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
Dogfooding the four read commands (posture, tokens, manifest, whats-active)
surfaced four defect classes, all in the seam between what a command template
promises and what the scanner behind it actually does.
M-BUG-40, fifth arm: posture wrote four temp files it could never read back.
#49 closed the $$/cross-block class in four commands, but posture survived it —
and so did the guard written to prevent exactly this. The guard compared each
$$ path to the block that created it, so a path written once and then read via
prose had no second occurrence to flag. Measured live: written from PID 21614,
read attempted from PID 23772. The invariant is now blanket (no $$ in any temp
path), which also caught fix.md and feature-gap.md.
M-BUG-43: 6 of 7 scanners write their payload to stdout when --raw/--json is
set even when --output-file was given, and the templates redirected only
stderr. Measured: posture 255 182 B, whats-active 35 922 B, drift 28 316 B,
manifest 23 825 B, tokens 8 768 B. fix and feature-gap never read the file they
wrote, so both recovered one letter grade from a quarter-megabyte dump.
tokens swallowed --json and --with-telemetry-recipe: documented, never
threaded, so --json returned the humanized payload where the docs promise
byte-stable v5.0.0 output.
M-BUG-42: manifest's render contract asked for {load}; the payload carries
loadPattern, so the Load column rendered blank for all 96 rows.
Four new tests (1449 -> 1453), each verified red before the fix. The
render-contract test checks {field} names against a live payload from a
fixture, since a hardcoded key list would drift. Frozen v5.0.0 snapshots
untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VGCk9o27eWo9uXLjkZTXEq
Dogfooding `plan` + `implement` against a throwaway config surfaced one root
defect with many arms: the command templates treat consecutive fenced blocks as
one shell. They are not. Every ```bash fence runs as its own Bash call in its own
process, so a variable set in one block is empty in the next, and `$$` is a
different PID (measured: 21710 vs 22109).
The planner agent confirmed the sharpest arm at runtime, reporting that
`Mode: $RAW_FLAG` "arrived literally unsubstituted" — `--raw` was documented in
three command files while being functionally dead. A machine sweep found the same
root in 20 places across 9 files, well past the two the written fasit predicted:
- `$RAW_FLAG` read from non-shell agent prompts (analyze, plan, implement)
- `$TMPFILE` read across blocks (tokens, manifest, whats-active,
plugin-health) — each command could not read the file it had just written
- `$GLOBAL_FLAG` across blocks (fix)
- `$TODAY` never assigned in any block (campaign), passing
`--reference-date ""` to a write CLI in six places
- three `$$` temp paths handed to the Read tool (fix), which expands neither
All now follow the hardened drift.md pattern: a fixed literal path, or a
re-derivation inside each block that needs it.
Also fixed, all confirmed against ground truth rather than inferred:
- `implement` printed a rollback ID it never captured (the timestamp lived only
inside a command substitution) — the one message a user reads after a bad run
- `plan` reported "No analysis results found" for valid sessions, because Read
was pointed at a glob it cannot expand; now uses Glob and verifies the
analysis report exists before spawning the agent
- five phase commands wrote state.yaml with two of four required fields; since
the agent writes all four, a follow-up write silently deleted the rest
- `implement` promised rollback deletes created files; rollback deliberately
leaves them (M-BUG-26 still open) — the doc, not the engine, was wrong
- `implement` claimed a score delta with no pre-change measurement
- `verifier-agent` was told to write a report it has no tool to write
- dead `Task` tool name in always-loaded rule context; planner-agent template
demonstrated the inline file content its own line 110 forbids
The sweeps land as tests/commands/command-shell-state-shape.test.mjs, verified
red before the fix and proven able to fail by reintroducing the defect. Two
existing tests asserted the old bash-block mechanism rather than the intent and
were updated. Suite 1449/0; frozen v5.0.0 snapshots and all scanner code
untouched.
Not fixed, deliberately: neither command scope-gates its actions to the audit
target. The generated plan included an edit to a real file under ~/.claude,
outside the throwaway target, because the skill/agent scanners are machine-wide.
That is a design change, not a side fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0195udHgCcFegzm7ecKku2Yc
