Timothy asked why the kickoff handoff doc stores historical narrative when
it should be instructions. It shouldn't — its own lore section is chartered
as "STANDING workflow/orchestration rules only" with the why belonging in
docs/decisions.md. But an inventory of every bullet against the decision
corpus inverted the premise: only ~8 of ~38 were actually covered. 19 had
no record anywhere and 11 more were half-covered, so that single file was
the ONLY copy of the mandatory review rubric, the whole CI-triage
vocabulary, the build-concurrency policy, the H12 session-end audit, and
the plumbing-merge recipe. Pruning first would have destroyed them.
So the records come first. New topic file docs/decisions/workflow-process.md
carries 32 records (ci.*, process.*, testing.*) covering every NONE and
PARTIAL the inventory found, including the Gitea `?milestones=` no-op bug
whose only copy was the archived selector section this prune deletes.
Only then the prune: HARD CONSTRAINTS and the lore section become one- or
two-line rules, each citing the decision key that holds its evidence, and
the 40-line "Archived — do not follow" section is gone. 636 -> 353 lines,
with every cited key verified to resolve against the corpus.
The aggregate corpus budget is re-baselined 4800 -> 5600 with the reason in
the code: the corpus grew because knowledge MOVED into it, which is the
system working, not drift.
refs #542
- Exclude docs/decisions/retrieval-eval.md from active decision parsing
(_NON_DECISION_FILES); its `## N.` eval-question headings were being
miscounted as 7 legacy-unmigrated records.
- Add decisions_lib.metadata_line_count() + a decisions_validate guard
that fails a record with more than one `key:` metadata line, so a
stacked-metadata-block migration bug (which the parser silently
tolerated by reading only the first block) can't recur unnoticed.
TDD: test_duplicate_metadata_block_fails / test_single_metadata_block_passes.
- De-duplicate the 6 docs/decisions.md records left with two stacked
metadata blocks (scan.getoraddfolder-db-lookup #488,
scan.musicvideo-reconciliation #494, scan.jellyfin-mixed-content-library
#489, iptv.logo-drives-bug-preset #67, ffmpeg.qsv-decode-encode-split
#498, ci.small-lane-git-only server-management#639), merging the union
of Signals/paths/issues/Mechanics from both blocks and keeping the
richer Rule wording; rationale prose untouched.
- Fill in the deferred Q6b row in docs/decisions/retrieval-eval.md now
that startup.parallel-orientation is active in docs/decisions.md,
scoring it as a real active-vs-superseded question against the
archived docs.queue-state-gitea-tracker.
- Regenerate docs/decisions/README.md via build_decisions_catalog.py.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds scripts/decisions_validate.py: lifecycle invariant checks (unique
active key, key format, reciprocal supersession, removed-without-archive,
rationale-rewrite-without-token, catalog staleness, corpus budget) plus
git-diff helpers for merge-base-based CI checks. Deviates from the task
brief in one spot: REQUIRED_META narrowed to (key, status) — the brief's
(key, status, since, supersedes, superseded_by) makes its own
test_clean_corpus_passes fail, since since/supersedes/superseded_by
default to None on bare Record() instances built without going through
the markdown parser.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
timothy
