmDanger` beside an
async confirm helper and `is_registered` beside a service unit are identical
at every structural level — same family, same form contradiction, same
density. They differ only in whether the candidate does the canon's JOB, and
no signature carries that.

WHAT THIS SHIPS is the part that is right and provable: an honest
denominator. `comparable_siblings` narrows the count to rows whose family
does not contradict the candidate's, using `families_conflict` — the same
predicate the gate uses, so the count and the verdict cannot drift into
disagreeing about what comparable means. "372 judged siblings" stops counting
a dataclass, a constant and an async service unit as three comparable things.

NARROWED BY FAMILY, NOT FORM, for the reason above: `fn` beside `async-fn`
stays a fair question. An unreadable sibling STAYS COUNTED — dropping it
would shrink `judged`, raise the share, and fire the check more on the
directories it can read least. Every unknown-form decision in this module
goes that way.

Density is now per candidate rather than per kind, cached on (kind, form).

TWO BUGS THIS CHANGE HAD, both caught before CI and both pinned:

- I passed a FAMILY where `families_conflict` reads a FORM, so
  `shape_family("callable")` returned "" and the narrowing was a silent
  no-op that still read as applied. The regression guard deliberately uses a
  callable: `type` is both a form and a family name, so testing with it
  proves nothing and the bug hides.
- My new `_Row` in the test file shadowed the one already there — same
  fields, different `snippet_id` default — silently breaking three passing
  `canon_form` tests. Reused the existing class. A duplicate definition
  quietly changing a neighbour's meaning is this file's own subject.

The residue test's docstring said separating the four needs "widen `kind` or
a comparison of meaning". Corrected: they are not alternatives.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 01:33:45 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 512d0326a0 fix(telemetry): a floor that moved inside the window makes the band check a comparison of two populations (#4225)
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`retrieval_telemetry(days=30)` reported, for write_path_rule:

  "the weakest tenth of what this arm returns scores 0.6984, only -0.0216
   above its floor of 0.72"

A negative distance above something. The tenth percentile of what an arm
RETURNED cannot sit below the floor that gates what it may return — not
inside one population.

MEASURED CAUSE. write_path_rule's floor was 0.68 until 2026-09-02, when
2385100 (#3318) raised the shipped default to 0.72. The window opened
2026-08-22, so six days of it are calls made under the old bar; top_score.min
for the surface is exactly 0.68, the old bar still in the sample.

AND THE CHANGE LEFT NO TRACE THE READOUT COULD SEE. retrieval_tuning_events
records dial turns — a person or a model choosing a number. It was silent
about the other way a floor moves: somebody edits floor_default and ships it.
retrieval_tuning_history returned {"events": []} and retrieval_surfaces said
last_change: {}, source: "shipped". All true, and all of it silent about a
floor that had in fact moved.

THE RAISE ANNOUNCED ITSELF. A LOWERED FLOOR WOULD NOT: the gap comes out
comfortably positive and reads as a clean bill of health on a sample that
half predates the bar being judged. Both directions are now pinned.

So the check is SUSPENDED, not softened. band_hugs_floor asks whether the
scores are piled on the bar; that needs the scores and the bar to come from
the same regime. Where they do not, the honest answer is that this sample
cannot say, plus the date after which one can — floor_moved_mid_window
replaces band_hugs_floor for that arm and never accompanies it. A reader told
a number is unavailable goes and gets one; a reader handed a qualified number
uses it.

NO MIGRATION. `actor` is Text with no CHECK precisely so a new kind of actor
is not one — the model's own comment says so, and this is the case it
anticipated. "release" joins "model" and "human". user_id is already
nullable, which is right: no user did this, a release acts on every account
that has not overridden the dial, and a row per user would both multiply and
misattribute it. Both readers now take the newest of (this user's change, the
release's).

THE FIRST SIGHTING IS A BASELINE, written with old_value NULL. Nothing moved;
the row exists so the next release has a predecessor. That null is
load-bearing: floor_moves_since asks for old_value IS NOT NULL, so a fresh
install's baseline does not silently retire the check on every new install.

UI: the tuning history rendered actor as `human ? 'you' : 'Claude'`, so a
release row would have told the operator that Claude moved a floor it never
touched — the one failure the actor column exists to prevent. Three-way now,
with an unknown value printing itself rather than guessing.

Recorded at startup, inline and awaited. What #4181 cost three hours was
concurrency — a background task racing the hook for the same pool. Sequential
creates no contention, and this is twelve single-row reads. It must finish
before serving because a readout served before the change was recorded is the
exact answer this exists to stop giving.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 01:17:37 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 36b54bff1f fix(plugin): the ledger that proves a rule was read was being deleted by the compaction that asked about it (#4217)
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Milestone 419's acceptance, and it failed the first time it was run — which
is the only reason this commit exists.

THE MEASUREMENT. Ran the step-5 readout against this session's real traffic
instead of a fixture. It reported 19 rules named by an arm and none opened.
That is false: the session had called `get_rule` 45 times. Across six real
sessions on this instance: 208 opens, 3 surviving ledger entries. 1.4%.

THE CAUSE. `.opened.ids` was doing two jobs with opposite lifetimes.

  - "this context HOLDS rule 156" — false after a compaction, and three hooks
    read it to decide whether to stay quiet. Clearing it is correct.
  - "rule 156 WAS OPENED" — which no compaction makes untrue, and which the
    session-end readout is built on.

`scribe_clear_session_ledgers` sweeps every `<sid>*.ids` on SessionStart
source=compact. Right for the first claim, and it was deleting the second.
The TTL did the same thing more quietly: `scribe_rules_live` ages an
exclusion ledger, which is right, and would have eaten the early part of any
long session's evidence too.

So the readout was reporting only the stretch since the last compaction while
reading as though it had reported the session — a statistic that cannot vary
being mistaken for a finding (#3311), which is the shape this whole milestone
exists to stop producing. It ran AT the seam it was blind to.

THE SPLIT. `scribe_rules_append` now writes both: the exclusion ledger it
always wrote, and `<kind>.keep.ids`, an evidence twin that is never aged and
never swept. The readout reads twins; the three `held` readers are untouched.

DERIVED, NOT LISTED, because a list is what broke this before — the comment
above the sweep says so about its own history. Every ledger written through
the appender gets a twin, including the next one somebody adds; a new ledger
is born on the swept side unless its name opts out. `scribe_checkpoint_allowed`
writes its twin explicitly since it bypasses the appender, and there the split
lands right on both sides: the cap counts the swept file, so a compaction
honestly restores the budget to stop an act the context can no longer justify,
while the record that a stop happened stays.

Removed `scribe_ledger_ids`, orphaned by the change — a dead helper beside a
live one is a thing the next reader trusts.

test_session_ledger_clear.py asserted every ledger dies and could not have
caught this: its fixture never created a twin, so the sweep was one glob away
from either mistake with only one of them guarded. Both sides now asserted.
The slippage tests build their ledgers through the real writers rather than
by hand, for the same reason — a fixture that writes the bytes itself keeps
passing after the writer stops.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 01:04:17 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ae773740b4 feat(plugin): the seam that erases the evidence is where the unresolved rules get named (#4216)
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Step 5 of milestone 419. The milestone's subject is that a rule read and
ignored is arithmetically identical to a rule read and followed, and the
compaction is where that identity becomes permanent — the turns holding the
evidence are summarised away, and the unjudged thing survives as nothing.

WHY THIS IS ASSEMBLED IN THE HOOK. `rule_usage_events` has no session column;
it is per user over a window. A session-scoped answer therefore cannot be
asked of the server, and has to be built where a session is a thing that
exists. Four ledgers four hooks already write:

  .rules.ids      an arm NAMED the rule
  .opened.ids     the session called get_rule      (#4100)
  .acted.ids      the session called rule_outcome  (new here)
  .checkpoint.ids the rule HELD an act             (#4214)

Every one is an observed tool call. Nothing asks the model what it followed —
milestone 386 ruled that out, because a model asked "did you apply rule 156?"
says yes. Two subtractions: named-minus-opened is the arm talking to nobody,
opened-minus-acted is the milestone's whole subject.

PreCompact stdout is the compaction's custom instructions (#3680), not a
message to the model, so the readout does not say "you slipped" — it says
which ids must be carried through, which is the one thing a summary can do
about an unjudged finding.

SILENT WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED, and the accusations are conditional on having
members. "0 rules unresolved" on every compaction is how a readout teaches
its reader to skip it. Traffic is still reported, because the static
instructions already ask for it in prose; these lines are the measured
version.

scribe_record_outcome.sh is the third ledger's writer, matched on
mcp__.*__rule_outcome and mirroring scribe_record_opened.sh: TMPDIR only,
silent, exit 0 on every path. A PostToolUse hook that spoke would put a line
after every rule_outcome call and give recording an outcome a cost.

Also: check_plugin.py skipped the new hook for want of a smoke event, which
would have left the newest of the three ledgers as the only one the plugin
lane never runs. Added, mirroring its sibling.

tests/test_precompact_hook.py now isolates TMPDIR — the hook reads session
ledgers from there, so without isolation a test would see whatever this real
session had accumulated.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:53:29 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 fdfb2d94ac feat(plugin): you altered the shape of something — here is everything that reads it (#4215)
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Milestone 419 step 4. Five of the milestone's seven misses were the same move:
acting on the thing in hand without reading the contract around it. Lesson
#4207 says so in words, and was written by its author hours before a
structurally identical mistake, having been surfaced twice in the turns
between. Text delivered at the moment of acting is too weak a carrier for a
reflex that has to change what the act IS. This looks it up instead.

Rule 33 one scope down: its checks are between layers, and the same question
exists between a definition and its callers.

THREE KINDS OF EXPOSED NAME, because a contract breaks three ways that look
nothing alike in source — the defined symbol (a rename or removal), its
parameter names (arity), and the quoted keys of its dict literals (the shape
of what it returns).

THE THIRD IS THE ONE A SIGNATURE-WATCHER MISSES, and it is in because of the
miss that produced this step. Two commits ago `get_writepath_config` gained
one dict key; three arms read that dict inside a fail-open `except`, every one
silently became a no-op, and ten tests went red with nothing pointing at the
cause. No signature changed. Run against that exact edit, the check now names
tests/helpers.py — the actual root cause — among six files, before the write.

TWO GATES, AND THE SECOND IS WHAT MAKES IT USABLE. A change to the exposed set
is necessary but not sufficient: a definition nothing else references has no
contract to break, so the readers lookup runs second and an empty result ends
it silently. Body-only edits say nothing, a subject is named once per session,
and the ledger lives in the swept directory under the `.ids` convention, so
the existing compaction-clear guards cover it — checked against
test_session_ledger_clear's own parsers rather than assumed.

LOCAL AND SERVERLESS, like the duplicate-name arm beside it. It needs the
working tree and nothing else; the server has no checkout, so this is the only
place the question can be asked. It is a NUDGE: scribe_prior_art.sh still
returns no permissionDecision, which is the operator's recorded decision that
a recall aid may not stand in the way of a write. A test asserts that here as
well as in test_write_path_trigger.py, because this is the arm most likely to
tempt someone into making it a gate — it reports something that may already be
broken.

The `sym` half delegates to `scribe_defs` rather than repeating its patterns:
those cover nine languages and have been corrected several times, and a second
copy would inherit today's version and quietly stop agreeing with it (#3497).

Verified by lifting the test file's own helpers and driving all 19 cases
against the real shell over a fixture git repo. Two of my own errors were
caught that way and are fixed: the fixtures were arriving as single lines
because Python `repr` inside bash single quotes leaves `\n` as two characters
(the extractor is line-oriented, so the tests would have gone green against
input no editor can produce), and the no-readers case put its subject in a
file that was not the excluded one, so it had a reader and tested the
opposite of its name.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:43:29 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 028d5218fc fix(tests): the prompt arm has no act to hold, so it carries no checkpoint (#4214)
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CI 7126: 1 failed, 2227 passed — down from 14. The last one was mine, and a
different mistake from the batch before it: I widened four assertions on the
literal `{"context": "", "rule_ids": []}` by replacing the string, without
checking which arm each test was calling. Three are the tool arm. The fourth,
`test_the_prompt_arm_says_nothing_when_asked_nothing`, is not.

The distinction is real rather than an omission, so the assertion goes back
with it written down. The two ACT arms can hold a call because there is a
composed act to hold. The prompt arm fires on the operator's message, before
anything has been decided — there is nothing to put a rule in front of, and a
checkpoint there would have to guess at an act that does not exist yet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:32:23 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4e59af380a fix(tests): the config stand-in fell behind the real one, and ten arms silently no-opped (#4214)
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CI 7124 Python tests: 14 failed. One root cause behind ten of them, and the
failure was the exact one `tests/helpers.writepath_cfg`'s docstring already
warns about in prose — while being unable to prevent this instance of it.

Three arms read their numbers out of that config dict inside a fail-open
`except`. A missing key raises where nobody sees it, so the arm becomes a
silent no-op, indistinguishable from the arm working and finding nothing. The
helper derives its keys from `retrieval_surfaces.SURFACES` precisely to stop
that — and `checkpoint_threshold` is deliberately NOT a surface, because
everything in that table is a floor/budget pair belonging to one query and the
checkpoint runs none. The derivation therefore could not see it, the write-path
rule arm died before `record_retrieval`, and ten tests went red at once.

Fixed at the helper, from the module constant, so there is still exactly one
literal and it lives in the product. And the guard the docstring claimed now
exists: `test_the_config_stand_in_carries_every_key_the_real_one_does`
compares the stand-in's key set against the real `get_writepath_config`, so
the next key that is not a surface fails loudly here instead of quietly
disabling an arm under test. `test_retrieval_surfaces`'s hand-written key list
gains it for the same reason, spelled out in place.

The other four were the contract widening itself: `checkpoint` is present on
every return of the tool arm, including its early ones, so four assertions
comparing the whole dict needed it. That key is deliberately always present —
the two arms feed one shell reader where an absent key and an empty one are
read the same, so the difference is invisible exactly where it would bite.

Verified statically: every cfg in the suite now routes through `writepath_cfg`
(test_write_path_trigger's local `_cfg` delegates to it), no hand-written
config dict survives, and the real config's eight keys match the stand-in's.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:30:20 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 91bc0fb01e feat(plugin): a high-confidence rule is put in front of a command, not beside its result (#4214)
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Milestone 419 step 3, the pre-act checkpoint. Every rule surface in this
plugin returns `additionalContext`, which Claude Code delivers alongside the
tool RESULT — so the rule is read after the call is written and lands as
commentary on a decision already made. That is the milestone's central
finding, measured over a session with seven misses, three caught by the
operator and none by this system.

The action arm can now return a `deny` instead. The act does not run, the
rule's text can be read before the call exists, and the remedy is one
`get_rule` call after which the act may be re-submitted unchanged. Nothing
reaches the operator: a deny is a message to the model.

"CONSEQUENTIAL" IS DERIVED, NOT ENUMERATED. The obvious implementation lists
act kinds — a write to product code, a schema change, a bulk classification, a
merge. Every one of those is consequential because THIS operator wrote rules
about it, and shipping that list is this instance's corpus hard-coded into the
product (rule 115). So the corpus decides: an act is consequential when the
install's own rules speak to it above the checkpoint bar. A fresh install with
no rules never stops anything.

FOUR CONDITIONS, EACH PREVENTING A DIFFERENT WRONG. Above the bar; a rule and
never a preference (which claims no such force); the band's top hit only (the
ranker's confidence claim attaches to its first element); and only a rule the
session has NOT opened — `held` is observable from the get_rule PostToolUse
hook (#4100), not self-report.

WHY "NOT OPENED" RATHER THAN "NO OUTCOME RECORDED". An outcome can be
satisfied with one cheap call asserting compliance without producing any, and
a checkpoint dismissible that way manufactures exactly the compliance data
step 2 was built to measure. Reading a rule cannot be faked in that direction:
after `get_rule` the statement is in context, which is the whole of what was
wanted.

THE BAR IS MEASURED. `retrieval_telemetry(days=30)`: write_path_rule p90
0.7628 max 0.8817; pre_tool_rule p90 0.7373 max 0.8293. 0.80 is above p90 on
both and below max on both, so it selects from the top decile of an already
selective arm and is still reachable. It ships as a setting with a Settings
card, because a cosine distance in one model's geometry over one corpus cannot
transfer.

TWO GUARDS ON THE WORST CASE: at most one hold per rule and five per session,
so a mis-set floor degrades to a noisy session rather than one that cannot
proceed. The ledger lives in the swept directory and is named `.ids`, so the
existing compaction-clear guards cover it.

WRITES ARE NOT HELD, AND THAT IS THE OPERATOR'S DECISION RATHER THAN MINE.
`scribe_prior_art.sh` carries a tested property that it never returns a
permissionDecision — a recall aid may not stand in the way of a write. Three
of the milestone's seven misses were file edits and none are reachable from
the command side, so there is a live argument for extending this; that
argument is exactly why the boundary is now asserted by a test rather than
left to memory. The write-path arm computes and returns the same block so the
decision can be revisited with evidence; the hook ignores it, and a change of
mind is a hook edit rather than a feature.

Verified by lifting `checkpoint_for` and `_rule_band` out of source with `ast`
and exercising the shipped functions over 17 populations, by running the
ledger and deny envelope in bash (10 cases, including that a refused hold is
not written and that a garbled rule id fails closed), and by
scripts/check_plugin.py — which caught the unminted plugin version, 0300 ->
0426.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:26:54 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 bb8013928f feat(telemetry): the readout names rules that were opened and changed nothing (#4213)
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Milestone 419 step 2. Step 1 made an outcome recordable; this makes it
readable. `retrieval_summary`'s rule block gains `applied`, `departed` and
`distinct_rules_acted`, and `_compute_warnings` gains two codes.

TWO CODES, NOT ONE WITH A ZERO IN IT. `read_and_unacted` reports rules that
were opened and left no outcome, against the ones that did. It only fires once
outcomes exist anywhere in the window, because a window with none cannot tell
"every rule was ignored" from "nothing calls `rule_outcome` yet" — and on
every install the day this ships, the truth is the second. Claiming the first
there would be #3311's failure exactly: a statistic that could not vary being
read as a fact about the corpus. The cold case gets its own code,
`outcomes_never_recorded`, whose prose says in as many words that it does NOT
mean the rules were ignored.

`applied` AND `departed` ARE NOT SUMMED. A departure carries the reason the
agent gave and is evidence about the RULE; an application is evidence about
the agent. Folded together they would say only "an outcome exists", which is
true of both and useful about neither. `distinct_rules_acted` counts either,
because for the unacted arithmetic the distinction does not matter.

An outcome is not a pull. The fold branches on OUTCOMES first and never routes
an outcome through the surfaced/ambient split: `source` on an outcome row
names the door the outcome came through, not a ranker, so the ambient
distinction has nothing to say about it. An integration test holds that line —
if an outcome leaked into the pull counters the silently-unchanged rule would
vanish into a compliant-looking total, which is the confusion #4212 was opened
to end.

Verified by lifting the shipped `_compute_warnings` out of source with `ast`
and exercising it against the six populations the new tests assert: cold
instrument, warm instrument, departures-only, full compliance, nothing opened,
and a failed read. The integration tests for the new counts run against real
Postgres in CI — count(distinct) with an IN over an unconstrained column is a
SQL shape a mock would agree with whatever it did, which is what #2663 was.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-21 00:13:45 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4ebf478575 fix(rules): the registration guard counts 24 now that rule_outcome exists
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Milestone 419's own subject, committed while building it. The module header
of mcp/tools/rulebooks.py says the tool count "lives in the registration
test, which fails when it drifts" — I read that line while adding the tool
and did not act on it, which is a rule surfaced, read, and silently
unchanged. The only reason it was caught is that the guard exists and CI ran
it; nothing about my process would have found it.

Worth stating plainly because the milestone is about exactly this class of
miss, and step 1 shipped the record that would let a future session SEE it:
a rule read and not followed is invisible unless something independent
notices. Here the something was a test written by whoever last changed this
count.

Integration was already green on the previous run, so the migration, the
backup round trip and the new `detail` column were never in question — this
was one integer.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 23:58:27 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 dfcb000719 feat(rules): a surfaced rule gets an outcome, not just a read (#4212)
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Milestone 419 step 1. `rule_usage_events` could say a rule was SURFACED and
that it was PULLED. It could not say what happened next, so a rule that fires
constantly and is always obeyed and a rule that fires constantly and is never
obeyed left byte-identical telemetry. The second is far the more urgent and
was the one the readout could not name — measured on a session where three of
seven misses were caught by the operator and none by the system.

Two new events, `applied` and `departed`, and a `detail` column carrying the
why of a departure. No CHECK migration: `event` was created in 0094 as plain
Text with no constraint, verified in the migration rather than assumed from
the model, so rule 36 does not bite here — said in both places because the
next person adding a value will reach for it.

THE THIRD STATE IS DERIVED, AND THAT IS THE DESIGN. Read-and-silently-
unchanged is the failure this milestone was opened on, and it cannot be
reported: an agent that knew it was ignoring a rule would not be ignoring it.
So nothing here asks. `applied` and `departed` are reported; the third state
is a rule that was opened and left no trace. An `ignored` enum member would
collect nothing while reading as though it had measured something, which is
#3311's failure — a statistic that could not vary being taken for a finding.

`detail` is a column rather than two more bare event strings because a
departure stripped of its reason reads back as a miss, so the two states this
exists to separate would collapse again one layer down, in the readout, where
nobody would see it happen. Nullable: following a rule needs no argument, and
an expensive event is one that stops being recorded.

`outcome_state` is the single reading of the four states, taking the aggregate
`usage_for_rules` already returns, so the badge, the readout and any later
session summary cannot disagree about what "followed" means — the drift #3246
found across the rules system. A departure outranks an application: a rule
both applied and argued with is a rule someone argued with, and the argument
is the half worth surfacing.

`rule_outcome` is the MCP door, classed as a WRITE. The read-only set
tolerates getters that call record_pulled, but those are reads that leave a
trace; this tool's entire effect is the row, and the row carries prose the
agent authored. A read-scoped key that can put text in the operator's
database is not read-scoped, whatever table it lands in.

Backup carries `detail` on both sides. It is the one field here a fresh
install cannot re-earn — counts come back by being used again, a stated
reason exists once — and #4197 records that the column guard watches the
export side only, so the round-trip test is the thing that would catch a
one-sided add.

Delivery is deliberately not settled here: how an agent gets prompted to
record an outcome is step 3's subject, and the same record serves whichever
answer that step reaches.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 23:56:05 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 0fe19a8440 fix(ledger): a canon may hold a class and the to_dict beside it (#4220)
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The review surface shipped yesterday reported two canons on its first live
day and both were sound. Coherence was "do all judged rows share a form",
which #2844 failed at 37/62 = 0.597 for containing a model class and the
to_dict the canon's own text says the class must carry, and #2849 failed at
4/7 for pairing sync loop-starters with the async ticks they schedule. A
review surface whose whole output is noise is one that stops being read.

The obvious repair is a trap, and there is now a test standing in front of
it. Grouping by family and keeping a majority test makes the check BLIND:
before #2844 was cleaned by hand it held 37 classes and 56 callables, which
as families is 56/93 = 0.602 — a clean pass, and the 31 rows that had no
business being there (Vue functions, route handlers, a dozen tests) would
never have been reported at all. A looser bar in the same shape is worse
than the bug.

So the verdict is inverted. Instead of asking whether most rows agree, it
asks how many rows the canon CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR: a row in the majority
family is accounted for; a callable defined in a file that also holds a
majority-family `type` row is a method of a member, not a foreign body; and
strangers above a fifth of the readable rows make the canon incoherent. The
majority vote abstains those methods, so a class's own serialisers cannot
outvote the classes and turn the members into the strangers.

Measured on the real ledger before it was written, which is why it is this
rule and not a nudge to the share: clean #2844 has 0 strangers in 62,
#2849 has 0 in 7, and polluted #2844 had 31 in 93 — the same 31 withdrawn
by hand this morning, named exactly.

The entry now carries `families`, the majority `family`, `attached`,
`stranger_count`, `unattended`, and `strangers` — THE ROWS THAT DO NOT FIT,
replacing a sample of the first twelve members. The reader's question is
which rows are wrong, and a sample of the agreeing majority cannot answer
it. `unattended` is the discriminator between a check that is too strict and
a ledger full of junk: both canons flagged on day one were entirely
audit-judged, and nothing showed that without opening each one.

Scoped to the review surface. `canon_form` still answers at the precise form
level for stamping and divergence, where a sync helper beside an async canon
is a fair question; nothing here changes what the ledger writes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 23:39:01 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 e87bcfa48c fix(guidance): the index had two characters of headroom, and I spent 391
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CI 7098: unit tests red, everything else green. `_INSTRUCTIONS` was 2439
against a 2000 budget.

WHAT I DID NOT CHECK. That block is capped because Claude Code injects only
the first ~2,048 characters of a server's instructions and cuts the rest
mid-word (#2562, observed live — a 20k version delivered ~10% of itself and
the Systems guidance never reached a session). The cap is stated in a comment
directly above the literal I edited. It was at 1998/2000 before this batch:
a shared, nearly-exhausted resource, and I added a six-line entry to it.

THE JUDGE LINE STAYS, and paying for it is the decision rather than dropping
it. A client with no Agent Skills support receives this index and nothing
else, so of everything here, "you are the judge of record" is among the least
safe to leave past the fold — an agent that never learns it defers every call
to an operator who was never going to make them.

So the line is earned by compressing prose AROUND the existing markers, not by
removing anyone's entry: RULES loses a clause, RECORD and REPORT lose trailing
restatement, PLAN drops a sentence the two markers already imply, and the
opening paragraph tightens. Every index marker the ownership registry requires
survives verbatim — that is what test_the_index_names_each_reflex_it_points_at
checks, and it passes.

Back to 1998/2000: the same headroom as before, with one more reflex indexed.
The next addition pays the same way.

Three guidance modules run green locally (21 tests) — they read files and need
no database, so this one did not have to go to CI to be known.

Plugin version re-minted; the previous mint is on a commit that never went
green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 23:00:14 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 76bf21633e feat(guidance): the agent is the judge — stated in the product, not in a rule
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I recorded this as project rule 174 first. That was wrong twice over, and the
second reason is the one that matters.

RULE 119 SAYS THIS EXACTLY: guidance about how an agent should behave with
Scribe belongs in `_INSTRUCTIONS`, `plugin/skills/*` or the adapter's static
context, never in the corpus. I read 119 while writing the rule, decided it was
"about authority rather than about using Scribe", and wrote it anyway — which
is the reasoning preference 29 exists to catch, performed in full.

THE REASON THAT MATTERS: a rule in the corpus is true on ONE install. If the
agent being the judge is how Scribe works, every install gets it or none does.
Baked in, it ships. As a rule it was one operator's private note about a
product stance.

WHAT IT SAYS. The agent is the judge of record for the work — what a shape is,
whether a finding holds, whether something is done. Surfacing a finding for the
operator to rule on is the judgment NOT made, however well written up: it reads
as diligence and functions as a backlog. Escalate the acts that are genuinely
theirs — their money, their infrastructure, anything hard to reverse or facing
outward — and keep the decisions. A hard call is still yours; an irreversible
act is still theirs.

And the half that keeps this from becoming the previous defect: JUDGING IS
ATTENDED. An agent reading evidence and recording why is judgment; a threshold
or a sweep reclassifying in bulk with nobody reading is the thing that fills a
ledger with confident nonsense (#4208, and Portal's 35 rows). When the fix for
bad unattended writes is another unattended write, stop.

THE PRODUCT WAS TEACHING THE OPPOSITE. reporting-back's Finding row read
"Symptom · Cause · Size of the fix · **Offer to fix it**". So the behaviour I
was corrected for is the behaviour the skill prescribed — which is the better
argument for fixing it here than any rule could be.

Three surfaces, per 119 and the ownership registry (#4027): `_INSTRUCTIONS`
gets a one-line JUDGE index entry; using-scribe owns the authority and the
attended/unattended distinction; reporting-back owns the report shape. Two
topics rather than one, registered separately in test_guidance_ownership so
trimming one cannot quietly take the other.

Plugin version minted — skills only reach a session when the manifest moves
(#2209).

Rule 174 deleted (trash 074434a2, recoverable).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 22:54:19 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 2be17828a9 fix(ledger): live_rows_for called access with nothing in scope (#4208)
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Lint caught an F821 that would have been a NameError the first time
`stamps_to_review` was called: `access` is imported locally inside each of the
seven functions in this module that need it — services/access reaches back
here, so a module-level import closes a cycle — and the new function used it
without one.

I wrote the function by pattern-matching its neighbours and did not check what
those neighbours do to make themselves work. Same shape as the tuple unpack
two commits ago (#4207): the mistake is not in the logic I was thinking about,
it is in the surrounding contract I did not read.

Unit and integration were both green on the failing run (7095); only lint was
red. Worth recording because the lane that caught it is the cheapest one and I
had read its command as covering tests — `ruff check src/ scripts/` does not
look at tests/ at all, so a clean test suite says nothing about it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 22:33:22 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 400253d039 feat(ledger): the ledger can say "these look wrong" without acting on it (#4208)
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THE HALF THAT WAS MISSING. #4204 put a floor under what the write-path hook
may assert. A floor only guards new writes; every row already stored stands
(lesson #4202). Measured after that fix shipped: Portal carried 32 rows under
one canon and 3 under another, all stamped on scores of 0.69-0.77 — below the
0.80 floor, so none of them could be written today, and all of them were still
there. Scribe's own ledger carries 334 under #2860.

`stamps_to_review` reports two things and changes nothing:

  weak       — rows the hook stamped on a resemblance below the current floor,
               each with its score, signature and derived form.
  incoherent — canons whose own judged rows do not agree on a form. A canon
               claims some shapes are the same sort of thing; when its members
               are a class, three getters and a dozen tests, that claim has
               stopped being true and every base-rate reading built on it is
               reading noise. `canon_form` already made such a canon fall
               silent — nothing made it VISIBLE.

IT DELIBERATELY CANNOT FIX ANYTHING, and that is the design, not an omission.
The first version of this commit was an automatic sweep that reset rows by
score. That is the original defect pointed the other way: what harmed the
ledger was not one wrong score, it was a machine recording permanent
classifications unattended. Un-recording them unattended is the same act with
a wider blast radius. An agent reads the evidence, judges, and records the
judgment under its own name through `classify_shapes`.

`test_the_service_carries_no_machinery_for_bulk_withdrawal` asserts that
structurally, so the next person to reach for an auto-retire has the argument
again on purpose rather than in a diff nobody reads.

A JUDGMENT IS NEVER LISTED AS WEAK, whatever its age. This is the measured
correction to an assumption I nearly shipped: of Scribe's 334 rows under
#2860, 302 are in `services/` — the canon's own home — and the ones sampled
there are `classified_by="audit"` with no score at all. The legitimate bulk
of that canon was never scored; it was judged by an agent in batch. Listing
those as weak would invite an agent to withdraw the only real judgments in the
ledger. An agent's decision is a different KIND of evidence, not a worse one.

THE SCORE NOW HAS A PARSER. It lived only inside a prose sentence, so nothing
could ask how strong the evidence for a row was without re-deriving it — which
is how 32 rows sat unexamined for nineteen days. Format and reader are one
constant apart (`_RESEMBLE_REASON` / `stamp_score`), with a round-trip test and
a test pinned to reason strings taken verbatim from the two poisoned ledgers.

`live_rows_for` is `live_rows` behind the project read gate, for callers that
arrive from outside rather than from a job that already knows who is asking.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 22:28:12 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d5b46ffc45 fix(ledger): the in-play tuple widened and one consumer kept reading four (#4204)
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[s_id for rank, _at, s_id, _why in bucket if rank == 2]
    ValueError: too many values to unpack (expected 4, got 5)

`in_play` gained the canon's form as a fifth element so the stamp could be
decided per shape rather than per file. The `record_uses` call eighty lines
below still destructured four, and every stamp that reached it raised.

Both integration failures on runs 7090 and 7091 are this one line —
`test_write_path_stamp_is_evidence_that_yields_to_judgment` and
`test_a_brand_new_shape_gets_a_provisional_row_the_sync_settles`.

Now indexed rather than destructured, matching the candidate scan above it, so
the next widening cannot break it positionally.

WHY THE UNIT LANE STAYED GREEN THROUGH TWO PUSHES. `record_uses` is only
reached once a stamp is actually written, which needs a real snippet, a real
ledger row and the write ACL — so no unit test crosses that line. 139 local
assertions and the whole unit suite passed on code that raised on every
successful stamp. The integration lane was the only thing that could say so,
which is the case for it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 21:53:53 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 a4883c8ac1 fix(ledger): divergence asks at family level — the first gate was inverted (#4204)
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CI run 7090 caught this; the unit suite could not. Integration job 25763 —
`test_a_second_confirm_dialog_is_detected_and_named`, the acceptance case of
milestone #2793.

WHAT I GOT WRONG. The previous commit gated BOTH halves of the ledger on
`forms_agree`. That is right for stamping and backwards for divergence,
because the two assert opposite things:

  STAMPING says "this IS that canon". Agreement in form is evidence FOR the
  claim, so demanding it is correct.

  DIVERGENCE says "this is NOT the canon that dominates here — did you mean
  to?" A form MISMATCH is the PREMISE of that prompt. Requiring the candidate
  to match the canon silences the check precisely where it belongs.

So #2793's case stopped firing: a hand-rolled sync `confirmDanger` in a
directory where an async confirm helper is canon read as `fn` against
`async-fn`, disagreed, and was dropped. `flag_divergence` returned 0 where the
test demands 1, and the write-time check returned nothing where it must name
the canon. That is a real flag the milestone exists to produce, and my change
removed it.

THE FIX. Divergence now gates at FAMILY level — callable {fn, async-fn},
type, value, css — and only on contradiction. A sync function beside an async
one is still a fair question. A frozen dataclass told to build from an async
service function is not a question at all.

WHAT THIS DOES NOT FIX, asserted rather than commented so it fails the day it
changes (`test_how_many_of_the_five_the_divergence_gate_actually_silences`):
of #4204's five false prompts this silences ONE. `Point` is a type against a
callable canon. `_p`, `get_point`, `is_registered` and
`sources_expected_to_emit` are callables like the canon and still ask — and
at the signature level they are indistinguishable from the #2793 case above,
so nothing readable here can separate them. That needs #4204 option 2 (widen
`kind` past `css | sym`) or a comparison of meaning rather than form.

The stamping half — `_RESEMBLE_MIN` 0.80 and the graded burden — is unchanged
and unaffected by this failure. It is also the half that matters more: loose
stamping is what manufactures the density the divergence check reads as
authority.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 21:26:12 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 947203fa44 fix(ledger): a canon is only urged on a shape that could be it (#4204)
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Two halves of one defect, found while writing #3431 and measured on a second
project.

THE DIVERGENCE CHECK WAS A BASE RATE. `dominant_canon` answers "what is most
common in this directory" and never "is this that" — the candidate's
signature was not examined at all. With `kind` carrying only `css | sym`, a
frozen dataclass, a module constant, a sync predicate, a class and an async
service function are all siblings, so the prior was not merely the best
signal, it was the only one. Writing a registry module of pure helpers
produced five prompts to build them from the `async_session` service canon.

THE AUTO-STAMP HAD NO FLOOR. `elif sid in resembles` took any score at all:
0.69 asserted as confidently as 0.95, and the number went into the reason
line without ever being compared to anything. Worse, the score is computed
against the WHOLE PAYLOAD, so one number spoke for every symbol in the file.
On Portal that recorded `class SessionAbsent`, `def build_channel`,
`async def attach` and a dozen test functions as instances of one snippet —
17 rows under #3283, which then made that directory "canon-dense" and started
instructing every later writer in it.

The two compound: loose stamping manufactures the density the divergence
check reads as authority. Both are fixed by one primitive.

`shape_form` derives a coarse form — css / type / async-fn / fn / binding —
from the signature, on READ. `kind` is part of the row identity, so widening
that column needs a migration and a re-extract (#4204 option 2, still the
principled fix); deriving costs nothing and is reversible. Every caller asks
`shape_form`, so the day the column carries the answer it returns that.

THE BURDEN SCALES WITH THE EVIDENCE, and getting this wrong was the first
version. A by-name reference — the payload names the canon's symbol — is
strong and needs only the absence of contradiction; demanding positive
agreement there silenced it whenever a shape's definition was not in the
payload (an Edit rather than a Write), turning strong evidence into none for
a reason unrelated to the code. A resemblance score is weak and must
positively agree.

`canon_form` reads the form a canon's own judged rows agree on, and returns
unknown when they disagree. That makes the halves cooperate: a canon already
poisoned by loose stamping — Portal's #3283 — falls silent instead of
flagging anyone else.

`forms_agree` requires BOTH sides known, so an unreadable signature makes the
checks quieter rather than more confident. `_RESEMBLE_MIN` is 0.80 rather
than the retrieval floors near 0.70: those decide whether to SHOW a record,
where being wrong costs a glance; this decides whether to RECORD a claim
unattended, where being wrong misinstructs everyone who writes there after.

Caught by the tests, not by review: a first pass required `const`/`let`/`var`
before a binding, so every Python module constant read as unreadable and a
whole form was silently excluded from both checks.

Not addressed: rows already carrying a wrong snippet_id are not undone by a
guard at the point of classification (lesson #4202). Portal's 17 keep
producing dominance until something re-judges them.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 21:16:51 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 e2c3a5c2b5 feat(telemetry): retrieval_telemetry says what is wrong (#3431)
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The tool returned distributions and left the reading to the caller, so every
readout was the same four checks done by hand — #3430's baseline, #3835's rule
near-misses, the #1038 rerank gate. Mechanical, and therefore forgettable.

Tonight's acceptance pass on #3898 was the case for doing this. Reading it by
hand meant catching that two surfaces had `covers_window: false`, that
`prompt_rule`'s floor had moved three times inside the window (which made the
readout self-contradictory: deliveries at 0.622 beside refusals at 0.7199),
and that 15 of 20 near-misses were one record against text no operator wrote.
Miss any of those and the obvious conclusion was "the bar is too tight" — a
floor change that would have injected one preference into every notification.

`warnings` is always present and empty when clean, so its emptiness is an
answer rather than a gap. Each entry carries the numbers that produced it:
"345 calls, 0 declined" is the analysis, "check write_path_rule" is an
instruction to redo it. Five codes — cannot_decline, band_hugs_floor,
no_duration, surfaced_never_pulled, unregistered_source.

cannot_decline has three guards, each a bug it would otherwise cause. Asked
surfaces are exempt (a search returning a list every time is working). An arm
not known to log unconditionally is exempt — that is #3497 exactly, where both
rule arms recorded only their hits, so a decline count of zero was a LOGGING
defect and this warning would have sent the reader to a threshold that was
never involved. Unregistered sources get numbers but no verdict.

`silent_surfaces` is the half the rows cannot show: an arm that emitted
nothing is invisible to every row-based check and looks exactly like an arm
that does not exist. It is driven by a new declared registry,
`retrieval_registry.POINTS` — deliberately NOT `retrieval_surfaces.SURFACES`,
which answers "what can be tuned" and excludes the reserved slots because a
budget of 1 is their feature. This answers "what can be measured", and the
reserved slots belong in it precisely because they are judgeable without being
tunable. A test asserts the two cannot drift apart.

The registry test derives sources from the call sites with `ast`, not grep,
and the difference is not theoretical: `wide_net` and `report_preference`
reach their recorder as `source=SOURCE` through a module constant, so a grep
for `source="` is blind to both — the narrowing #3191 warns about. Three sites
pass `source` as a variable and are declared in FAN_OUT_SITES; the test pins
those sites but not the values they can pass, which is why the
`unregistered_source` warning exists to catch the rest at first fire.

Thresholds are settings (rule 25) defaulted so a fresh install with almost no
data produces no warnings at all (rule 115) — a new user's first readout
naming five broken things would be describing the emptiness.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 20:24:56 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1f7ff7b215 fix(plugin): the prompt boundary retrieves against prompts, not plumbing (#4200)
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Claude Code submits more than typed words through UserPromptSubmit. A task
notification, a slash-command echo and the caveat banner a local command
prints all arrive as user turns, reaching `.prompt` indistinguishable from
something the operator wrote. scribe_autoinject.sh believed all of them.

The cost that matters is not the wasted embedding — it is the log row. Every
such call counts in the denominator of every prompt-boundary surface, so
delivery rate reads low for a reason unrelated to retrieval; and each refusal
lands in `near_misses`, where a later tuning decision reads it as demand.

Measured while taking milestone 399's acceptance (#3898): 15 of the top 20
`preference_slot` near-misses were `<task-notification>` blocks, all matching
ONE record — #140 "Let each action land before starting the next" — all within
thousandths of the 0.70 floor. A notification that an action finished really
does resemble a preference about letting actions land. Lowering the floor to
serve that apparent demand would have injected that record into every
notification: the instrument arguing for the wrong fix, which is #379 again.

scribe_skip_prompt is a PREFIX test, not a substring one, and that is the
whole safety argument. A real prompt may contain one of these tags — an
operator pasting a transcript, or a `<system-reminder>` after typed words —
and must still be retrieved against. Nothing an operator types begins with a
client envelope. The compaction-resume injection is deliberately NOT filtered:
it is machine-written, but it summarises real work, and a resumed session is
where recalling a rule earns its keep.

Client-side only, so no server contract moves and lagging plugin caches keep
working. The tags are Claude Code protocol constructs, identical on every
install — instance-agnostic under rule 115.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 18:45:13 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 7e653e16dc docs(ci): jq is not a CI requirement and should not be promoted (#4107)
ci-requirements.md is the document that drives promoting a per-job dep into
the ci-python image, and it still recorded jq as installed in the plugin job
and "load-bearing for the smoke test specifically", on the grounds that every
hook opened `command -v jq || exit 0` and the test would otherwise pass while
exercising nothing.

That was the tail wagging the dog. The hooks ship to users; jq is absent by
default on macOS, the Debian/Ubuntu slim images, Alpine and most CI
containers, and a machine without it got no context, no rules, no prior art
and no process sync in silence. The answer was to remove the dependency, not
to install it harder.

Recorded as a promotion the entry now argues AGAINST rather than deleted: the
next person to read this file should find out why jq is absent, not merely
that it is.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 12:24:37 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4bfa0cbbc0 fix(plugin): stop CI installing the jq the hooks no longer use (#4107)
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Three loose ends from a49e7ed, all found by CI or by re-reading it.

TWO TESTS PINNED THE jq SYNTAX, not the word `jq`, so grepping the suite for
the tool name missed them: test_write_path_trigger asserted the literal filter
strings `(.note_ids // []) - (.sync_note_ids // [])` and `(.rule_ids // [])[]?`
appear in the hook. Re-spelled with the readers that replaced them. The claim
each makes is unchanged — that the reuse and sync channels keep their own
state file, their own query parameter and their own write-back.

CI STILL INSTALLED jq, TWICE. The "Install jq for hook execution tests" step
existed because those tests skipped rather than failed without it; the Plugin
hooks job installed it alongside shellcheck for the same reason. Removing a
dependency from the product and leaving CI to install it anyway means the
smoke tests never run under the condition they exist to assert. Both gone —
the hook tests now run on a bare image.

`awk 'END { print $0 }'` IS UNDEFINED IN POSIX. gawk retains the last record
in END and mawk does too, but it is not guaranteed, and reaching for a
non-portable idiom inside the change whose entire purpose is portability is
the same mistake one layer down. Now `{ last = $0 } END { if (NR) print last }`.
Verified it still selects the same start line on a real transcript.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 12:23:42 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 a49e7ed2af fix(plugin): the hooks need no jq and no tac (#4107)
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Every hook opened `command -v jq >/dev/null 2>&1 || exit 0`, so on a machine
without jq the operator got no session context, no rules, no prior art and no
process sync — and not one word saying why, because `exit 0` is
indistinguishable from "ran fine, nothing to say". jq is absent by default on
macOS, on the Debian/Ubuntu slim images, on Alpine and in most CI containers.
That is not a prerequisite to document; it is the plugin handing its own
packaging problem to whoever installs it.

`tac` was worse: GNU-only, so the prior-art hook's enclosing-definition arm
did nothing at all on every Mac, silently, from the day it shipped. It is not
replaced but removed — scribe_defs judges each line independently, so
extracting forward and taking `tail -1` is the same answer as reversing and
taking the head, and it drops the early-exit `head` that #4042 was filed for.

No server contract changed, so a lagging plugin cache keeps working.

  scribe_json.awk   JSON -> IDX<TAB>PATH<TAB>VALUE. Two modes: `whole` for an
                    event or a response body, `lines` for a transcript, where
                    an unparseable record is dropped and the rest still read —
                    the `map(try fromjson catch empty)` the jq program opened
                    with. Arrays also report their LENGTH at `[#]`, which is
                    what keeps "zero notes" distinct from "no answer" (#2932).
  scribe_turn.awk   the turn-bounding program, replacing the thirty lines of
                    jq in the Stop hook.
  scribe_defs.sh    scribe_json_flat / _pick / _list / _len / _list_minus read,
                    scribe_json_out writes the envelope (five copies of one
                    shape, gone), scribe_urlenc replaces `jq -sRr '@uri'`.

Percent-encoding goes through `od -tu1` rather than an awk character loop on
purpose: awk's idea of a character follows the locale, so gawk reads an
accented letter as one and mawk as two, and an encoder built on substr() would
emit a different URL depending on which awk is installed. Encoding is defined
on bytes. Verified byte-identical to `jq -sRr '@uri'`.

Measured, not assumed. The per-event path costs 8ms against jq's 3ms. The
transcript path was 70x slower until two fixes: the Stop hook now finds where
the turn starts with a fixed-string grep before parsing (a needle carrying
unescaped quotes cannot occur inside a JSON string, so it matches only at a
record's top level — checked against a full JSON parse of a 27MB transcript:
152 prompt records, 152 matches, no misses, no extras), and the parser reads
each token out of a 1024-byte window instead of copying the rest of the buffer
per token, which was quadratic in line length on the 400KB tool results a
transcript carries.

Differential-tested against the jq program it replaces over 724 windows cut
from three real transcripts — 724 identical, 0 mismatched, 45 of them
exercising a real task close and a real reply. That sweep is what caught
`scribe_turn.awk` never setting FS, which truncated every multi-word reply at
its first space and was invisible to a test whose replies were all empty.

check_plugin.py's `jq -R` lint becomes a guard against either binary coming
back, and three smoke checks lose their `shutil.which("jq")` skip. jq is not
in `ci-python` either, so those three announced a skip on every CI run and had
never once run there: removing the dependency from the product also closed a
permanent hole in its verification. They pass now across all ten hooks.

tests/test_hook_json_reader.py is a differential against Python's `json` over
nested objects, arrays, unicode, escapes, control characters, empty cases and
a value longer than the token window, plus the envelope, the encoder and the
turn analyzer. 139 cases.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-20 12:20:45 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 97867d47ff fix(telemetry): the reading project survives a backup (#4196)
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Run 7068 failed two tests on a4aae97, and the second was a real bug the
guard caught before it shipped.

THE COLUMN GUARD (#3182) was right. `note_usage_events` excludes only
`id` from backup, so telemetry IS exported — and a new column that the
serialiser never learned about would have restored as null on every row.
That is the exact failure #3182 was built from, where nine columns
vanished from `notes` the same way: added to the model and the migration,
which fail loudly, and never to the serialiser, which fails silently.

So `project_id` is exported, not excluded, via the one `_usage_event_rows`
builder both exporters share.

The importer re-maps it through `project_id_map` and DEGRADES rather than
skipping. `code_shape_events` drops a row whose project will not map,
because a shape event without its project says nothing; a usage event is
not like that. The project is optional by design and null already means
"not reported", so an unmappable one restores as unreported. Dropping it
would lose a real pull and deflate the pull-through this table exists to
report.

BACKUP_VERSION deliberately unchanged: the suite states that column
additions do not bump it, only new sections do, and a third test asserts
the current number.

The second failure was mine and smaller — test_record_pulled_writes_a_
single_row compares exact dicts, so it now expects the null project. I
had claimed these assertions were key-based; they are not, and I had
read a summary line rather than the assertion.

Added an import-side guard while here. The column family checks the
EXPORT side only, so a column can be exported faithfully and dropped on
the way back in — a restore that reports success and has quietly lost a
dimension. No general guard for that direction exists yet; this covers
the column added here and names the gap for whoever builds the general
one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 23:32:54 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 a4aae974a2 feat(telemetry): a usage event records which project the reader was in (#4196, #3735)
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`RetrievalLog` has carried `project_id` since it existed, so "this record
was SURFACED on project B" was always answerable. `note_usage_events`
had none, so "this record was OPENED on project B" was not — and the two
cannot be joined to recover it, because there is deliberately no session
identity server-side. NoteUsageEvent's own docstring rules that out.

That gap sat exactly on the question milestone 385 exists to answer. A
lesson's whole claim is that it reaches a session on a project it was not
written on, and step 8's acceptance is "retrieved on a different project
AND opened". Each half was answerable; the conjunction was not.

WHICH project, because the name is ambiguous and the wrong reading makes
the column useless: it is the project the READER was in, never the one
the record belongs to. The record's own project is already on the note;
copying it here would answer a question nobody asked while looking like
it answered this one.

The surfacing half is free — every arm already holds the scope it just
searched, so auto_inject, lesson_slot, the write-path arms and
enter_project now record it. process_skill_sync does not and should not:
it installs every Process the operator can reach, which is not a
project-scoped question, so a project there would be a fiction.

The pull half needs the caller, since a getter knows only what it was
handed. The five single-record getters take `project_id: int = 0` and
pass it through, following the convention `search` and `create_*`
already set. Null stays an ordinary answer meaning "not reported" — a
pull with no project is still a pull and still counts toward dead
weight; it simply cannot speak to transfer. The four REST detail views
report none for now: a human opening a record in a browser is a
different event from an agent recalling one, and #2245 left that
asymmetry deliberately undecided.

Guarded the way #2245 and #2476 taught: by source inspection, because a
parameter that was never threaded through changes no return value and
shows up only as a column that is mysteriously always null. Three
guards — the signature, the pass-through, and the arms — plus the
can-fail test rule 167 asks for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 23:26:55 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 26a757ecfe feat(lessons): a lesson is yours to keep current too (#4195)
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The lesson kind shipped with every mechanism for growing and nothing
telling a session to use them. `learned_from` is a list on purpose, the
dedup gate hands back an existing id rather than minting a twin, and
`update_lesson` already names re-keying a bad trigger as the edit that
pays most. None of that was reachable as a habit.

The exclusivity claim was the bug. The skill said "a preference is the
one record you keep current yourself", and by naming only preferences it
put lessons outside the habit. That sentence is now "a preference is
yours to keep current", which says the same thing about preferences
without saying anything false about lessons.

Beside it, a paragraph on what growing a lesson means: another incident
added to what taught it, a claim stated more exactly, or a trigger
re-keyed to the situation that really fired. Written as a practice
rather than a prohibition (rule 165) — the reader is named as the one
person placed to judge the trigger, because they are standing in the
situation it claims to name.

`get_lesson` carries the same prompt at the moment it bites: a session
reading a lesson inside the situation it names is the only reader who
can tell whether the trigger is keyed to what actually fired.

The guidance-ownership registry gains the topic and re-points the
preference topic's statement, since the phrase it pinned is the sentence
this change rewrites — the module asks for exactly that, in the same
commit. No index marker: the index names session-start reflexes and this
one fires mid-work, so `_INSTRUCTIONS` stays at 1998/2000.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 23:17:20 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1c438b27e2 fix(lessons): deleteLesson matches apiDelete's contract (#3734)
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CI 7059's typecheck, two errors on one line: `apiDelete` returns
`Promise<void>` and takes no type argument. I had given it the response body's
shape, which it discards.

Matched to how snippets delete, rather than adding a second delete helper to
carry the batch id — no caller has wanted it, and the second helper would be
the duplication rather than the feature.

Everything else in the UI batch typechecked clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 14:15:08 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 95dc25eaab feat(lessons): a lesson is readable, writable and browsable by a human (#3734)
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Step 7's actual UI. Before this the frontend had zero lesson code — the kind
existed for agents only, which is rule 27 failing.

THE EDITOR ASKS FOR THE TRIGGER BY NAME, and leads with it. Three fields —
the trigger, the claim, the detail — never one markdown box. That is the
design step 1 settled, and the evidence is blunt: the snippet corpus carries
a trigger on every record with no guard anywhere, because a service composes
the title from a named parameter. What is at 100% is a named structured
field, not a writer remembering a convention. The trigger gets the most room,
its own explanation, and a save button that refuses without it and says why.

The form shows the composed title live, so the writer is agreeing to a
document they can read rather than one assembled out of sight. A 409 from the
duplicate gate is rendered as the record that already covers the moment, with
a link to improve it and an explicit override — not as a failure.

THE BROWSE VOCABULARY GAINS THE KIND, which #3161 warned this step not to get
wrong: a facet chip, a badge label, and routing to `/lessons/:id` rather than
the note editor, which cannot edit a trigger. The badge is neutral alongside
snippet and process — a hue would make the softest record in the corpus look
like the loudest, next to a rule that actually binds.

BOTH DIRECTIONS OF THE PROVENANCE. The detail page resolves `learned_from` to
titles rather than bare ids, because "#4181" tells a reader nothing about
whether it is worth opening. And `LessonsTaughtPanel` answers the reverse on
the record's own page — the direction the task body calls the one that gets
forgotten. It has no author to type it, which is exactly why it tends never
to get built. A component, not markup in the task editor, so the same panel
mounts on any record a lesson can cite instead of being written a second time
(#3207). Silent when empty: most records taught no lesson, and a panel that
says "None yet" everywhere is one people learn to skip.

GLOBAL-BY-DEFAULT IS MADE LEGIBLE. A lesson meeting you on a project it was
not written on reads as a bug unless the page says otherwise, so the origin
line says it as a property of the kind rather than as an apology.

Design system tokens throughout; no new raw hex. `--fs-error` rather than
`--fs-danger` — 31 uses against 1.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 14:11:39 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d36d68a20f feat(lessons): the REST door a human can actually reach (#3734)
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Step 7, part two. Milestone 385 built the lesson kind through the MCP tools,
which is the agent's surface. The Vue app speaks REST, so a lesson was a
record a person could not create, read, edit or retire — rule 27 failing at
the door rather than in the view.

`/api/lessons` now offers list, create, read, update and trash, plus
`/api/lessons/taught-by/<id>` — the reverse of `learned_from`, which the task
body calls the direction that gets forgotten and arguably the more useful one:
a reader opening an old issue wants to know what was learned from it, and
until now the relation was only navigable from the lesson's side.

`lessons_taught_by` reads `data[taught_by]` through `path_exists`, the same
jsonpath dialect the snippet location lookup uses, so both reverse lookups hit
the GIN index (0070) the same way rather than scanning bodies. Share-aware via
`readable_notes_clause`: it renders beside a record the caller can already
see, so a lesson shared with them belongs there exactly as their own does.

THE TRIGGER IS REFUSED WHEN EMPTY, at create and at update. This is the one
place the door is not a thin wrapper, and it is deliberate: the service will
store a triggerless lesson quite happily — it saves, reads correctly in every
listing, and never surfaces. There is nothing to notice afterwards, because it
looks exactly like a lesson that works. Better to refuse it than to hand back
a record that looks finished. The refusal says why, so the next reader does
not take it for a nag and delete it.

`lesson_to_dict` moves into the service and the MCP tool's `_to_dict` becomes
an alias for it. Both doors now return one shape — a payload spelled once per
door answers the two of them differently the first time a field is added — and
both compose through `services/lessons.py`, so a lesson written from the web
ranks identically to one written by an agent. The document IS what ranks, so
that parity is the whole reason the door is thin.

The dedup gate matches the MCP path: two lessons under one trigger compete in
a single ranked list for one reserved slot, so a duplicate here displaces
rather than merely clutters.

NOT DONE YET: this is the door, not the UI. #3734 stays in_progress until the
Vue views, the router entries, the Knowledge browse badge and the both-ways
sources panel exist — rule 27 is about the operator being able to touch it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 14:02:57 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1252d0e305 fix(lessons): a derived mirror survives the generic note door, by kind not by name (#3734)
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Groundwork for step 7, and a data-integrity fix in its own right.

Two kinds keep a queryable mirror in `notes.data` derived from their body:
snippets and, since milestone 385, lessons. Every read prefers the mirror —
deliberately, because parsing markdown to answer what an index can answer is
how a hot path rots. So a write that moves the body must move the mirror.

#3128 found that hole for snippets and plugged it with a hard-coded
`if note.note_type == SNIPPET_NOTE_TYPE`. The plug was correct and did not
generalise: lessons arrived with the same design and none of the protection,
which is precisely the "don't add a fourth instance" defect #3734 was told to
avoid.

The cost is higher for a lesson. A stale snippet mirror reports the wrong
path. A stale lesson mirror reports the wrong TRIGGER, and the trigger is the
whole retrieval story — the lesson goes on firing for the situation it used
to name while displaying the one it now names. Silent, and confident.

So `update_note` now dispatches through `_mirror_recomposers()`, a
note_type -> recomposer table. A kind with a derived mirror is covered by
registering it, not by someone remembering to widen an if.

`lessons.recompose_data` is the lesson's entry. It recovers the subject with
`embeddings.untrigger_title` — new, and deliberately placed beside the join it
inverts rather than in the caller that wanted it, because a separator spelled
in two files is a separator that will one day be changed in one of them
(#3207). `TRIGGER_SEP` is now the one spelling, and `parse_snippet_fields`
uses it too; it had the third copy inline.

The two inverses stay distinct on purpose: a snippet partitions at the first
separator (its name is a symbol), a lesson strips an exact known suffix (its
subject may legitimately contain a dash). Different algorithms, one constant,
so they cannot disagree about where the seam is.

Provenance is DROPPED when the body drops it, which is the opposite call from
a snippet's `verification` — that is carried because it was never in the body
to delete. The body is the authority; carrying a value the reader just removed
is the failure the recompose exists to prevent.

Tests: test_snippet_mirror_generic_door.py becomes
test_derived_mirror_generic_door.py, since the concern is now plural. The
registry property is asserted directly (every kind with a mirror is in the
table; the dispatch names no kind inline), plus the lesson cases and the
join/inverse round-trip. `fake_lesson` moves to tests/helpers.py — it existed
in test_lesson_surfacing.py and a second copy was about to be written — and
gains the explicit `None`s `fake_snippet` carries, because update_note reads
`verify_with` and a MagicMock is truthy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 13:58:54 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1ade956cd5 chore(plugin): mint 2026.09.19.1614 for the using-scribe force-axis edit
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The five-answer change touched plugin/skills/using-scribe/SKILL.md, and CI
7052 caught the manifest still reading 2026.09.18.1606. Per #2209 the
marketplace clone self-updates but the cache that actually executes only
refreshes on a version change, so without this the new guidance reaches the
repo and stops there.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 12:14:50 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 0ed8e86cd5 feat(instructions): a rule proposal has five answers, and three of them route (#3733, #3896)
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Step 6 of both milestone 385 (lessons) and 399 (preferences). #3896 asked for
the fourth and fifth answers in one pass, because two people each adding one
branch to a three-way distinction produce a list that does not read as a set.

create_rule now opens by asking what kind of thing is being held, with one
question that sorts it — what happens if someone doesn't do this? Something
breaks, a boundary is crossed: a rule. It gets done a way the operator didn't
want: a preference. They lose time rediscovering it: a lesson. The closing
question grew the two matching answers, and they are named as first-class
outcomes rather than places a proposal lands when it fails. An observation
that turns out to be a lesson has been routed, not dropped.

Stated as a practice, not a prohibition (rule 165). #3557's first cut opened
"NOT YOURS TO CALL UNPROMPTED" and cost the noticing; the wanted behaviour
here is still more proposals, and what changes is only which door they go
through.

create_note says the same from its side, so routing does not depend on having
opened create_rule first — and its existing rule test ("a mistake, not merely
uninformed") turned out to name the lesson exactly. create_lesson names the
fifth kind so the set is complete from every door. create_project_rule's
citation of the loop names five answers, since it cites rather than repeats.

The force axis has one owner (decision #4027): using-scribe states all three
strengths, the sorting question, that updating a preference mid-work is the
normal case, and that preferences shape how work is done and never what gets
recorded. _INSTRUCTIONS carries the pointer — "Rules bind; preferences guide
and you keep them current; lessons inform." It had 14 characters of headroom,
so the clause is paid for by trimming atmosphere from three other lines; 1998
of 2000 now.

Guards: the proposal-loop test learns the preference branch, the lesson
branch and the force question, on both rule surfaces; guidance-ownership gains
the force-axis topic (shared with the docstrings, for the moment a proposal is
actually written) and the preference-scope topic; a new guard pins that the
index names all three strengths and who keeps the middle one current, with its
can-fail case being the omission that actually happens — a kind added to the
product while the index still describes the corpus that came before it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 12:12:14 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1fcfd47ab6 fix(startup): a slow database costs seconds, not the instance (#4181)
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On 2026-09-19 a host storage stall made one Postgres checkpoint of 14
buffers take 281 seconds against a 1.3-second baseline. The app restarted
into the tail of it, `get_maintenance_hour()` — the first DB read in
`before_serving` — hung with no deadline, Hypercorn killed the worker at
its 60-second lifespan timeout, and nothing retries a failed lifespan. A
five-minute disk hiccup became a three-hour outage that only a human
restart could clear. Every MCP call returned 405, which reads like a
routing fault and was nothing of the kind: nothing was serving.

Three changes, none of which prevent a stall — they stop a transient one
becoming a permanent one.

1. THE STARTUP READ IS BOUNDED (rule 156). `get_maintenance_hour` already
   answered `_DEFAULT_HOUR` for a value it could not parse; a database
   that will not answer in three seconds is the same class of "no usable
   value here". The failure is now a WARNING naming the symptom — the
   breadcrumb whose absence meant this was only diagnosable from
   Postgres's own log — and a default run-hour, instead of the app.

2. THE BACKFILL NO LONGER RACES STARTUP. Its comment said it "never
   blocks the server from accepting requests": true of requests, false of
   startup, because the task began while `before_serving` was still
   running and competed for the same pool. Both of the incident's
   cancelled statements were in flight together. It now waits on a flag
   released on the hook's way out — in a `finally`, never after the work
   (rule 157), because an undeadlined wait is only safe when the wake-up
   cannot be missed.

3. THE ENGINE CANNOT WAIT FOREVER TO CONNECT. asyncpg's default is 60s,
   the whole lifespan budget spent before a query is sent. `command_timeout`
   is deliberately NOT set alongside it and the comment says why: it would
   apply to every statement, and this app runs long ones on purpose.

tests/test_startup_survives_a_slow_database.py asserts the shape rather
than the stall: a read that never returns still yields an hour, the
warning names the symptom, a healthy read is unaffected, the backfill
does no work before release, the flag is released even when startup
raises, and the engine's connect args carry a deadline but no blanket
statement timeout.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 10:50:57 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 3075de19eb feat(lessons): a lesson reaches the moment it applies, and says it binds nothing (#3732)
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WHICH ARM — the two note arms, and no new one.

`write_path` filters kinds, so a lesson was not outranked there but
unreachable, which is #3702's shape: an arm that never had the candidate
reports a healthy bar. It now asks for lessons alongside snippets and
issues. The founding example of the kind is a lesson about a code shape,
and this is the arm that fires when code is written.

`auto_inject` does not filter kinds, so lessons were already candidates —
but scoped to the bound project, which for a kind whose whole claim is
that it transfers is the same silence. Both arms now pass
`include_global_kinds` (#3730).

WHOSE BUDGET — a reserved slot in the prompt menu, none on the write path.

The step's premise needs a correction: the notes menu and the rule hints
are separate functions with separate budgets, so a line reserved here
displaces a note, never a rule. (`RULEHINT_LIMIT` is also 5, not 1, since
#4102 made it a default rather than a cap.)

The trade taken: a note crowded out is a lost convenience and a rule
crowded out still fires at an act arm, but a lesson crowded out is the
feature failing — a lesson exists only to be met at the moment it
applies, so the arm IS its delivery and the loss is total and silent.
That is `preference_slot`'s argument, and the rarity is `reuse_slot`'s.
It buys position, never a lower bar, and it EXTENDS rather than evicting:
a displaced hit sits in the general search's own log row, and evicting it
would make two tables disagree about one call (#3668, #379).

No slot on the write path: that arm fires before every Write and Edit,
where a guaranteed extra line is a guaranteed extra interruption, and its
field is already just snippets, issues and lessons rather than the whole
corpus.

`lesson_slot` logs its own retrieval and its own surfacing from the first
deploy, and the general contest stays open to the kind — otherwise "the
slot earns its line" would be true by construction.

THE VOICE — "they don't always have to be followed".

The menu's register is already the non-binding one. What it lacked is
that a lesson reads as one more title in a list of material when it is
advice someone paid for. One clause, in the header, only when a lesson is
on the menu: weigh it, use your judgement, it is not a rule and binds
nothing. It deliberately does not borrow the rule arms' "before deciding
it does not apply", and a guard asserts that phrase never appears.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-19 00:46:20 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 31b478b7ac fix(dedup): the two new report kinds say what to DO about a duplicate (#4164)
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`_REPORT_KINDS` gained `lesson` and `process` without `_KIND_SUGGESTION`
gaining either, so the report would have listed pairs with no advice —
and the suggestion is the report's point. CI's per-kind guard caught it.

Lesson: read both triggers first (a lesson is retrieved by the situation
it names, so alike insights under different triggers are two lessons);
same trigger means one lesson learned twice, so fold the `taught_by`
union into the survivor and delete the other. Process: a process arrives
as a skill, so a duplicate runs the wrong procedure rather than merely
cluttering a list — keep the one in use, fold the missing steps, delete
the loser.

The guard now asserts the property per kind rather than spot-checking
two: no non-snippet suggestion may propose merge_snippets, so a sixth
kind inherits the bar without anyone editing the test.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 18:39:25 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 6a2476addb feat(records): every typed kind gets all five doors and a duplicate report (#4164)
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Arising from #3731, which shipped a lesson with three of five tools and logged
the rest rather than widening its own scope. The operator's framing on reading
that: each kind deserves CRUD functions and to show up in the search and report
functions. So this fixes the property, not the two instances.

WHAT WAS MISSING FOR A LESSON: no delete, no list, and no duplicate report.
`delete_lesson` is the #2250 situation exactly — the trash is kind-agnostic so
`delete_note` always reached a lesson, but nothing said so, and a kind whose own
tools offer create/read/update reads as one you cannot retire. `list_lessons` is
the only way to ask what has been learned at all: `get_lesson` needs an id you
already have, and semantic search returns what resembles a query, never the set.

APPLYING THE RULE FOUND THE SAME REPORT GAP FOR PROCESSES, which have had full
CRUD for months and have never been in `_REPORT_KINDS` either. Both are in now,
each compared only against its own kind.

The lesson report default is 0.90 — the general semantic floor, deliberately
BELOW its own write-path bar of 0.96. The gate is permissive on purpose so it
does not refuse two genuinely different lessons whose triggers read alike, and
that tolerance is precisely what wants reviewing later, so the report looks at
the band the gate was told to let through. Safe there and not at the gate,
because a report proposes and the operator picks where the gate blocks a write.

A BUG CAUGHT BEFORE IT SHIPPED: `list_lessons` first read the trigger from
`it["data"]`, which `_note_to_item` does not carry — it projects named keys off
the mirror (`language`, `verification`) rather than the column. Every row would
have listed an empty trigger, which on a kind whose whole point is the trigger
is the failure looking like the feature. `when_to_apply` is now projected there
beside the others, so every listing surface gets it, including step 7's UI.

The guard asserts the PROPERTY rather than the instances: for each typed kind,
all five tools exist, are actually offered by register(), are classified for
auth, and the kind has a duplicate report. Derived from the kinds themselves, so
a fourth inherits the bar. A per-tool test cannot catch a missing tool, which is
why four steps of milestone 385 went green over this.

`find_duplicate_records` now validates against `_REPORT_KINDS` instead of its
own literal — the second copy is what would have refused a kind the service
already supported.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 18:35:13 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1d201d2ff7 feat(lessons): a lesson can be written, and it keeps every incident that taught it (#3731)
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Milestone 385 step 4 — the write path.

ITS OWN TOOL MODULE, not create_note(note_type="lesson"), on the snippet and
process precedent and for the reason that precedent exists: a kind whose value
depends on one field being filled needs a door that ASKS for that field by
name. create_note would take a lesson through a generic body parameter and the
trigger — the whole of why a lesson is findable — would be something the writer
had to know to include.

THE TRIGGER IS REQUIRED, refused rather than flagged. Step 1 left the choice
open. Refusing is right for the same reason create_rule makes enforcement the
deciding question: a lesson with no trigger is not a weaker lesson, it is a
note that will never surface, and nothing downstream can tell the difference —
it saves, reads correctly in every listing, and is silently absent from the one
moment it was written for. A flag is a warning nobody is present to read; the
write path is where the writer still is. The message says SYMPTOM, because
"required" alone produces a topic where a situation was wanted.

The docstring carries the distinction this milestone exists to fix, in a line a
reader can apply: the difference between a lesson and a rule is FORCE, not
importance. If ignoring it would be a mistake it is a rule and needs the
operator's yes; if ignoring it just means someone re-derives it the slow way it
is a lesson, and nobody is bound.

CARDINALITY: a LIST, in notes.data under `taught_by`. The founding example
generalised three incidents into one claim about failure classes no CI lane can
see — generalising across incidents is the shape a good lesson HAS, and
arose_from_id holds one, so a single id keeps the first and drops two while
reading as complete. It lives in `data` rather than a join table for the reason
decision #4157 put the trigger there: a table would settle, for every note kind
at once, whether provenance is multi-valued — a question nothing has measured.
`arose_from_id` is filled only when there is exactly ONE source, because every
surface that renders it renders it as THE origin, and one of three would make
those surfaces state something false.

THE DUPLICATE GATE, which step 4 asked to check: a lesson is judged at a bar
ABOVE the sibling band, not the general 0.90. #2518 measured deliberately
parallel variants at 0.92 on a document that is mostly prose about the thing,
which is exactly a lesson's shape now — so at 0.90 two genuinely different
lessons about one area ("CI cannot see this class of failure") would refuse each
other. Its own constant rather than reusing the snippet's: the two are separate
facts that coincide today, and this number is inherited from a structurally
analogous corpus rather than measured on lessons, of which there are none yet.

Follows canon #2846 including the third registration point it names and this
change would otherwise have missed: get_lesson is in server._READ_ONLY_TOOLS
and the two writers in _WRITE_TOOLS, which test_mcp_auth requires.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 18:19:28 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 1361ed7200 feat(lessons): the document shape is the stored record, and it travels (#3730)
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Milestone 385 step 3 — the step where the kind either works or is cosmetic.

THE DOCUMENT, and why there is no `lesson_document()` beside `rule_document()`
in embeddings. The step expected one. The difference is where the sharp shape
LIVES. A rule keeps its trigger in a column and its title is a plain name, so
`{title} — {trigger}` has to be synthesised at embed time and exists nowhere
else. A snippet — the only sharp record in the corpus by #2485's measurement,
0.153 top-to-second against 0.010–0.023 — gets there the other way: its STORED
title is already the join and its stored body already opens with the trigger,
so the ordinary `title\nbody` join IS the sharp document. Step 1 chose the
snippet route and step 2 built it, so `lessons.lesson_document` composes what
is STORED and the generic chunker does the rest.

The consequence the step asked about: `chunk_document` is untouched, so
CHUNKER_VERSION does not move and NOTHING re-embeds. The step's "Re-embed"
section describes a change this design does not make.

THE NARRATIVE stays in the body, departing from the step's instruction to keep
it out. `rule_document` excludes `why` because long dated narrative made
sixteen dev-logs land on the centroid of "development" — but that finding
predates chunking (#280). A body over budget is now split, and every chunk is
prefixed with the title, which for a lesson carries the trigger. The story
occupies its own vectors instead of averaging itself into the trigger's, and
each of those is still anchored to when the lesson applies. A guard asserts
exactly that. Holding the story out would cost the reader the only part that
explains the insight, to buy a sharpness the chunker already provides.

GLOBAL IN THE SEARCH is the real new code: `GLOBAL_NOTE_TYPES` and
`include_global_kinds` on `semantic_search_notes`, widening the PROJECT filter
alone. Off by default, because two callers depend on that filter holding — the
near-duplicate gate compares a record only against its own project on purpose,
and a globally visible kind there would let a lesson block an unrelated note's
create on a project its author never touched. It composes with `note_type`
rather than overriding it, so narrowing to snippets does not quietly acquire
lessons, and it changes nothing about the ACL: `notes_visibility_clause` still
gates every row.

Wired into the explicit MCP search only — the operator asked, and there is no
budget to spend. The unasked-for injection arms are step 5's subject (#3732)
and the legibility of a lesson appearing on a foreign project is step 7's
(#3734), so neither is turned on here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 16:13:15 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 d127d48c14 fix(tests): the browse vocabulary guard names the fourth kind (#3729)
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CI 7016. `test_non_task_facets_are_the_note_types_and_only_those` pins the
non-task vocabulary as a literal set, so adding `lesson` to `_FACETS` turned
it red — the guard working, not breaking. It stays a literal: derived from
_FACETS it would assert nothing, and rule 167 wants a guard that can fail.

The representative corpus had no lesson row, so `lesson` was reaching only
the two tests that iterate FACET_TYPES and never the one that asserts each
facet selects EXACTLY its own rows. It has one now, which is what pins the
half that matters: a lesson is not picked up by the Notes facet despite
both being non-task records.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 15:34:17 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 0ab15d7d80 feat(lessons): the lesson kind, and one join for every trigger title (#3729)
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Milestone 385 step 2, implementing decision #4157 from the step-1 spike.

The kind: `note_type='lesson'`, a note findable by WHEN IT APPLIES rather
than by what it is about. The trigger lives in `notes.data.when_to_apply`,
mirrored into the title and the head of the body — the shape snippets
already use, and the reason nothing re-embeds: chunk_document is untouched,
so CHUNKER_VERSION does not move.

NO MIGRATION, and the step assumed there would be one. `note_type` carries
no CHECK — only `task_kind` does (0056, 0065). Migration 0036 added it as
plain Text with a server default and nothing has gated it since, so rule 36
has no whitelist to expand and #3128's failure mode (a value the database
refuses) cannot arise for this column. The vocabulary that actually decides
what a reader can reach is services.knowledge._FACETS, which since #3161 is
one table feeding the door's validation, the counts and both dialects of
the type filter — so the kind lands there in a single edit.

ONE JOIN, not a fourth copy. `{subject} — {trigger}` had three
implementations: rule_document, snippets.compose_title, and this step
needed another. #3207 records what that costs, so the join moves to
embeddings.trigger_title beside embedding_text and all three delegate.
Behaviour is unchanged for rules and snippets; the guard calls each through
its own public name, so a re-implementation fails it.

The #3163 bill is stated in the service docstring rather than left to be
inferred: versions, supersession, trash, the share ACL, tags, project and
System tagging, chunked embeddings and the duplicate gate are all
inherited; status/task_kind/milestone_id and recurrence are not, and
verify_with/expires_when are available but outside the kind's contract.
The status cell is the one that matters — `is_task` IS `status is not
None`, so a lesson that acquired one would become a task.

The integration guard asserts the WRITE rather than the constraint: it
holds whether or not note_type is ever gated, and goes red only if it is
gated without this value.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 15:30:49 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 7038e41ec7 feat(rules): preferences are writable, and their drift arrives (#3895)
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Milestone 399 step 5. Steps 1-4 put preferences into the backend: a kind
column, an inverted write path, a third register in the injected block, a
delivery slot. Nothing the operator could touch. Rule 27 forbids leaving it
there, and here it matters more than usual, because the UI is the only
guard against the risk the milestone named up front — an agent misreads one
session, rewrites a preference, and follows the rewritten version forever
while the operator never sees the moment it changed.

Four things ship.

A preference is DISTINGUISHABLE. `kind` reaches the client (the server has
always sent it in rule_brief) and a preference carries a chip. Force is the
one thing a list of instructions must not leave the reader to infer, and a
row that renders identically to a rule teaches the opposite of both facts
about a preference: it does not bind, and a session may rewrite it.

A preference is WRITABLE. The editor gains the kind as a first-class choice
with the test beside it — what happens when someone does not do this — and
says plainly, when preference is chosen, that sessions rewrite these
without asking and every rewrite is kept.

DRIFT ARRIVES. `GET /api/rules/drift` returns one row per rewritten
preference carrying its latest rewrite: what it said, what it says now, and
the record named by `arose_from_id` that taught the change. Both texts ride
along so the list shows the diff without a call per row. The new pane sits
beside the staleness sweep, because drift belongs to no one rulebook, and
it answers a question the operator would not have thought to ask.

REVERSION IS ONE ACTION, and this is the carve-out worth arguing with.
Milestone 323 refused a one-click restore for rules — "a binding
instruction should not be revertible in one click", because a silent revert
erases the only record of why the rewrite happened. That reasoning turns on
the rewrite being the operator's own decision. A preference's is not: the
agent makes it mid-work without asking, so reverting is a veto over someone
else's edit rather than an undo of your own, and a veto costing more than a
shrug is not supervision. The route refuses anything but a preference (409),
and nothing is erased: the restore goes through update_rule, so it snapshots
too and the history GAINS the revert. An integration test pins that, because
it is the whole basis for the exception.

Tested against real Postgres — every claim is about which rows come back
and in what order, which a stand-in session cannot judge.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 12:39:13 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 94ecb633a0 fix(tests): the counts query selects four columns, not three (#4154)
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The new fixtures fed (milestone_id, status, count) and the query also
carries max(updated_at), which last_touched_at is computed from. Six
tests in the new module died unpacking it; the product path was never
reached, and the rest of the suite was green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 12:11:39 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5c6175ad97 feat(placement): a record you only cite carries its status (#4154)
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Step 1 made placement cheap for a task whose status CHANGES: create_task
and update_task return where it sits, and the report is written from
that. It did nothing for a task a reply merely cites.

This milestone's own step-6 review reported "#4014 is the open step of
milestone 409". #4014 had been done for four days; the open step was
#4015. The id did not come from a read — it came from a retrieval hint,
which carries an id, a kind and a title and says nothing about status,
while list_milestones said "8 of 9" and would not say which one. The
gap was there to be filled and the nearest-looking id filled it.

Two surfaces, one principle: the status arrives with the id.

1. get_project_milestone_summaries gains next_step — the earliest open
   step, {id, title, status} or None — carried through _BRIEF_FIELDS to
   enter_project, get_project and list_milestones. One extra flat query
   for the whole batch, so #2384's fan-out does not come back.

   OPEN_STEP_STATUSES moves to services/milestones.py and placement.py
   imports it; both surfaces now answer "what is next" and must not
   drift on what counts as open. Both step queries take the same
   readable_notes_clause (rule 78), so a row cannot name a step its own
   progress numbers exclude.

2. _record_kind renders a task's status: [task (done)], [issue (todo)].
   A finished step and an open one read identically before, which is
   exactly the line the misreport was taken from. Only tasks — is_task
   IS status-is-not-None on the model, so there is no fallback branch.

reporting-back gains the practice, owned and registered in the guidance
ownership table: a record you only mention is a record to read.

The guards are structural and each fails on the regression it names:
the query count is asserted rather than the payload shape, and the two
surfaces' agreement is pinned on the rendered ORDER BY, since a mocked
session hands back whatever order the test chose.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 12:08:00 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 b5df9d6dca feat(plugin): a reply's sections are chosen, not filled (#4153)
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Milestone 409 step 6 measured the scaffold on live sessions and found its
two halves disagreeing: adherence passed and the read test failed.
Completion replies carried every section the table asks for and were
still hard to read.

The cause was in the skill, not in compliance with it. It said to pick a
kind of reply "then fill its sections... keep them even when one is
short", which is an instruction to complete a form, and nothing anywhere
set a ceiling. A faithful reply and an unreadable one were the same
reply.

Four changes to the discipline around the scaffold. The categories and
their sections are untouched.

- Sections are what to consider including, not a form to complete. A
  section answering a standing question ("does anything need me?") is
  always answered, even with "nothing"; a section that explains earns its
  place only when it changes what the operator does. Otherwise it belongs
  in the record's log, where it is available and not in the way.
- Write the shortest reply that carries the answer, with named exceptions
  so this cannot be read as "always be terse".
- "Needs you" takes BOTH tests: theirs to decide, AND work is waiting on
  it. A question answerable by reading something or taking an available
  measurement is work not yet done, not a request — settle it, say which
  way you went, and leave them free to overrule.
- A decision already made gets acted on. Re-arguing a settled question
  reads as contradicting yourself rather than as being careful, and costs
  the operator the decision twice.

"Before sending" gains a second pass for what can go, since the existing
check asks what is MISSING, which a bloated reply passes.

Guards in tests/test_reply_discipline.py, three topics registered for
ownership. Every guard was falsified against the pre-change text before
committing (rule 167): all five fail on it and pass on the fix, and the
sixth deliberately passes both since it guards the scaffold against
collateral damage. No absence checks — the skill legitimately discusses
filling in order to warn against it, so asserting "fill" is absent would
false-alarm on the corrected text (snippet #3352).

Instance-agnostic per rule 115: the added text carries no record ids, no
software-specific terms and no verbatim quotes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 11:52:14 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 104c1d6f37 feat(plugin): a recognized retrieval miss has a route, and the record comes first (#4133)
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The tuning loop shipped in steps 4 and 6 and logged zero events in its
lifetime. `tune_retrieval`, `retrieval_telemetry` and `retrieval_surfaces`
appeared on no instruction surface at all — not the skills, not the hooks,
not the MCP instructions — so the decision that "the model should be the
thing handling it 9 times out of 10" could not begin to happen.

What was missing was not an auditor but a route. `using-scribe` now carries
it, ordered: read the refused records, fix the trigger, and only then
consider the dial. The order is the content. A rule's `when_to_apply` IS
the text its score is computed against, so a miss is evidence about that
text first; rewording one trigger changes one rule's reach, while moving a
floor changes what every record on the surface does and cannot tell a
badly-worded trigger from a genuinely distant one.

Measured, and the reason the order is asserted rather than suggested: rule
1 scored 0.6515 and ranked 5th for the moment it governed, behind three
rules that restrained the same act. Every percentile said "lower the
floor"; at 0.60 the arm delivered those three restraints and still not rule
1. Rewriting the trigger to lead with the symptom put it 1st at 0.7130.

Also: the create path gets a precondition. A new record is itself a
retrieval-affecting act, so before writing one, what_might_apply asks what
already covers that moment — fifty candidates and no bar, because a bar is
what lets the existing record hide.

`_INSTRUCTIONS` gets one index line, not the route: 1,986 of 2,000
characters, since Claude Code cuts the rest mid-word (#2562).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-18 00:37:04 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 a7d736860f fix(retrieval): the newest two rows are not the newest row of each dial (#4104)
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`current_settings` read a surface's history with one query and `limit(2)`, then
keyed the rows by dial. That is only the same thing while both dials have moved
equally often — and they do not. Floors get walked; budgets rarely move. Three
floor changes and one budget change returns two floor rows, and the budget
change vanishes.

Under #4102 that cost a missing reason. Since #4104 it is worse: the dial then
reports `source: "shipped"` — still on the value Scribe shipped — for a number
somebody deliberately tuned. A wrong calibration answer, in the direction a
reader has no cause to double-check.

One query per dial, `limit(1)` each.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:49:15 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 def144df06 fix(tests): a Result's .all() is sync, and the module has a fourth tool (#4104)
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Two failures in the tests added with the step, both mine.

`make_mock_session` is an AsyncMock and every child of an AsyncMock is one too,
so leaving `.all` as it came handed `migrate_floor` a coroutine where it reads a
list — the same trap the helper's own docstring already flags for `add`.

And the registration test enumerated three tools by name, which is exactly what
it is for: `migrate_retrieval_floor` made it four.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:47:57 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 aee24c9c1c feat(retrieval): a tuned number carries the space it was measured in (#4104)
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Milestone 416 step 6. A retrieval floor is a cosine similarity, which only
means something inside one embedding model's geometry over documents cut one
particular way. Change either and every floor on the install keeps applying
while describing nothing — and nothing anywhere says so, because the scores
simply come out different and the bar goes on cutting.

`CHUNKER_VERSION` already solved this for documents: stamped per row, so the
backfill re-embeds precisely what is stale. The same idea, applied to the
numbers:

- `calibration_stamp()` — embedding model + document shape, one definition.
  TWO fields, never a fused string (rule 149): a mismatch has to say WHICH half
  moved, because they call for different responses.
- `retrieval_tuning_events` gains `embedding_model` / `shape_version`
  (migration 0104), stamped on every write. Nullable and NOT backfilled —
  "unstamped" is the honest answer for a row written before this existed, and
  it reports as `stale: null`, never as fine.
- `current_settings` reports calibration per dial: tuned rows from their event,
  untouched dials from the registry default's own stamp.
- `retrieval_surfaces` and the Settings panel show the mismatch. The panel
  renders ONLY when something is stale, so seeing it at all is the signal.
- `migrate_floor` / `migrate_retrieval_floor` answers "a path for thresholds to
  be inherited by the next model so that they don't have to recalibrate a lot":
  the raw cosine cannot cross models, but the PERCENTILE it represented can.
  Measure what fraction of a surface's logged calls the old floor admitted,
  re-score those queries under the current model, take the value admitting the
  same fraction. Dry run by default; applying writes an ordinary tuning event
  with the arithmetic in its reason.

Nothing auto-retunes. A stale stamp says a number is no longer a measurement;
it does not say what the number should be, and #4102 measured the one case
where the statistic and the correct action pointed opposite ways.

The load-bearing test is an ABSENCE: no chat-model identifier may appear
anywhere in the calibration path. Claude produces none of these scores, so a
Claude upgrade must trigger nothing — a false alarm here teaches the operator
to ignore the real one on the day bge-small becomes bge-base.

Backup v17 carries both columns, unfilled on the way out and on the way back:
a round trip must not turn "we don't know" into a stated fact.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:45:48 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 dcf800ed65 fix(plugin): a line break split the token a guidance guard matches on (#4103)
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CI 6973 — `test_guidance_ownership` on "rules are retrieved; ask before
a consequential act": the using-scribe skill was missing the marker
`content_type="rule"`.

It was there. I had hard-wrapped the new bullet across `content_type=`
/ `"rule"`, and that guard matches its MARKERS raw while normalising
whitespace only for the longer `statement` — which is why the failure
reported the statement present and the marker absent in the same
breath. Rewrapped so the token sits on one line.

Worth noting rather than just fixing: the markers are deliberately
raw-matched, since a marker IS a literal a reader copies. `tool_doc`
flattens for exactly the opposite reason one layer over. Both are
right; the trap is that they differ.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:20:56 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 381c90ca7e feat(retrieval): the wide net becomes a pull — fifty candidates, no bar (#4103)
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Milestone 416 step 5. The operator's compromise — "if you're worried
about excluding potentially important data let limit it to 50 entries"
— moved to the surface where it is safe. Fifty in the push would be
milestone 394 with extra steps; fifty in a pull crowds nothing out.

`what_might_apply(query)` returns ranked rule candidates with NO
threshold. The moment it serves is the one where the caller does not
trust a bar to decide for them, so it does not have one — every row
carries its score and the reader judges.

WHY IT IS NOT A BIGGER `limit` ON `search`

`_search_rules` returns statement, why and how_to_apply in full, on the
stated reasoning that a caller who went looking deserves the whole
record. That is the DEEP pull and should stay that way. This is the
SHALLOW one — many candidates, each just enough to decide whether to
open it. Opposite trade-offs, so it is a second tool.

THE PREMISE THE STEP GOT WRONG

The task said fifty "costs nothing". `_rule_hint_line` had already
measured otherwise: ~143 tokens per line once the trigger is rendered,
and #3855 tripled trigger lengths across the corpus. Fifty is ~7,000
tokens — cheap next to an arm firing before every Bash call, but not
free, and a tool promising a free wide net gets reached for casually
and then regretted.

So it reuses the graduated shape #3851 measured for the push: the top
few carry their trigger whole, the rest carry a cut of it. TRUNCATED,
never dropped — the trigger is what lets a reader judge without
opening, and a teaser without one is just an id. The cut borrows
`_goal_line`'s technique including the fallback that matters (#4036):
`textwrap.shorten` returns a bare "…" for one unbroken word.

TELEMETRY

Logged under its own pull source, asserted absent from both the tunable
push registry and AMBIENT_SOURCES. That guard is load-bearing right
now: the push arms' near-miss distributions are the evidence #4121
argues from, and a pull folded into them would move those numbers.

INSTRUCTION SURFACES

The using-scribe reflex and the MCP instructions both pointed at
`search(content_type="rule")` for the consequential moment — the deep
tool, at the moment you want breadth. They now point here, and keep
`search` for reading a rule you already suspect. Written as a practice
rather than a prohibition (rule 165).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 12:18:25 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ea108acac5 fix(docs): two comments cited the wrong snippet for the duplication (#4102)
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Both said the repeated read-and-clamp was "canon #2860 across 295 of 372
siblings". Wrong on both halves, and checked rather than assumed:
#2860 is "Scribe service function — the async_session unit", the
service-layer canon, and its instance count is that canon's dominance in
src/scribe/services — nothing to do with a threshold helper. The
divergence hook flagged the new module against it because the new module
is a service, which is the hook working correctly and me misreading it.

The duplication itself was real and is what the registry consolidated:
`plugin_context` read and clamped the pair twice over, three rule arms
did it again, and `reply_preferences._threshold` once more. The comments
now say that, and claim nothing about a ledger count.

`rule_usage.py:122` cites #2860 correctly as the service canon and is
untouched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
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bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 c8bfa6947c docs(retrieval): stop asking the operator to diagnose retrieval (#4102)
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The last item in this step's done-when: no wording anywhere asks an
operator to tune for correctness.

Four Settings hints told them to do exactly that — "raise it if rules
keep arriving unread", "lower it if a git push arrives with nothing",
"lower this if genuine duplicates go unnoticed". Every one of those
asks the operator to diagnose a ranker from symptoms, which is the job
the model now does from the records: the telemetry says what each bar
refused, and reading those records is what separates a real miss from
a bar doing its job. The hints keep the explanation of WHAT each number
is — that is worth reading — and drop the homework.

`plugin_context.py` said the defaults "are meant to be tuned from
retrieval_logs once data accrues", which was true and had no owner.
It now names who does it and with what.

`retrieval_telemetry`'s docstring gained the warning that belongs
beside it: this readout has been measured pointing the wrong way, so
the ids it returns are the point, not its percentiles.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:38:16 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 6240652dce feat(retrieval): the operator can see what was tuned, and every write is recorded (#4102)
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The other half of the bargain in milestone 416 step 4. The model moves
these dials; this is what makes that reviewable rather than merely
automatic.

THE HOLE THIS CLOSES

Every retrieval floor is an ordinary settings key, and `/api/settings`
accepts any key at all. A floor written through it landed correctly and
recorded nothing — a tuning history with holes in it, which is worse
than no history because it reads as complete.

So the generic endpoint now routes registry-owned keys through
`set_dial` instead of writing them as plain rows. ROUTED, not refused:
refusing would only work for callers that had been updated, while this
way the form, a script, and an old client all leave the trail, and
there is no version of "forgot to use the other endpoint". Clearing a
control is written as an explicit set back to the shipped default,
because the operator reverting something is the single most important
move this history can record.

`set_dial` now also refuses to record a no-op. The Settings form
re-sends every field on every save, so without that one press of Save
would write six rows saying the operator set six dials to the numbers
they were already on — and a history nobody can skim is one nobody
reads.

WHAT THE OPERATOR GETS

`/api/retrieval/surfaces`, `/surfaces/<name>` and `/tuning-history`,
with `actor` fixed server-side rather than taken from the payload: a
payload-supplied actor would let a model claim to be the operator, and
"did I do this, or did the session?" is the first question this list
is asked.

In Settings: the five missing BUDGETS (until now only auto-inject had
one, so the only control over a noisy surface was to raise its bar —
which discards that surface's best candidates along with its worst),
and a "What has been tuned" panel showing each change, who made it, and
the reason given. The operator's own changes are marked.

The MCP tool demands a reason; these endpoints do not. That asymmetry
is deliberate and stated in routes/retrieval.py: the requirement exists
to make the MODEL read the records before moving a number on someone
else's behalf, and the operator is that someone — a mandatory
justification box on every control would be friction charged to the one
participant who owes no explanation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:36:22 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 25bd6742e0 fix(mcp): the three tuning tools get a read/write classification (#4102)
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CI 6962 — `test_every_registered_tool_is_classified_exactly_once`. The
backup gap is closed (1692 passed); this is the next guard, and the same
shape of one: a tool registered without a classification is silently
denied to a read key, with nothing to notice (#3191).

`retrieval_surfaces` and `retrieval_tuning_history` read. Read access
matters more than usual for these two — a session that cannot see the
bar in force, or the reason it was last moved, is one that will move it
again blind.

`tune_retrieval` writes in both senses: the number the arm reads, and
the reason appended to the audit trail.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:30:32 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ca49a46c23 feat(retrieval): the model moves its own floors, and says why (#4102)
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Milestone 416 step 4's write half. `retrieval_surfaces.py` made the six
push arms describe their `{floor, budget}` the same way; this adds the
three MCP tools that let the model READ that and change it, and the
backup sections that carry the reasons.

The operator's decision, which this implements:

    "the floor should be chosen and adjusted by the model using it… the
    user should be able to touch it but the model should be the thing
    handling it 9 times out of 10."

WHY A REASON IS REQUIRED, AND WHY THE TOOL ARGUES AGAINST PERCENTILES

The milestone originally listed self-tuning as a non-goal on one
measured case, and that case is now the tool's docstring rather than a
prohibition: `report_preference` logged 69 consecutive declines with
the refused record 0.0006 under the bar, and every percentile said
"lower it". The refused record was rule 77 "Extract intent from loose
phrasing" matched against a query about report layout — a false
positive. Lowering would have attached that rule to every completion
report ever written.

What separated the statistic from the correct action was OPENING the
record. So `tune_retrieval` refuses a blank or perfunctory reason,
tells the caller to read `retrieval_telemetry(near_miss_samples=5)`
and the record ids it names, and carries that 69-decline example — an
abstract warning loses to a number. The non-goal that survives is
*statistical* auto-tuning; nothing here reads a percentile and picks a
value.

BACKUP (v16), which is what CI caught

`retrieval_tuning_events` was neither backed up nor excluded, and
#2293's guard said so. It is backed up: `settings` already carried the
numbers, so dropping this would restore an install with six moved
dials and no argument for any of them — precisely the state the table
exists to prevent, and worse now that the model is the one moving
them. One `_retrieval_tuning_event_rows` builder called from both
exporters (snippet #2851); `user_id` travels because a restore has to
remap it, which is why the row builder is not the model's `to_dict()`.
`surface` is a registry name rather than a foreign key, so the history
survives a restore into an install whose ids all differ.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:28:17 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 003bfd7a0a fix(tests): two readers moved, and the settings guard now checks the registry (#4102)
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CI on 09b4845 caught both, and the second is an improvement rather than a
repair.

`test_services_reply_preferences` patched `reply_preferences.get_setting`,
which the registry refactor removed — its floor and budget are resolved through
`retrieval_surfaces` now. Its key-independence test also asserted the arm asks
for exactly one key; it asks for two, because both of its numbers are its own
since this step, so the assertion names both and adds a check that the registry
and the module constant still agree about the floor key. They writing different
keys is the failure where the Settings form saves one string and the arm reads
another.

`test_settings_defaults_agree` parsed `plugin_context.py` for a bare
module-level float, and those constants now alias the registry. Rather than
teach the regex about aliases, the six retrieval floors are keyed on their
SURFACE NAME and read from the registry directly — which is strictly better for
this guard: a surface name is also its telemetry source, so a row names the same
arm the readout does, and a floor cannot be checked against a stale constant
that happened to keep its old value. `PLAN_MATCH_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD` is not a
push surface and keeps the older shape, with a note saying why.

Added while there: `test_every_tunable_surface_has_a_control`, derived from the
registry, so a seventh surface arrives as a failing test rather than as a number
only the model can reach (rules 25, 27).

Also lands the audit trail this step needs — `retrieval_tuning_events` (model +
migration 0103) and `services/retrieval_tuning.py`. The tool layer on top is
the next commit; the table is here because `reason` being REQUIRED is the whole
guardrail, and the schema is where that starts. A number moved silently leaves
nothing for the operator to review or disagree with, and the operator's decision
is that the model moves these "9 times out of 10".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-17 11:20:47 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 09b48457ff refactor(retrieval): one registry for every surface's floor and budget (#4102)
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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 5d47342fbc fix(tests): two expectations that the new contract corrected (#4101)
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Both were mine, and both show the change behaving as designed.

`test_session_dedup_marks_the_reuse_arms_rather_than_silencing_them` asserted
#12 stays out of the search's `exclude_ids`. It does not, and should not: the
place arm has just listed it, so the semantic arm must not list it again. That
is the same-call rule, not the ledger. The claim I meant — the LEDGER never
reaches the query — is asserted on its own against a record the call has not
otherwise rendered.

`test_a_pulled_snippet_already_seen_is_evidence_not_menu` expected #7 and #8.
It gets #7 alone, because #7 (0.91) now anchors the margin band at 0.81 and #8
scores 0.80. Withholding #7 used to promote a materially weaker hit into a slot
it had not earned, with nothing in the output saying so — the band measures
distance from the best answer, and letting the ledger decide which answer that
is was the axis confusion the rule band was written to avoid.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 21:19:05 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 825491d859 fix(retrieval): the place arm marks its repeats too, and three tests meet the new contract (#4101)
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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 f1e63d207f fix(plugin): the sweep missed the arm that fires most — two ledger directories (#4101)
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CI caught two things in c61f730, and the second is the one that mattered.

1. `scribe_autoinject.sh` keeps its note ledger in `${TMPDIR}/scribe-autoinject`,
   not `scribe-priorart`. Every ledger NAMED in the hooks was in the one
   directory the sweep visited, so it read as complete — and the arm that fires
   most (598 calls in five days) was the only one still carrying the bug. The
   clear ran, found nothing to remove, and exited 0. `SCRIBE_LEDGER_DIRS` in
   `scribe_defs.sh` is now the roster, and the guard reads that string rather
   than a copy of it, so a test can no longer agree with itself forever.

2. The convention guard over-reached: it flagged `<sid>.snap` and
   `<sid>.blocked`, which live in `scribe-afterwrite` and `scribe-reportcheck`
   and can never be touched by the sweep. It is now two tests keyed on the
   directory, because the two assumptions fail differently — one lets a ledger
   sit where nothing sweeps, the other lets it sit in the right place under a
   name the sweep does not match.

`test_only_the_rule_ledger_is_cleared_and_the_note_ledgers_are_left` also went
red, correctly: the note arms' exemption was a real decision, recorded in a
test, and my commit message said nothing about it had been decided. That was
wrong and the test was right to stop me. The decision is reversed rather than
ignored, and the reasoning is that #4101 removed its premise: it rested on a
note repeat being WITHHELD, so clearing the ledger meant re-injecting whole
menu lines the session already had. Now a repeat is rendered with a `seen`
marker, so the ledger only decides whether that marker is true — and across a
compaction it is false, telling a freshly-summarised session it has already
seen a record that is nowhere in its context. The test keeps its name and
records the reversal with the reason, rather than being deleted.

Verified by running the hook directly: all six ledgers across both directories
gone on `compact`, `<sid>.unreached` left standing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 21:11:43 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5c64ea0b4f feat(retrieval): a repeat on the note arms is a reference, not silence (#4101)
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#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 c61f7301bc fix(plugin): a compaction clears every session ledger, not the two on the list (#4101)
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`scribe_session_context.sh` cleared `.rules.ids` and `.opened.ids` by name and
left `.ids`, `.sync.ids` and `.derive.ids` standing, under a comment asserting
that was a decision. Reading the note arms says it was not: their exclusions go
straight into `semantic_search_notes`, so a surfaced note leaves the result set
rather than being rendered as a reference the way #3750 gave a repeated rule,
and unlike the rules ledger they never age. Hard, permanent, never cleared — a
note surfaced in a session's first minute is unreachable for the rest of it,
which is milestone 386's own defect alive on the arms that fire most often.

The list was the bug, so the fix is not a longer list. `scribe_clear_session_
ledgers` matches the naming convention instead — a per-session ledger is
`<sid>[.<kind>].ids` — which covers all five and covers the sixth on the day it
is written. `<sid>.unreached` is deliberately outside it: that records an
outage, not held context, and #2932 needs it to survive.

tests/test_session_ledger_clear.py runs the hook rather than grepping it for
`rm -f`, since grepping for the names is the pattern being removed. It pins
both directions — `compact`/`clear` take all five, `startup`/`resume` take
none — plus the convention the glob rests on, checked against the hooks
themselves so a ledger named outside it fails loudly instead of silently never
clearing.

Also drops a stale comment pointing at a rules-etag marker that milestone 394
retired.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 21:00:42 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 957a72c501 fix(tests): the compact band pins three holding states, not two (#4100)
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CI run 6945: 11 failures down to 1. The survivor is
test_shortening_a_line_does_not_decide_what_it_says_about_holding, which
asserted "no longer hold it" appears in the compact line for seen=True — the
phrase that now belongs to the OPENED state, not the named one.

Its subject is a property, not a string: `compact` and the ledger are
independent axes, and shortening a line must not change what it claims about
holding. So the fix follows the axis rather than swapping the phrase. The axis
grew from two states to three, and the test now checks all three are distinct
under compact — pinning only two would let the compact branch collapse the new
middle state into either neighbour, which is the same regression it was
written for with one more place to hide.

Added the assertion that matters most when room is short: a line the session
never opened must not imply it did.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 17:35:08 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ebd6cb203c fix(tests): the repeat tail is the middle state now, not the opened one (#4100)
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CI run 6943: 11 failures, two causes, both existing guards correctly catching
the behaviour change rather than defects in it.

TEN were `_SEEN_TAIL = "You saw it earlier this session"`. Every one of those
tests drives an arm with `exclude_rule_ids` alone — the NAMING ledger — which
since this change is the middle state, not the opened one. That is the whole
point of the step: `seen` stopped meaning "you saw it". The constant now holds
the middle tail, so each test keeps asserting exactly what it was written to
assert (a repeat gets a line distinct from a first surfacing) against the
wording that is now true.

Added `_HELD_TAIL` and a negative assertion with it: neither call names an
opened ledger, so neither may claim the session read anything. That catches
`held` defaulting true, which would have every repeat assert the strongest of
the three claims on no evidence — and none of the ten existing tests would
have noticed.

THE ELEVENTH was my own test edit being wrong, not the code. I asserted
`held_rule_ids` would appear in `re.findall(r"printf '([a-z_]+)=", defs)`, but
`scribe_held_query` spells it `printf '&held_rule_ids=`, and the leading `&`
means that regex never matches it. The regex enumerates SCOPE keys — the
alternatives that open a query — and the ledger key is appended to a query
that already has one. Two different contracts that happened to share a file,
so they are now asserted separately and the difference is written down.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 17:19:19 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 ad26b3f458 feat(retrieval): the ledger records what was OPENED, not merely what was shown (#4100)
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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 bb6ab0f2a8 fix(tests): the trigger backfill assumed keyword calls; three fixtures pass positionally (#4099)
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CI run 6937 red — 3 collection errors, `positional argument follows keyword
argument`, in the three integration fixtures that call the service positionally
(`create_rule(topic.id, uid, "title", "statement")`). The script that added
`when_to_apply=` to 15 fixtures inserted it as the FIRST argument, which is
valid only where every other argument is already a keyword.

Moved to the last argument in every call, which is legal in both styles, and
the continuation indent now matches the surrounding arguments.

Also repairs self-inflicted damage: the same script added a trigger to the two
tests in test_rule_trigger_required.py whose whole purpose is to call the
creators WITHOUT one. They would have stopped raising and the guard's own
proof would have inverted — a test that passes for the opposite reason than
the one it names, which is worse than a failing one.

Caught by ast.parse across tests/ rather than by the next CI round trip.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 14:49:05 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 07bdbf1647 feat(rules)!: a rule cannot be created, or edited into, having no trigger (#4099)
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`when_to_apply` is not metadata. `rule_document` embeds a rule as
`{title} — {trigger}` / `When to apply: {trigger}\n\n{statement}`, the trigger
appearing twice so purpose dominates a short vector — the shape note 2485
measured on snippets (a 0.153 top-to-second gap against 0.010–0.023 for
everything else). Without one the document silently becomes title + statement:
a DIFFERENT shape, ranked against a corpus it does not match, with nothing to
report it. Every bar and every rank in the system assumes one shape.

`create_preference` has refused an empty trigger since it shipped. The two rule
creators defaulted it to "" — so the shape was enforced for the record kind
that guides and optional for the kind that binds.

The guard lives in the SERVICE, because both doors reach it: the MCP tools and
the frontend's fast path in routes/rulebooks.py. Written in either alone, the
other could still create a rule that never fires. The route keeps a matching
check for the STATUS CODE only (400, not the 404 it maps ValueError to).

update_rule refuses to EMPTY an existing trigger, checked after the mutation so
it covers `clear=[...]`, an emptied form input, and any route added later.
Deliberately asked as "did this edit remove one" rather than "does one exist":
a rule predating the guard has none, and refusing to save it would freeze
precisely the unreachable records that most need fixing.

Deliberately not following arose_from_id, which the human door exempts itself
from because provenance is about auditing what the AGENT changed. That reasoning
does not reach this field — a missing trigger is not a missing explanation, it
is a rule that does not work, and it fails an operator as badly as a session.

15 test fixtures across 6 files were creating rules with no trigger. They now
pass one; that they did not is the point — curation is not a guarantee.

Step 1 of milestone 416 "Retrieval stops guessing a bar". First because every
later step assumes one document shape, and it is much cheaper to guarantee
before a corpus grows than to backfill after.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 14:45:32 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5ae60734bb fix(retrieval): the completion-report arm gets its own bar, not the prompt arm's (#3860)
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`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 dd08f9858c fix(tests): the rule-33 contract follows the scope key into the shared helper (#4085)
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Two interface-contract tests read each hook's own source for the query args it
sends. The project-scope key now comes from scribe_scope_query, so `repo=` was
no longer spelled in the hook and both read that as the hook having stopped
sending it.

They now pin the pair: the hook delegates to the helper, and the helper emits
exactly `repo=` and `project_id=`. That is a stronger assertion than the one it
replaces — it catches a hook rolling its own scope resolution again, and it
pins the new key, which the route must read for a non-git session to reach its
project at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 08:34:55 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 aa94c73d9e feat(plugin): a directory says which project it belongs to, git repo or not (#4085)
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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 47388eda36 fix(tests): the no-block guard reads the shell, not the comment explaining it (#3680)
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The hook's header quotes `{"decision":"block"}` while explaining why this hook
must never emit one, and the instructions it prints use "decision" in a
sentence. Grepping the whole file caught both and failed the guard on the file
doing its job.

Strips comments and the heredoc first, and guards the stripper: `_code()`
returning nothing would make all three static checks pass against an empty
string, which is the circularity rule 167 is about.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 08:13:56 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 4b8d22e3ec feat(plugin): a PreCompact hook tells the summarizer what must survive (#3680)
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Spike #3680 asked whether a PreCompact hook can reach the model. Read out of
the installed Claude Code build (2.1.273), the answer is yes — through a
different channel than note #3679 assumed:

  * `hookSpecificOutput.additionalContext` is NEVER read on PreCompact. The
    hook-output schema has no PreCompact variant; the field is honoured for
    SessionStart, SubagentStart and Stop, and silently dropped here.

  * A PreCompact hook's STDOUT becomes `newCustomInstructions`, merged with
    the operator's own `/compact` instructions and passed into the prompt that
    writes the summary. Manual, auto and partial compaction all do this.

So the hook does not interrupt the compaction — it steers the summary, which
is what the next turn reads. Blocking is the thing not to do: a PreCompact
block SKIPS compaction, tells the model nothing, and leaves the session
running on uncompacted with no summary at all.

scribe_precompact_preserve.sh names what the summary is the only copy of:
Scribe record ids WITH titles, the in-progress task and its milestone, work
done but not yet recorded, governing rules, and unfinished operator asks.

No network and no config — what must survive is already in the conversation
being summarized; the hook only says which parts are load-bearing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-16 08:11:52 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 5e4fd017ae fix(mcp): list tools return rows that say what a record is, not what it says (#4061)
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list_tasks returned every row's to_dict(), body included: a project's todo list
came to 93-165k characters, past what an MCP client accepts inline, so the list
arrived as a file to page through (the #4045 failure, one call over).

- notes.brief_row: id, title, type, project, tags, updated_at; for tasks,
  status, kind, priority, milestone id and title; description, parent and due
  date only when set.
- milestones.titles_for: one query for the milestone titles a page of rows
  names.
- Brief rows on list_tasks, list_notes, get_milestone's steps, get_system and
  list_system_records. get_task / get_note / get_snippet read a record in full,
  and each docstring says so.
- tests/test_list_rows_brief.py pins the ceiling: 100 rows of ~5k-character
  step plans stay under 40k characters.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 16:07:00 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 6eb5ef5c73 docs(plugin): a request for the operator's approval gets its own "Approval requested" section (#4084)
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A session's go-ahead request sat inside a completion list as "Blocked by the
permission check", and the operator read it as a fault rather than a question
waiting on them. The reporting-back skill now puts any action held for a yes
under a section headed "Approval requested", near the top of whatever reply
it is: each change numbered so part can be approved, why it needs them, how
it is undone, and what happens after. The Asks table gains an Approval row,
and the completion report's "Needs you" points at the section.

test_reporting_back_skill pins the heading and the row. Plugin version minted:
2026.09.15.1921.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 15:21:28 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 21a701c572 fix(planning): the plan gate's default drops to 0.80, where reworded plans actually score (#4079)
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Measured live after deploy: three plans reworded from existing active
milestones scored 0.83-0.87 against the milestone they restated, and the
nearest distinct plans 0.72-0.77. At the inherited 0.90 the semantic arm
matched nothing, so only an identical title was caught. 0.80 sits in the gap.
The Settings form's default moves with it (test_settings_defaults_agree).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 14:53:14 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 fb36599f2d docs(plugin): find the existing plan before making one, and file related work into it (#4080)
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Step 5 of milestone 415 "An existing plan is found before a new one is made".
Sessions opened a second milestone beside the roadmap milestone that already
covered the work, and filed related tasks loose, because no surface told them
to look first.

- writing-plans: a section on finding the plan that exists (enter_project's
  unplanned_milestones, search(content_type="milestone"), list_milestones);
  when an active milestone covers the work, add steps to it; a second
  milestone only for a separate arc; the gate's existing_milestone reply.
- using-scribe: "when you plan" gains the same check and milestone_id on
  related tasks.
- _INSTRUCTIONS PLAN line points at the milestone search (1,689 of 2,000).
- test_guidance_ownership pins the topic on writing-plans.
- Plugin version minted: 2026.09.15.1744.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 13:45:52 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5 2811fc9025 fix(planning): the plan gate joins step text through embedding_text (#4079)
test_nothing_else_builds_the_embedding_document_itself caught start_planning
building f"{title}\n{body}" inline for the plan gate's candidate text. That is
the embedded-document shape; plan_candidate_text now takes (title, body) pairs
and calls embedding_text, so the candidate moves with the corpus it is ranked
against (#2486).

Also carries the create_task / create_records milestone_id docstring lines from
step 5 (#4080), which share the file.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
2026-09-15 13:45:52 -04:00