Adversarial deep research (25 sources, 124 claims extracted, 25 verified:
11 confirmed / 14 refuted) plus direct measurement of all 18 cloned open/
repos. The useful half of the result is what it REFUSED to support, so the
research is recorded in docs/presentation-research-2026-08-03.md rather than
being spent and forgotten.
- BADGE-COUNT (WARN) — past five badges. Trockman et al., ICSE 2018
(n=294,941 npm packages) measured a non-linear relationship with popularity
inflecting at five, motivated by surveyed maintainers calling over-badged
READMEs cluttered and "trying too hard". WARN and never ERROR: the
coefficient sits in an appendix with no CI or p-value. Counting deliberately
uses a NARROWER rule than the existing claim check, so a screenshot or an
architecture diagram is never counted as clutter. Fires on 8 of 18.
- README-LANGUAGE (WARN) — prose not in the language this repo's readers were
declared to speak, via a new `locales` axis in the register. Class is
structural, a trait is what the code DOES, a locale is who it is FOR — the
standard's own "who the reader is decides what is required". English is the
default; ms-ai-architect and okr are declared nb, named by the operator as
Norway-only in audience. Stopword-frequency comparison over prose with code
stripped: a Norwegian flag name in a shell example cannot decide the
document. Fires on exactly those two, silent on all sixteen English repos.
One design correction found mid-implementation: the first version returned
SKIP when a README had too little prose to judge, which broke a passing
fixture and would have stopped any terse repo from ever reaching OK. SKIP is
for a check that could not RUN; this one ran, saw everything and found no
prose to be in the wrong language — the same shape as "no licence claim to
back". Insufficient prose is now OK, and evenly bilingual prose is the SKIP,
because there the question is live and unanswered.
Deliberately NOT built, because the evidence does not reach: any rule about
images, diagrams or terminal recordings (every such claim refuted 0-3); a
README length bound (no evidence-based target exists); a section count (would
fire on 9 of 18 — textbook "suspect the CHECK"); Mermaid source length and
#gh-dark-mode-only (zero occurrences, and the instance limit is not readable
via the API, so any threshold would be a guess).
Verified live against the operator's own forge (15.0.6+gitea-1.22.0): Mermaid
DOES render in README.md — two div.mermaid-block iframes carrying real SVG —
while #gh-dark-mode-only landed only in Gitea 1.26.0 and is unavailable here.
103 tests green, up from 92. No version bump: the catalog ref still trails at
v0.1.1 against 0.1.3, and starting a second release chain over that is the
operator's call.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TCAGKZT8h9F46ygzSkhEee
