msd-core/docs/adr/1820-spec-optional-predicate-rail.md

ADR-1820: Spec-Optional Predicate Rail — the Spec-Section Detection Module, the fallback toggle, and the SPEC↔probe precedence contract

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-07-04
• Issue: #1820 — approved-feature (ADR-857 Phase 6, predicate-rail exception 857:138)
• Relationship to prior ADRs: This does NOT restate ADR-857 (predicate generation is core substrate, not an off-by-default Capability), ADR-550 (the spec-phase probe contract + the must_haves.prohibitions projection), or ADR-1606 (the verify-time enforcement seam). It documents the new architectural surface #1820 introduces on top of them: a new Module seam, a new config toggle, and the SPEC-supplied-vs-probe-derived precedence/authoring contract. 857:138 pre-approved the policy of wiring the probe family onto the core rail (settled 2026-06-12); it does not itself document this module, toggle, or gate, which were designed afterward.

Context

The edge-probe and prohibition-probe families surface a phase's unwritten edges and must-NOTs. Before #1820 they ran only in spec-phase (Step 5.5 / 5.6), so their value reached the verifier only when a phase authored a SPEC.md. But the verifier reads must_haves from PLAN.md frontmatter (verify-phase (workflow, retired in #1892)), not from SPEC.md — SPEC.md is only an optional source plan-phase lifts from. A phase planned without a SPEC therefore shipped with an empty predicate set and the probes' reach was lost. Per the load-bearing premise verifier reach = spec reach, that is a silent coverage hole precisely where a spec is thinnest.

The fix wires the probe generators into plan-phase's must_haves authoring as a spec-optional fallback: when a section is absent (no SPEC, or a SPEC that omits/empties that section), the fallback runs the probe and authors the predicates directly into PLAN.md. Deciding whether a section was supplied requires detecting the SPEC's ## Edge Coverage / ## Prohibitions (must-NOT) sections and counting their resolved rows. That detection first lived as ad-hoc awk inline in the workflow body, which hard-coded the header strings at the call site and hand-rolled markdown-table row counting — brittleness that produced two real bugs (an exact ^## Prohibitions$ anchor that missed the canonical ## Prohibitions (must-NOT) heading, and a single-table row-counting assumption). Centralizing the detection made the knowledge testable and shared — and created a new Module seam, which is what makes this an ADR-worthy decision (contributor-standards: "an ADR is required when a decision introduces a Module seam that other code will depend on").

Decision

1. A new spec-section Module seam owns "did the SPEC supply section X?"

src/spec-section.cts (compiled to the gitignored msd-core/bin/lib/spec-section.cjs per ADR-457) is the single source of truth for SPEC-section detection. Pure and dependency-free. Locked exported surface:

• SpecSectionKey — the logical sections the fallback cares about (edges | prohibitions).
• SECTION_HEADERS — the canonical, suffix-tolerant header matchers (prohibitions matches both ## Prohibitions and ## Prohibitions (must-NOT); edges matches ## Edge Coverage and any future parenthetical suffix).
• SectionStatus — { key, present, dataRows, supplied }.
• countSectionDataRows(specText, key) — pure specText → { present, dataRows } (multi-table-robust: a blank/prose line resets per-table state, the |…| line before a |---| separator is the header row and is never counted).
• specSectionStatus(specFile, key) — the disk-reading wrapper.

Invariants this seam pins:

• Supply rule: supplied = present AND dataRows > 0. A present-but-empty section is not supplied and triggers the fallback.
• Suffix-tolerant header contract: if spec-phase renames a heading, update SECTION_HEADERS and the templates/spec.md heading together. The contract is pinned by tests/spec-section.test.cjs (both historical bugs are regression-tested).
• Fail-safe: a missing/unreadable SPEC file resolves to present:false / supplied:false (fallback fires) rather than throwing.

Ownership boundary: this seam answers detection only. It does not run probes, author must_haves, or read config — those stay in the workflow body and the existing probe/projection modules. A future third spec-section consumer reuses this seam instead of re-parsing markdown (the extraction Gall's-Law rationale below).

2. workflow.specless_probe_fallback — a default-ON, disableable policy toggle

The fallback is governed by a new config key workflow.specless_probe_fallback (registered in config-schema.manifest.json validKeys), default-on, with a visible "disabled" marker when off.

• Why a toggle exists (Chesterton's Fence): the prohibition-recall half is an LLM pass with a real per-invocation cost; the toggle is the cost-gate that lets a project opt the fallback invocation path out without touching the verifier↔predicate contract.
• Why default-on: the probe family is core verification substrate (ADR-857); shipping the fallback default-off would recreate the skippable-gate failure one level up. Default-on keeps the substrate reaching the verifier by default; the visible skip keeps a disabled state honest, never silent.
• Boundary with ADR-857:66 (ruled, not re-opened): 857:66 says the probe generator is "default-on and non-removable." This toggle governs the spec-less fallback invocation path, not the generator or the verifier↔predicate contract (which stay non-toggleable core substrate). The maintainer ruled on #1820 that 857:66 governs spec-phase, not the spec-less fallback — so a default-on disableable toggle over the fallback path is in-bounds. This ADR records that ruling; it does not amend 857:66.

3. The SPEC-supplied ↔ probe-derived precedence & authoring contract

• Section-level precedence — a SPEC-supplied section is never re-run. The fallback fires per section: only for a section that is absent or empty (supplied === false). A section the human authored in the SPEC is lifted as-is and never overwritten by the probe. This is section-level, not file-level: a partial SPEC (edges present, prohibitions omitted) runs the fallback for prohibitions only.
• One serializer, no second producer (Hyrum). Fallback-authored prohibitions go into the must_haves.prohibitions sibling block via the same projectProhibitions serializer SPEC-lifted prohibitions use — no parallel authoring path, so the verifier↔predicate round-trip contract is unchanged.
• Fallback predicates are descriptor-less → flagged, never green, never auto-dismissed. A probe-recalled prohibition authored without a wired check_* descriptor disposes flagged/unverified at verify time (ADR-550 D4/D5 fail-closed default; honest-verifier abstention, #1154) — it surfaces for human resolution, it does not silently pass. Unresolved edges are surfaced as explicit assumptions, never silently dropped. No-silent-drop equality holds between the SPEC-lifted and fallback paths.

Consequences

• Positive: the probes' reach no longer depends on a phase authoring a SPEC; SPEC-section detection is testable and shared instead of re-parsed inline; the toggle gives projects a cost-gate without a capability surface; the precedence contract makes "who wins, SPEC or probe?" a documented decision rather than call-site behavior.
• Cost / Hyrum: the toggle default-on is an observable behavior change (a no-SPEC phase now emits predicates it previously didn't) — but the honest-verifier's fail-closed abstention keeps it from being a regression (descriptor-less fallback predicates flag/abstain, never flip a previously-green phase red). SECTION_HEADERS becomes a depended-on surface: renames must move it and templates/spec.md together (pinned by test).
• Deferred (Gall's Law). The build surfaced a duplicated _msd_lib() runtime-dir resolution idiom shared by the probe shim steps; further centralizing it is deferred, not done. This ADR names the spec-section seam as the precedent so the next probe-fallback consumer extends an existing seam rather than re-inlining detection — the failure mode a documented seam prevents.

Cross-references

• ADR-857 — Verification substrate vs. plug-in tier (the predicate boundary): predicate generation is core, non-toggleable substrate; Phase 6 (Migrate) wires the probe family onto the core rail (857:138). This ADR is that migration's plan-side landing.
• ADR-550 — spec-phase probe contract; the must_haves.prohibitions projection (projectProhibitions) and the fail-closed disposition this rail reuses unchanged.
• ADR-1606 — the verify-time enforcement seam that consumes the authored predicates.
• ADR-457 — src/*.cts → gitignored bin/lib/*.cjs build seam.
• CONTEXT.md — Spec-Section Helper Module (the greppable module predicate).
• Code / prompts: src/spec-section.cts, msd-core/workflows/plan-phase.md (Step 7.95 + the <downstream_consumer> Otherwise branches), msd-core/references/specless-probe-fallback.md (the protocol), msd-core/references/planning-config.md (the toggle), msd-core/bin/shared/config-schema.manifest.json. Tests: tests/spec-section.test.cjs. Issue: #1820.