A surfaced rule stops going permanently quiet (#3750, #3751, #3752) #149

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bvandeusen merged 2 commits from dev into main 2026-09-09 22:44:29 -04:00

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Author	SHA1	Message	Date
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5	c1aa1d8e92	feat(plugin): rule exclusions age, so salience decays without a context event (#3751) ... #3749 clears the ledger when an EVENT destroys context — a compaction, a /clear. This is the case with no event at all: a long session where a rule was named two hundred turns ago and has simply fallen out of attention. It is #3702's argument at the tier level — present in context and salient at the moment are different properties — applied to time instead of to tier. FORMAT: `id<TAB>epoch`, per entry. Not a whole-file mtime: that is one line of shell and wrong in exactly the session that needs it, since a single recent write keeps every stale id alive, and the ids that go stale first come from the rules that fire most. Not a turn counter, though it would be the truer model — an idle session does not forget. A hook has no turn number without keeping its own, which is a second piece of session state to write, read, clear on compaction and get wrong. Wall time costs a `date` call. The failure it accepts is a session left idle over lunch treating its rules as forgotten, worth one extra full line per rule and nothing else. TTL 2700s (45 minutes), reasoned rather than picked (rule 32). About one working stretch on a single task: long enough that a rule does not re-announce itself while you are still doing the thing it governs, short enough that a multi-hour session gets a refresh rather than one 9am mention. It leans short because since #3750 being wrong on the short side is the cheaper error — an expired entry costs one full line instead of one short one, and the exclusion re-arms the moment it is spent. There is no data on this yet; #3807's near-miss listing is what should revise it. BOTH READERS THROUGH ONE HELPER, in scribe_defs.sh. The two hooks share one ledger so a rule named by one arm is not re-offered by the other; a format only one of them understood would break that on the first read. The flat `tr '\n' ','` read would now send `156<TAB>1789002860` as an exclude id — verified, which is why this is not a per-hook edit. THE LAST ENTRY FOR AN ID WINS. The file is append-only, so a rule that ages out, is surfaced fresh and is appended again has two lines. Reading the first leaves it permanently expired, and it then re-announces itself on every call for the rest of the session — the mechanism meant to quieten things becoming the loudest thing in the hint. A BARE ID IS LIVE. That is the pre-#3751 format, and every session in flight when this ships has a ledger full of them. Reading unknown as EXPIRED would make all of those sessions re-announce every rule they had already been told, at once — the exact noise this prevents, delivered by the feature on the day it ships. Unknown means "not measured", never "old", the same discipline the nullable retrieval_logs columns use. GUARDS (tests/test_rule_ledger_ageing.py, real shell, no credentials) - old ages out AND recent survives, in ONE assertion (rule 167): either half alone passes against a broken helper — "old is gone" passes against one returning nothing, "recent survives" passes against the flat read this replaces, i.e. against the defect itself. - the ping-pong case, which is the one that costs the most to get wrong. - a bare id is live, including beside a stale stamped one. - missing/empty ledger excludes nothing. - an id repeated in the ledger appears once, with no empty list element. - structural: neither hook reads the rule ledger flat again — pinned on the flat-read SHAPE, so a rename of the helper is not a failure and a hook that ages correctly some other way is not either. The TTL's VALUE is deliberately not asserted. The tests read the constant out of the shell and assert the property around it, so a later tuning change stays a tuning change instead of a red build. Dropped a boundary test (`ttl` vs `ttl + 1`) before committing: racy by construction, since a ledger written at T is read at T+n and the two cases swap. A one-second distinction on a 45-minute window is also not observable behaviour, so it pinned a flake rather than a property. Plugin version minted to 2026.09.10.0221 — this is entirely hook-side, so without the bump the cache would never pick it up and the merge would ship nothing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ	2026-09-09 22:21:32 -04:00
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5	c4908f093f	feat(rules): a repeat is referenced, not withheld (#3750, #3752) ... Both arms used to drop a hit already on the session's exclusion ledger and emit nothing. That is correct only while the session still HOLDS what it was told, and a compaction breaks exactly that: the earlier injection is summarized away while the id stays on the ledger, leaving the rule absent from context AND unreachable for the rest of the session. #3749 closed the compaction half by clearing the ledger; this closes the ordinary half, where a session simply stops holding a line it read an hour ago. Only ONE CLAUSE of the existing line is false on a repeat — the claim that the rule is not in the session's loaded set — so only that clause changes. The fresh line is byte-identical to what it was. Both tails now come from one `_rule_hint_line`. The arms phrase their heads differently on purpose; everything after must not differ, and #3497's history is that the pre-tool arm inherited a defect by being modelled on its sibling rather than sharing with it. THE BUDGET DECISION, recorded at RULEHINT_LIMIT. A repeat competes for the single slot on rank alone: nothing is fetched behind it, and it never rides alongside as a second line. Promoting a fresh rule past a better-ranked repeat would reinstate the withholding one rank deeper, and a second line is the one thing the limit exists to forbid. The consequence is deliberate — a rule that keeps ranking first for a recurring situation keeps being referenced, and its decay belongs to exclusion ageing (#3751), not to a first-place rule being demoted for having won before. THE TELEMETRY, decided before shipping rather than after a number moved (#3752): nothing changes. A reference is a RENDERING decision, not a retrieval outcome. `results` stays `fresh`, `suppressed` stays len(hits) - len(fresh), and `record_rule_surfaced` still counts only what the arm freshly chose. This matters more than it reads: the naive implementation drops the `fresh` filter and takes suppressed_count to zero everywhere — and #3739's near-miss fix identifies repeat-caused zeros by `suppressed_count > 0`, so the contamination corrected on 2026-09-08 would return by a different route, in the same field, with the fix still in the code and no longer working. A test asserts the counters as unmoved, because "nothing changed" is only worth something if it is checkable. Also corrects two comments that outlived #3702 — both arms still claimed CONDITIONAL ONLY while the module-level note above RULEHINT_LIMIT said the opposite, in the exact code this change edits. GUARDS - an already-held hit produces a rule line at all (the regression), asserted on `get_rule(<id>)` rather than a truthy context: the write-path arm fills its context from four other sources, so truthiness passes under the OLD behaviour and pins nothing there. - the two tails are distinguishable, each excludes the other, and neither injects the rule statement — the budget claim, both branches. - the counters are unmoved, per #3752. - test_a_rule_the_session_already_holds_is_not_re_offered asserted the old contract (`"161" not in context`). Repinned rather than deleted: the telemetry half of what it protected still holds. Repinned the #3497 log-placement guard on structure (rule 167). It read `body.index("if not fresh:")` — a local variable NAME, not the property. This change renames that guard to `if not hits:`, so the old assertion would have raised ValueError and reported #3497 as back while the arm was entirely correct. Now walks the AST for the first early return after the search and asserts the call row is written before it. Falsified both ways: it fails on the #3497 mutation, and it refuses to pass when no early return exists at all. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011cPyzNnegXHr5iRMzzy5KJ	2026-09-09 21:48:50 -04:00