CNF compared every discovered settings.json/hooks.json pairwise regardless of
origin, so it treated installed plugins' bundled configs — each plugin's own
settings.json/hooks.json plus its shipped test fixtures and examples under
~/.claude/plugins/ — as if they were the user's authored cascade. A "conflict"
between two plugins' bundled test fixtures is not something a user can resolve,
yet these dominated the count: 339 CNF findings on this machine (315 high-sev
permission allow/deny "conflicts", 18 duplicate-hook, 6 settings-key), almost all
sourced from plugin-internal fixtures. The Conflicts grade was F on pure noise.
Fix: CNF excludes any file whose path is under `.claude/plugins/` from conflict
analysis (new isPluginBundled predicate; absPath marker). Kept CNF-local rather
than a discovery-level skip on purpose: an active plugin's contributed
hooks.json/.mcp.json legitimately lives in plugins/cache and other scanners need
it — only conflict analysis must ignore plugin-bundled files. Same class as
M-BUG-8 (non-live config trees treated as live). Suite 1344/0 (+3: plugin-bundled
exclusion, discovery-side sanity, over-exclusion guard). Frozen v5.0.0 + SC-5
snapshots untouched (marketplace-medium has no plugins/ paths), no re-seed.
Dogfood ~/.claude CNF 339->0 (F-grade was 100% plugin-bundled noise; the ~3
genuine user-scope local settings have no actual conflicting keys, matching the
plan C5 "real surface ~3 files" prediction).
Follow-up (not in this fix): classifyScope tags plugin-bundled files by checking
basePath instead of the file's own path, so scope:'plugin' is effectively dead
for a ~/.claude-rooted scan. Fixing it would let every scanner trust the scope
field, but that is a discovery-layer change beyond this bug's scope.
Kjell Tore Guttormsen
e8afb148d3