A command template is a caller with no compiler behind it. It names a scanner and
an argv; nothing checked that the scanner still accepts them. M-BUG-45 measured
what that costs: `--stale-after` arrived malformed, was ignored, and the command
reported "all 14 entries re-verified within the last 90 days" about a threshold
the user had just overridden.
The new guard builds the argv from each template's OWN text (#63 — a hand-typed
call is a path no user takes), reading all three forms a flag appears in,
including the comment-only `GLOBAL_FLAG="" # --global`; that third form is the
one that dies unobserved, since the default path leaves the variable empty.
Measured: 38 invocations, 54 (CLI, flag) pairs, 15 CLIs, 0 dead scanner paths.
Two premises in the plan text were falsified by measuring:
- "the flag exists in the CLI's BOOL_FLAGS/VALUE_FLAGS" — only 3 of 34 scanner
files declare such a surface. The contract is checked on BEHAVIOUR instead:
run the CLI, ask whether it calls the flag unknown.
- `--full-machine` was predicted dead on `posture`. It is live. The fasit was
wrong, not the code.
What the measurement found instead: `campaign-export-cli` was the only one of the
fifteen without the shared `requireValidArgs` gate. Its hand-rolled chain guards
every value branch with `argv[i + 1] !== undefined`, so a trailing `--repo` fell
past all of them to the `startsWith('--')` catch-all and was reported as an
unknown flag — about the flag the CLI itself requires. Classification of "value
flag, no value" across all fifteen: 14 correct, 1 wrong. It now uses ARG_SPEC +
requireValidArgs like the other twelve; valid argv reaches the existing loop
byte-for-byte unchanged. Special-casing it in the test would have rebuilt, in
test code, the prose exception Q1 deleted.
And what the guard itself got wrong, which is worse than what it was looking for:
probing a flag means RUNNING the CLI, and some flags are writers. Its first run
let `drift-cli --save` default its target to the working directory and overwrite
the operator's real ~/.config-audit/baselines/default.json — an ungated write
outside the repo, produced by the guard whose whole subject is ungated writes
outside the repo. Every probe now runs under hermeticEnv() with its own empty
cwd, and the cwd is asserted empty afterwards. Isolation that is only a
convention is not isolation. Side effect: 65s -> 13s, because a hermetic HOME
stops every probe from enumerating ~/.claude.
All six arms seen RED against their own defect, twice — including the ORIGINAL
class (remove --approve-scope from fix-cli) and the plan's own verification
(delete the write-scope-cli line from a template). The non-emptiness arm is
derived from the tree, not pinned to a count that would only be a drift point.
Suite 1707 -> 1724, frozen v5.0.0 + default-output snapshots 0 changed files.
Not fixed here, found while verifying and pre-existing at 749b710: the suite was
NOT green on HEAD. output-file-robustness fails on drift-cli, root cause
diff-engine.mjs:194 — `m.from.severity` where `m.from` is undefined in the moved
section of the drift report. It crashes after the scan, in formatting, so the
CLI exits 3 with no output file. Its own chunk, not this one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Pj6UoTi6iPsAB2B2j6EZ1k
`write-scope.mjs` has existed since M-BUG-41, but only one writer ever called
it. Measured 2026-08-12: 9 files under `scanners/` write to disk, 1 imported
the gate; 21 command templates, 17 mention a write, 5 call `write-scope-cli`.
Five templates paraphrasing one policy is the shape that put the lever table in
five copies (#61) — one level up.
The defect was never "8 ungated writers = 8 bugs". Four of them write the
plugin's own bookkeeping and must STAY ungated: a gate that fires on every run
gets switched off, and then it guards nothing. The defect is that nothing
declared WHICH, so the question was answered by reading, and answered
differently each time it was asked.
`tests/lib/write-gate-coverage.test.mjs` makes the answer structural: every
writer either imports the gate or holds an EXEMPT entry naming where the bytes
land. Seen RED against today's tree before the fix (4 ungated writers), and
each of its four assertions was separately seen red against its own defect.
Two premises in the plan text were falsified by measuring them first:
- `scan-orchestrator` was carried as "plugin-managed, legitimately exempt".
`--save-baseline` derives its path from the SCAN TARGET, so `--global`
lands `~/.claude/.config-audit-baseline.json` — user-scope, require-ok. It
is gated. `lib/baseline.mjs` is the genuinely exempt one.
- the first sweep scored 9 writers with a regex that could not match
`writeFileSync(`, so `lib/backup.mjs` — a real writer — read as clean. The
guard covers sync and async forms, strips comments before matching, and
asserts non-emptiness so a regex that stops matching cannot make every
other assertion vacuously green (#63, #64).
Gated: fix-engine, rollback-engine, campaign-export-cli, scan-orchestrator.
All five call sites share ONE reduction, `evaluateWriteTargets` — four copies
of classify/strongestGate/dedup is the drift this exists to prevent.
`campaign export` still DISCLOSES rather than refuses: cross-repo is by design
there, and tightening it into a refusal would break the feature. A dry run is
still not a write, so it is never gated (#63). A refusal is a verdict about a
config that WAS examined, so it rides in the payload and keeps the 0/1/2 exit
contract (#62) — and the verdict now reaches the success payload too, since
stderr is discarded by `2>/dev/null` (F3's class).
commands/fix.md carries `--approve-scope` from the answer the user gives, with
the rule stated where it can be read: classifying is not approving.
Dogfooded end to end: a target outside the session root refuses with zero bytes
written, then applies under `--approve-scope`.
Suite 1703 -> 1707/0. Frozen v5.0.0 + default-output snapshots: 0 changed files.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Pkn22uGCgk6QZA738zNmHL
Dogfooding `campaign` + `knowledge-refresh` against a throwaway ledger. Seven
defects, all found by running the commands as written and measuring, not by
reading them.
The headline pair only existed together. `knowledge-refresh` built
`STALE_AFTER="--stale-after 30"` and expanded it unquoted, trusting the shell to
split it in two. bash does; zsh — the macOS default, and what the Bash tool runs
here — does not. The CLI got one argv entry, matched no flag, and because it had
no unknown-flag branch, silently kept the 90-day default and reported "✓ All 14
register entries were re-verified within the last 90 days": a true-sounding
sentence about a threshold the user had just overridden. Fixing either half alone
leaves a silent wrong answer or a loud one; both are fixed, and a guard now
rejects any template that packs a flag and its value into one variable.
`knowledge-refresh` also read one register and wrote another: step 6 named an
unanchored `knowledge/best-practices.json` while the CLI reads
`${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/…`, which for an installed plugin is the cache. The
validation gate then ran the cached test against the cached register — green no
matter what was written. The two copies were byte-identical that day, which is
exactly why it was invisible.
`campaign` vouched for repos it could not read. `add /finnes/ikke` returned
`added` + exit 0; `refresh-tokens` then put the phantom in `swept[]` with a
0-token delta and left `skipped[]` empty, so the machine-wide bill claimed
coverage of three repos on a machine with two. Paths stay tracked — an unmounted
volume is a legitimate absence — but are reported as `addedUnverified`, and the
command names them.
Two class sweeps, both measured rather than assumed. `posture` was the single
scanner (1 of 14) whose fatal catch exited 1, which ux-rules defines as a normal
WARNING grade — a crash indistinguishable from a result. And all 13 payload
writers failed on a `--output-file` whose parent did not exist, which on a fresh
machine turned `campaign`'s first run into "the ledger may be corrupt"; they now
share `scanners/lib/write-output.mjs`.
Predicted breadth was too wide for the first time in five sessions: 6 of 8 CLIs
predicted to lack unknown-flag rejection, 4 measured. `drift` and `fix` already
reject them, via a construct the grep did not recognise — a grep matches an
implementation, the invariant is a behaviour. The sweep was rewritten to run each
CLI with a bogus flag and read the exit code.
Suite 1453 → 1469/0. Frozen snapshots untouched. `optimize-lens-cli` and
`token-hotspots-cli` share the unknown-flag defect and are deferred to the v5.14
argument-handling chunk with their positional-swallow arm; the count is recorded
in the guard rather than rounded down to zero.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012NHWjN8EnoxSqRvMTLK2NE
process.exit() terminates immediately, but Node writes stdout asynchronously
when stdout is a pipe — everything still buffered is dropped. scan-orchestrator
measured 246 854 bytes to a file against 65 536 to a pipe (131 072 on another
run; the cut point is a flush race), so every machine consumer that pipes the
envelope got truncated, unparseable JSON. The failure reads like a corrupt file,
not like a cut-off, which is what made it survive this long. Reported by
org-ops, whose census pipes our output.
Closes the class rather than the one CLI where it was visible. campaign-cli,
campaign-export-cli, campaign-write-cli, knowledge-refresh-cli, drift-cli and
fix-cli all exited the same way on their success paths and were green only
because their payloads fit the pipe buffer today; size is not correctness. All
38 sites across 14 files now set process.exitCode and return, which is the
pattern self-audit.mjs already used.
Two contracts needed care rather than substitution: fail() is a never-returns
guard at ~25 call sites, so it throws a CliUsageError the top-level catch
renders with the identical "Error: " prefix and exit code 3; the path guards
needed an explicit return so main() stops instead of running on. Exit codes and
stderr text are unchanged, and the frozen v5.0.0 snapshots are untouched.
The class sweep is landed as a test, not as fourteen edits — it caught one site
this commit had missed. Suite 1443/0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01B8sS1DuDV6bUJcyumLwbvj
Completes Block 4 (4b backlog + 4c export/execution). Asymmetric: plan
export is new testable code; execution is pure reuse of the existing
per-repo implement/rollback (no new execution machinery), per the plan's
"reuse existing backup/rollback".
Plan export ("planer følger arbeidsstedet"):
- scanners/lib/campaign-export.mjs (pure, now injected, 8 tests):
planExportPath(repo,sessionId) -> <repo>/docs/config-audit-plan-<sessionId>.md
(sessionId-keyed so same-day re-audits never collide);
buildPlanExportDocument({...,now}) -> provenance header + verbatim plan.
- scanners/campaign-export-cli.mjs (-cli, read-only by default, 10 tests):
--repo resolves the repo's linked session, reads its action-plan.md,
assembles the doc, emits {exportable,problems,targetPath,document}. Two
gates -> exit 1 advisory: no-session-linked / no-action-plan. Writes the
file ONLY under opt-in --write (byte-faithful copy; the LLM never re-types
a 200-line plan). --sessions-dir override for hermetic tests; exit 0/1/3.
Command: commands/campaign.md gains an `export <path>` mode (Step 6:
preview -> approve -> --write), then routes the user to the existing
/config-audit implement (backup + verify) + rollback + set-status
implemented. Nothing auto-written (Verifiseringsplikt).
Byte-stable: lib + -cli + command-doc only -> scanner count stays 15,
agents 7, commands 21 (export is a mode, not a new command), SC-5 +
backcompat suite untouched. suite 1150->1168. Block 4a (migrateLedger)
still deferred to the first breaking schema change.
Docs: CLAUDE.md section + badge 1150->1168/65->67 files; README badge +
campaign row + Testing prose (fixed stale 1055/59 -> true 1168/67).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
