msd-core/docs/how-to/interpret-scope-conformance-warnings.md

How to interpret scope-conformance warnings

Goal: Understand the advisory warnings that the worktree.cleanup-wave gauntlet emits when a plan branch commits changes outside the scope it declared, and decide what — if anything — to do about one.

Prerequisites: MSD Core is installed and you have run /msd-execute-phase with worktree isolation enabled (workflow.use_worktrees: true, the default), so that plan branches were merged back by a cleanup-wave.

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What you will see

When /msd-execute-phase runs plans in isolated worktrees, each plan branch is merged back into the phase branch by the worktree.cleanup-wave gauntlet. If the wave manifest recorded the plan's declared scope (files_modified, passed as --files to worktree record-agent / worktree create), the gauntlet compares the branch's actual committed diff (HEAD...<branch>) against that declared scope and reports any committed path that falls outside it.

A realistic cleanup-wave result with one such warning:

{
  "ok": true,
  "reason": "wave-cleanup-complete",
  "warnings": [
    {
      "code": "scope_out_of_declared",
      "branch": "plan-04-add-rate-limiter",
      "path": "src/util/rate-limiter-cache.cts"
    }
  ],
  "entries": [
    {
      "branch": "plan-04-add-rate-limiter",
      "status": "merged_removed",
      "warnings": [
        {
          "code": "scope_out_of_declared",
          "path": "src/util/rate-limiter-cache.cts"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

ok: true and status: "merged_removed" are unchanged by the warning — the merge happened. The same warning object appears twice: once nested under the offending entry, and once aggregated into the top-level warnings array so you can scan for conformance issues across the whole wave without walking every entry.

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Why this happens

/msd-execute-phase gives each plan a declared scope up front (files_modified in the phase plan index), so that parallel plan branches can be reasoned about and merged with some confidence about what each one touched. The scope-conformance check is a post-hoc, best-effort verification of that promise: after a branch merges, the gauntlet diffs what was actually committed against what was declared, and flags any mismatch as a warning. This is issue #2596.

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The two warning codes

• scope_out_of_declared — emitted once per committed path that falls outside the plan's declared scope. A branch with three unexpected paths produces three of these warnings.
• scope_check_unavailable — emitted once per entry when the scope diff itself could not be computed (a git failure or a timeout), rather than once per path. This means conformance is unknown for that entry, not clean — the check deliberately distinguishes "could not verify" from "verified and clean" so an unknown result is never silently read as a pass.

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It does not block

Scope conformance is advisory by design. A scope_out_of_declared or scope_check_unavailable warning never changes ok, reason, the per-entry status, or the process exit code — the merge proceeds exactly as it would with zero warnings. There is no failure to fix here. Promoting scope conformance to a hard gate (one that blocks the merge) would be a separate, explicitly disclosed change — it is not what this check does today.

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What to do about one

1. Compare the reported path against the plan's declared files_modified in the phase plan index.
2. Decide which side is wrong: either the executor committed something outside its brief (over-reach), or the plan's files_modified under-declared what the work actually needed to touch.
3. If the plan under-declared its scope, widen files_modified in the plan so future waves report accurately.
4. If the executor over-reached, review that path's changes specifically — it is already merged into the phase branch, so treat the review as catching it before it travels further (into a PR, a release, or a later phase).

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When nothing is reported

Absence of scope_out_of_declared / scope_check_unavailable warnings is not proof that a branch stayed in scope. The check legitimately stays silent in three cases:

• No --files was recorded for the plan. Scope is unknown, so no comparison runs at all — not even a git call is made for that entry.
• Every out-of-scope path is a .planning/**/*SUMMARY.md artifact. These are always exempt: the executor writes them by orchestration contract, and no plan declares them as part of its scope, so flagging them would be noise rather than signal.
• A declared pattern had no literal prefix (for example, *.md). Matching is prefix-based (see below), so a pattern with no literal prefix cannot usefully bound anything — the check suppresses warnings for that entry by design, so an advisory check never cries wolf on a pattern it cannot meaningfully evaluate.

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Known limits

• Glob matching is literal-prefix only. src/**/*.ts matches anything under src/, including src/a/b.json — the check does not parse glob syntax past the literal prefix.
• Renames are not detected specially, and mostly are not gated at all. Git's rename detection runs by default, so a pure rename (content unchanged, similarity 100%) is reported as a single R entry and appears in no --diff-filter=D output. The deletions guard therefore never fires on it — before or after #3003 — and the rename lands here at the advisory, where the new path is compared against the declared scope like any other. Only a rename that also edits the file enough to fall below git's similarity threshold decomposes into a separate add and delete; that delete is a real deletion, and the guard blocks the entry unless the old path is declared in files_deleted. Declaring it is the fix in that case. The old path needs no files_modified entry either way: a declared deletion is subtracted from this check's findings, so it never shows up as out-of-scope.
• /msd-quick worktrees have no plan-declared scope. They are never checked, for the same reason as the "no --files recorded" case above.

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Related

• CLI Tools reference — worktree commands — the worktree record-agent / worktree create --files reference
• Execute a phase
• Debug a failed execution
• docs index