Skipping lines that START with the comment opener is not the same as
skipping a comment. Every continuation line of a wrapped comment under
the NESTE heading still looked like prose, so the excerpt became comment
internals instead of the next step. Both the board line and the route
line wrap easily; measured, 1 of 28 repos was affected, with the symptom
held down only by the convention of keeping those comments one-line.
An open comment is now tracked to its closer, and a NESTE block that is
nothing but a comment reports an empty block rather than promoting the
comment's own text.
Two limits are the format, not leftovers: an HTML comment body may not
contain the closer at all, so a rationale quoting it still ends its own
comment early.
The fixture is the real shape - one-line, wrapped, one-line, prose -
because a lone wrapped comment passes even with a flag that never
resets, and the continuation marker sits at the start of its line
because the table's 38-char cut would otherwise truncate it away and
the check would pass against the broken code too.
board-selftest 138 -> 142.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014K262DRWBJzEpWoMsBjB8J
Replaces the weighted score shipped in 0.19.0 with five lookups: chain-root
credit, unhandled inbox, planned, in-progress, undeclared status. Within a
group: that group's own quantity, then a Sonnet next-cost, then oldest plan.
The score's objection is accepted, not forgotten, and is written into board.sh
and CLAUDE.md so a later session reads it as decided rather than as an unfixed
defect: a group order cannot express "owes one message AND releases two others"
as one quantity. What the score could not do was hold still for the format's
second consumer - re-tuning one weight against another silently reorders a
parser in another repo, and no test here can catch that.
planned now ranks above in-progress, inverted by the same decision: converting a
decision into motion is the slow step; live work is already moving.
Debt stays uncapped and never excluded. One group below chain-root credit is not
the cap declined at 0.19.0 - the debtor keeps its tab, its most-owed-first
position, and its why=inbox:N. Pinned by a discriminating fixture the score
would fail: a root releasing one repo outranks a repo owing four.
board-selftest 134 -> 138. Suite 183 + 138 + 73 = 394.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Y6ULuFCPMNYAPNN3pAjsXQ
blocked-on was scanned and then used for a single display string; it never
reached the ordering. A blocked chain's root could therefore rank below the
repos waiting on it - measured on the real tree, the root opened at tab 14
while the two repos it held up opened at tabs 5 and 8.
--plan now ranks on one score instead of four hard buckets, because four
groups cannot express "this repo owes one message and releases two others":
40 x repos released transitively + 15 x inbox
+10 in-progress / +5 planned / +2 undeclared, +3 for a Sonnet row
Chain-root credit follows blocked-on transitively to the first repo that is
not itself blocked and credits only that root. Opening a blocked repo
releases nobody - its own next step is by definition waiting. A cycle, a
blocked-on naming an unscanned repo, and a blocked repo with no target all
credit NOBODY: inventing a root there yields a plan that looks correct and
sends the operator to the wrong repo.
Debt is deliberately uncapped. A cap was proposed alongside the credit and
declined: owing a reply is the other axis from a repo's own next step, and
answering is often what unblocks a chain. The weight carries that decision -
15 per message exceeds the sum of every other bonus (13), so one message
more still outranks any combination of status and cost. At the originally
proposed 12 a tiebreak could flip the debt order, which is the cap arriving
through the back door.
blocked-on becomes a record field, inserted BEFORE neste so no existing field
index moves: neste is free prose lifted from a STATE.md and may carry a
literal '|' from a markdown table, so it stays last.
why= now names the dominant term rather than the first rule that matched, so
a block says what opening it would release instead of repeating inbox:N.
Format is otherwise unchanged for both declared consumers: tab=, repo=, dir=,
why=, status=, neste=, command=/command_missing=, paste= and the fokus_*
header all keep their names and positions.
board-selftest 118 -> 134 (chain, cycle, dangling-edge and format fixtures
written first, all failing before the change).
The awk reader matched /NESTE/ unanchored, so any prose line that merely
mentioned the word (not just the real ## NESTE heading) set the flag and the
excerpt became whatever line followed the false match, not the real next
step.
Closed by operator decision 2026-08-02: one anchor form for all repos,
^#+[[:space:]].*NESTE. Measured 26/27 repos already use the heading form;
the one exception now renders "(tom NESTE-blokk)" instead of a misleading
fragment, which is the intended, honest failure mode until it switches
over - already flagged directly and on the same shape as the existing
"MERK: N repo mangler board-linje" line.
board-selftest 116 -> 118 (new fixture proves the false-match failure before
the fix, both checks green after).
The marker reader accepted **slug**: done and missed slug: **done**. That was
never a rule - it was whichever example happened to be in front of us when the
regex was written. The second form is in live use, and it makes a repo that HAS
declared look silent to --focus, which is the exact failure the held-back
report exists to surface.
Found by acting on the report's own output instead of reading it: enumerating
the held-back population turned up a repo whose declaration we were dropping
ourselves. The report blamed the repo; the defect was here.
The evidence field reports the status unwrapped - the emphasis is markdown the
operator typed, not part of the token, and "**done**" in a key=value field
reads as a value. board-selftest 114 -> 116.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0186vKCzuUEN5WcJB82kddzF
With nobody held back, fokus_utenfor= ended at a bare colon. sed could not
supply the placeholder it looked like it was supplying: given an empty string
there is no input line for the substitution to run on, so it silently did
nothing. That is the shape command_missing= exists to keep out of this format
- a field whose value carries nothing.
Zero repos mentioning a slug without declaring it is a real answer and now
looks like one. board-selftest 113 -> 114.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0186vKCzuUEN5WcJB82kddzF
The worked example in the focus comment was a live slug from another repo's
private topic register. This repo mirrors publicly, and the decision file
deliberately avoids naming slugs for that reason - the code has to hold the
same line. Replaced with a shaped placeholder; behaviour untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0186vKCzuUEN5WcJB82kddzF
--focus "<prose>" narrows the day plan to repos whose STATE.md DECLARES a
matching topic marker. Measured on the real tree: 26 blocks to 6.
The filter alone was never the feature. --plan documents that it takes one
position (the order), hides nothing, and labels what it cannot rank rather
than dropping it, so a silent cutoff would break a property the format had
already written down. The same run prints the slugs the prose resolved to,
how many blocks it removed, the repos that MENTION a resolved slug with no
marker line - named, not counted - and how many STATE.md it searched. Each
surviving block carries the declaration it survived on.
Enumerated rather than counted because the decisive find behind this feature
was invisible to every string measurement until the held-back population was
listed. "nevner", never "dekker": this reports text found, and board.sh has
no grounds for a claim about relevance. The slug vocabulary comes from the
scanned STATE.md themselves, so the "no other file" invariant survives.
Emitted as key=value, not '#' comments: the consumer's parser runs in
paragraph mode and drops any block without tab=, so a comment would reach the
operator on the terminal path and vanish on the driver path - the one case
where the cutoff is applied unseen.
board-selftest 89 -> 113. The narrowing check is comparative, since every
presence-only assertion passes against a no-op filter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0186vKCzuUEN5WcJB82kddzF
--plan shipped with dir= and command= as separate fields. That is right for a
driver, which moves the pane itself and then types the command, and unusable
for a person: the first operator to read a block could not act on it at all.
Joining an absolute path from one field with a command from another is not a
saved line of output. It is the step where a session gets started in the wrong
repository - the same failure the absolute dir= exists to prevent, moved from
the machine to the human.
paste= is the two already joined, cd <dir> && <command>, one thing to select.
Both forms stay: the two consumers want the same fact shaped differently, and
neither shape serves both.
Emitted only alongside command=, never once per block. A `paste=cd X && ` with
nothing after it would run the cd and then a bare newline, which fails
SILENTLY - the operator ends up in the right directory with no session started
and no error to notice.
board-selftest: 86 -> 89 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011eKRzhD1RqY2MxvDEkrJAM
The table says what the state of every repo is; the briefing says who is
waiting. Neither says which repos to open a tab for today, in what order,
and with which command - so a day plan was assembled by hand every morning
from a table that deliberately takes no position.
--plan is built on exactly the argument --brief was: a lookup over data the
scan already holds, zero model calls, and route.sh already derives the
per-repo command. The order IS the position it takes, and the only one -
there is no cutoff, so nothing is hidden.
The rule most likely to be "fixed" into a defect: repos owing mail rank
first regardless of status. Excluding blocked or done is a claim about a
repo's OWN next step, which by definition cannot be moved, while owing an
answer is the other axis entirely - and answering is often what unblocks
it. Measured on the real tree, two of 26 planned repos were done with an
unhandled inbox, so the fixture tree pins done-with-debt and
blocked-with-debt rather than the general rule alone. Repos with no board
line rank last and are LABELLED, because the table already prints a note
about them and dropping them silently would repeat that defect.
key=value rather than prose, because the plan has two consumers: the
operator, and a separate repo driving a terminal from it. Prose would make
the rendered format an API no test here could hold stable for a consumer
living in another repo. dir= is absolute because a new pane inherits its
anchor's directory; command_missing= carries both no-command causes,
because a driver reading ^command= would type a blank line into a live pane.
route_cmd_for() becomes the single reader of the route-line grammar, shared
with --brief, distinguishing the two failure causes by exit code rather
than by an empty string. --brief output is unchanged.
Driving a terminal from the plan stays OUT of this repo, on the measurement
in docs/ghostty-orchestration-measurement.md rather than on taste.
board-selftest: 51 -> 86 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011eKRzhD1RqY2MxvDEkrJAM
The operator has more repos than they can hold in their head, and the
question that actually costs them is "who is waiting on me, and what does
answering cost". board.sh already scans for it; nothing rendered it in a
form an unattended job could leave behind.
--brief is a second RENDERING of that scan, never a second scan. It prints
NESTE uncut, because the 38-character cut is the table column's property
and not the record's - the value used to be truncated at record-build time,
which left the cut string as the only copy. Each startup command is derived
by CALLING route.sh with that repo's own four traits; next-cost alone
cannot produce it, since the advisor flag is a property of the ROW and two
rows can share a model/effort pair while differing on it. A repo with no
route line is told so rather than handed a guess.
It cross-checks itself against coord-count.sh, and that is the substance of
the change rather than a nicety. The repo scan and the mailbox are two
different populations: a mailbox can carry a name no scan will ever produce
- a declared non-git surface (CLAUDE_COORD_REPO, e.g. ~/repos) or a
checkout outside the roots. Measured on the real mailbox: 11 repos / 21
messages in the briefing against coord-count's 12 / 22, the missing one
being the declared surface `repos`. A briefing that only walked the scan
would answer "who is waiting on you" with a number it quietly knew was
short.
Zero model calls, which was the deciding property. Measured against 2.1.220
under subscription auth: --max-budget-usd DOES bite (terminal_reason
budget_exhausted, exit 1), but it aborts AFTER turn one - floor ~0.25
USD-equivalent per turn on claude-opus-5[1m]. It is a runaway brake, not a
pre-flight gate, so a nightly claude -p job would draw on the same quota
pool as interactive work every night. Determinism removes the question.
board.sh stays read-only: the file write lives in brief-nightly.sh, which
renders to a temp file and renames it into place, and treats an EMPTY
render as a FAILED one - board prints nothing when its scan roots do not
exist, which is what a mistyped path or a moved home looks like, and a
plain `> file` redirect would destroy yesterday's briefing on a bad launchd
environment.
The launchd template carries placeholders, not absolute paths: this repo is
mirrored publicly and a plist is the one file here that would need a home
directory in it. It points at a checkout rather than the plugin cache,
which is version-pinned and would break silently on the next bump.
board-selftest 36 -> 49. One check pins a defect caught only by eye against
the real tree: fold copies its input's missing trailing newline, which ran
the command onto the tail of the NESTE prose and produced a briefing whose
commands could not be copied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017orCFDkmp88fLnqDR3chdJ
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
The board line's next-cost field had a reader (board.sh) and no writer, so
its value was retyped by hand every session and drifted into several
competing spellings. Cleaning the data could not fix that: the cause was the
missing write path.
route.sh is that writer. Four scored traits of the next task -- path,
verification, reversibility, scope -- plus a required rationale, run through
the operator's model rubric moved here as the single copy. The row table is a
closed set of six values, so a seventh spelling cannot enter circulation, and
route-selftest.sh section 6 runs the round trip (route emits -> board parses)
inside one repo rather than across two.
Two spellings of one decision come out of one table: the rubric name for the
board line, the CLI alias for the command the operator pastes. Effort levels
are the set pinned in this marketplace; model aliases are gated against the
installed claude rather than hardcoded.
Three things worth naming:
- Escalation is asymmetric. Any single trait escalates; the cheapest row needs
all four at the cheap end. Underkill costs one session, overkill costs quota
every session -- but a wrong architecture call costs more than either.
- The Fable rows fire only from an explicit judgement flag, never inferred
from the last-session record. "The session did not finish" also covers
context exhaustion and operator interrupts, which say nothing about the
model, and Fable runs without an advisor.
- The trait block is a single-line HTML comment because board.sh's NESTE
extractor skips only lines that START with '<!--'. Measured first: a YAML
block or a multi-line comment silently replaces the repo's next step on the
board with "next_task:". Pinned by section 7.
board.sh is untouched as a program; its header now points at route.sh for the
value set so this does not reopen the two-specs defect 305f168 closed.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 47 (new), node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
The board line's cost field had two specifications and one of them was this
script. `--help` prescribed a versionless `sonnet/xhigh`; the global model
rubric it points at spells the model `Sonnet 5 / xhigh`. A session following
either was correct by its own source, so the field drifted with nobody making
a mistake. Measured across a real 44-repo tree: 14 board lines carrying eight
distinct strings, and not one of them the form documented here - the only
spelling nobody used was ours.
The help now prescribes the rubric's, which is also what most lines already
carry. The parser is untouched and stays lenient: it reads to `;` or `-->` so
the rubric's spacing survives, and the fixtures still vary the spelling on
purpose to pin that. Read-side leniency was never the defect; it is what makes
a documentation-only fix sufficient.
No normalization at read, deliberately. Board lines are rewritten every session
by convention, so an unambiguous spec self-heals the existing lines in about one
session per active repo - mapping variants would be permanent code migrating
data that migrates itself. Nothing compares the field mechanically today either:
KOST is a display column and the board sorts on a numeric bucket key, so the
defect was real but latent. Two checks (28 -> 30) pin the documented form,
red first, because cleaning the data cannot fix a spec that regenerates the
divergence every session. Validation at write has no write path to attach to:
nothing in this repo emits a board line outside the fixtures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U6EixQo6hpoRCVtiAXdnFs
The v0.9.0 comments explained the attention-vs-topic axis by pointing at the
operator's private cross-repo register by path, naming an internal incident
code, and quoting a measured count of the operator's own repo population.
This repo mirrors to a public remote, so operational metadata about a private
machine does not belong in it - the reasoning does, the referents do not.
Rewritten self-contained: the topic-axis contrast now stands on its own terms
without citing a file a public reader cannot see, the defect class is named
rather than coded, and the worktree rationale keeps WHY .git is tested with
-e (a worktree or submodule has .git as a FILE) while dropping the census
that motivated measuring it. Illustrative paths stay; they carry no fact.
Comments only, no behavior change: 136 + 28 selftest checks and 6/6 node
tests unchanged. No version bump, so the v0.9.0 tag and the catalog ref stay
where they are - and with them the pre-scrub text, which history and that tag
still carry. Un-publishing that is a history rewrite and the operator's call,
not a side effect of a comment edit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01U6EixQo6hpoRCVtiAXdnFs
The mailbox answers "who wrote to me"; it never answered "which repo
deserves the next session". board.sh scans every discovered repo and reads
three sources each: the STATE.md next-step block with its optional board
line, git status, and that repo's pending mailbox count. Read-only by
construction, pinned by board-selftest.sh (28 checks).
It ships here rather than as a personal script because the mailbox is one
of its three inputs and the two carry the same axis distinction: a pending
count means others are waiting on that repo, while who a repo waits ON comes
only from its board line, since the message format has no reply-to field.
Splitting the board from the mailbox would put that distinction in two
places. It also lets the skill resolve the engine through CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT
like every other script here, instead of depending on a file that exists
only in ~/.claude/scripts (a directory with no remote and no backup).
The skill is a ranking, not a report: re-runs the board every invocation
because counts drift, ranks by what unblocks the most and what is cheapest
to move, then names one repo, the rule that fired, and the real next action
read from that repo's STATE.md. Never the table. Not wired into session
start, which would spend context on repos the session is not in.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MubwdTi88yu4hVLAFG1LbM
