"""Every rule-write surface documents the trigger it can write (#3855). WHY THIS EXISTS `when_to_apply` is not documentation. `rule_document()` uses it twice — as the embedded title's second half and again above the body — so it dominates the vector, and a rule whose trigger names a CATEGORY rather than a moment collapses toward its title and never arrives. Measured in #3835 across 113 rules, then again in #3855 on eight preferences. The corpus damage traced to an uneven contract rather than to careless authors. `create_rule` had carried the full argument since 2026-08-27, and the two preferences written that day got good triggers; the six written before it — "during hard debugging", "when reading any request from the operator" — got categories. The guidance worked wherever it existed. It simply did not exist on either `update_*` surface, which is where every RETROFITTED trigger is written, and retrofitting is most of the work: a trigger that already reads fine as English is the one nobody rewrites. WHAT THIS PINS One structural property, no wording: a tool that accepts `when_to_apply` mentions it in its docstring. That is exactly what `update_preference` failed before #3855 — the parameter existed and the docstring never said so, which is how six triggers got written against no contract at all. THE SURFACE LIST IS DERIVED, NEVER HAND-KEPT. It comes from what `rulebooks.register()` actually hands the server, filtered to signatures taking `when_to_apply`, so a rule-write tool added later is in scope on the day it is added. A hand-kept list has to be remembered by the person least likely to know it exists — the argument `RANKED_SOURCES` makes in services/rule_usage.py, and the reason #3855 happened at all. WHAT THIS DELIBERATELY DOES NOT PIN, AND WHY IT IS NOT HERE The regression worth catching is the one above's *softer* twin: guidance kept but abstracted back to "name the moment in session vocabulary", which is advice about being concrete that is not itself concrete — the shape that was already on file while the corpus filled with categories. Two predicates for it were written and both were discarded, because each was falsified and each failed: - Counting quoted multi-word phrases anywhere in the docstring measured ambient quotation, not demonstrated triggers. It passed the broken version by scoring unrelated prose ("what happens if someone doesn't do this"), and prose with an odd number of quote characters produced matches spanning the gap BETWEEN two unrelated phrases. - Scoping that count to a window after each "trigger"/"when_to_apply" mention then failed `create_preference` in its CORRECT state, because its examples sit further from the first mention than any defensible window reaches. Rule 167's standard settles it: a check that passes on the broken code reads as coverage and stops anyone looking again, so no check is the better of the two. Whether a docstring teaches the shape WELL stays a reading judgment, and the record of that decision lives here so the next author does not spend the same two rounds discovering it. """ import inspect import pytest from tests.helpers import tool_doc as _doc _MODULE = "scribe.mcp.tools.rulebooks" def _registered_tools() -> list: """Every function `rulebooks.register()` actually hands to the server. Collected by handing `register` a stand-in that records what it is given, rather than by reading the source or repeating the tuple here. The point is that this cannot drift from what ships. """ from scribe.mcp.tools import rulebooks collected: list = [] class _Collector: def tool(self, name=None): def register_one(fn): collected.append(fn) return fn return register_one rulebooks.register(_Collector()) return collected def _trigger_writers() -> list[str]: """The registered tools that can write a rule's trigger.""" names = [ fn.__name__ for fn in _registered_tools() if "when_to_apply" in inspect.signature(fn).parameters ] # An empty list would make every case below vacuous and the guard would # pass by having nothing to check — absence read as non-existence, the # #3720 shape. Fail loudly instead. assert names, "no rule-write surface takes when_to_apply; the guard is blind" return sorted(names) @pytest.mark.parametrize("name", _trigger_writers()) def test_a_trigger_writing_surface_documents_the_field(name): """A tool that can write a trigger must say what the field is for.""" doc = _doc(_MODULE, name) assert "when_to_apply" in doc, ( f"{name} accepts when_to_apply but never mentions it in its " "docstring. The tool docstring is the agent-facing contract " "(rule 119), and a trigger written against no contract is the #3855 " "defect: six preferences named a category instead of a moment, and " "a category is not a thing any session ever types. Say what the " "field is for, and show a moment — see create_rule." )