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feat(board): split the age column, so a silent repo cannot hide behind a fresh plan

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ALDER carried two readings depending on which branch a repo fell into: STATE.md
mtime for repos that had one, last-commit age for repos that did not. The
consequence was one-sided -- a repo WITH a STATE.md reported only how recently
its plan was touched, so one that had not committed in a year looked exactly as
alive as one worked on this morning, and no column contradicted it.

Now each column means one thing. ALDER is the plan's age and is blank where
there is no plan; SISTE is the last commit, read for every repo, and blank where
there are no commits -- a day count there would be a fabricated reading, which
is what the old -1d was.

The four ranking rules stay four: the new column is evidence, never sort input.
The sort key was already a separate field from the displayed age, so bucket 5
keeps ordering by commit age while showing nothing in ALDER.

The fixture tree was missing the only case that discriminates -- a repo with a
STATE.md AND an old last commit -- so the checks land with it, plus its mirror
image (old plan, fresh commit) to pin that the two ages read independently and
that neither became the sort key. Backdating sets GIT_COMMITTER_DATE, not
--date=: %ct is the committer date, and an author-only backdate would have left
the red test failing for the wrong reason.

board-selftest: 30 -> 36 checks.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QS6gYYgYgJAz7VjcFHEzbb
This commit is contained in:
Kjell Tore Guttormsen 2026-07-31 11:04:27 +02:00
commit 6a09c9caa1
5 changed files with 111 additions and 17 deletions
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14
skills/board/SKILL.md
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@ -59,7 +59,8 @@ rule exists to stop. The run costs about three seconds.
| `KOST` | Model/effort for the next step, from the rubric row table in `route.sh` (the `route` skill writes it; this one only reads it). |
| `INN` | Unhandled inbox: **other repos are waiting on THIS one**. An obligation it owes outward. |
| `DRT` | Uncommitted files. |
| `ALDER` | Days since STATE.md last changed. |
| `ALDER` | Days since STATE.md last changed — the age of the *plan*. `-` where the repo has none. |
| `SISTE` | Days since the last commit — the age of the *work*. `-` where the repo has no commits yet. |
| `NESTE` | First line of the STATE.md next-step block, truncated. |
**`INN` never means "this repo is waiting on someone."** It means the opposite:
@ -85,8 +86,15 @@ fired — the rule is the justification, and it is what lets the operator disagr
naming: the config backup mirrors commits, not working trees, so uncommitted
files exist in exactly one place.
**`ALDER` is never a ranking input.** An old STATE.md often means a finished repo,
not a neglected one. Report it only if the user asks about staleness directly.
**Neither `ALDER` nor `SISTE` is a ranking input.** An old STATE.md often means a
finished repo, not a neglected one, and an old last commit can mean the same.
Report either only if the user asks about staleness directly — the four rules
above stay four.
Read them as a **pair**, though: they answer different questions, and the gap
between them is the reading neither gives alone. A fresh `ALDER` beside a long
`SISTE` is a repo that keeps being re-planned without anything landing, which no
other column on the board reports.
`deferred` is a deliberate choice, not neglect — do not surface a deferred repo as
a candidate unless nothing else qualifies, and say that it was deferred if you do.