Files
msd-core/docs/features/spec-phase-prohibition-probe.md
Tom Boucher 36375513b9 feat(#3840): generate docs/FEATURES.md from per-feature fragments (#3845)
* feat(#3840): generate docs/FEATURES.md from per-feature fragments

docs/FEATURES.md was hand-maintained, and every feature PR wrote into two
shared mutable cells: the '### N.' heading whose integer was hand-allocated at
authoring time, and the hand-maintained table of contents. Concurrent PRs all
picked the same next integer, and two PRs adding differently numbered features
still collided on the TOC. #3831 was renumbered 165 -> 166 -> 167 -> 168 across
successive rebases, each collision also costing a full matrix verification run
because the sha-keyed pass marker dies with the rebase.

Mechanism: one fragment per feature at docs/features/<slug>.md carrying
id/title/group (and an optional order) in frontmatter, consolidated by
scripts/gen-features.cjs --write|--check into a marker-delimited region of
docs/FEATURES.md that holds BOTH the TOC and every section body. Group headings
and their order are derived too - a group sorts by its lowest-ordered member -
so there is no shared registry to edit either; optional per-group prose lives in
docs/features/_groups/<slug>.md. A contributor adds exactly one new file.
Wired into regen:derived and lint:generated-sync alongside the eight existing
generators, matching gen-adr-index.cjs's CLI shape and typed-REASON reporting.

Migration froze all 168 existing numbers verbatim: identical section set,
identical order, identical bodies. Two defects found in the tree are fixed
inline rather than carried forward - the '## Related' block had been spliced
into the middle of the document, orphaning §142's Reference line, and four
inbound anchors were already broken on next (FEATURES.md#runtime-identity in
two files, and #143-spec-phase-edge-completeness-probe off by one). Since the
repo has no link checker, --check now validates every inbound
FEATURES.md#anchor by resolved target, so that class cannot ship silently
again; locale FEATURES.md files resolve elsewhere and stay out of scope.

Refs #3840

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(#3840): carry upstream §69 delta into its fragment and harden the generator

Review found section 69 missing '[--strict]' and REQ-STATE-05/06 versus
origin/next. Root cause was a stale base, not extraction loss: those lines
landed in 394bf384b (#3844) AFTER this branch forked at 63abcface, and
'git diff 63abcface origin/next -- docs/FEATURES.md' is exactly that hunk.
Merging origin/next auto-applied the hunk into the GENERATED region, which
--check immediately reported as stale; the delta is now carried in
docs/features/statemd-consistency-gates.md and regenerated from there.

--write is now fail-closed. It previously rendered the region even with
violations outstanding, warning only on stderr and exiting 0, so a
'--write && git commit' chain could commit a FEATURES.md carrying two
colliding sections. It now refuses and exits 1; --force is the explicit
override and says so in the report. The test that pinned the old behavior now
pins the refusal, plus the --force override and its scoping.

Marker forgery is rejected at two layers. A fragment body containing
'<!-- FEATURES:START' or '<!-- FEATURES:END' is a typed
body_forges_region_marker violation (fragments and group notes alike), and
spliceIntoFeatures anchors the end boundary with lastIndexOf instead of
indexOf, so a marker that reaches the document by any other route can only
make the generated region grow, never shrink. Matching is on marker PREFIXES,
so a decorated variant comment cannot slip past.

Symlinked corpus entries are refused with a typed dirent_not_regular_file
rather than read. A fork PR could otherwise commit docs/features/evil.md as a
symlink to any readable path and have the generator inline those bytes into
the committed docs/FEATURES.md on the next regen.

Equivalence re-verified with a method that cannot cancel out. The first
check extracted both operands with the same body-normalising helper, so
anything that helper dropped was dropped on both sides. The replacement runs
two independent passes: a global content-line multiset diff with no
per-section logic at all (0 gained, 19 lost, all 19 the stale hand-written
mini-TOC links this change deliberately deletes), and a per-section
byte-exact body diff carrying a coverage assertion that fails loudly per file
when the extractor accounts for fewer lines than the file contains. That
assertion caught two blind spots in the checker itself. 168/168 sections
present, order identical, one intended body difference (§142 regains the
Reference line orphaned by the misplaced '## Related' block).

Refs #3840

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore(#3840): backfill changeset PR number

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

---------

Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-24 22:49:00 -04:00

5.1 KiB

id, title, group
id title group
146 Spec-Phase Prohibition Probe v1.43.0 Features

Command: /gsd-spec-phase

Purpose: Surface the unwritten must-NOT constraints — the values/safety/ethics interpretations a feature could silently become that the author would never want but the spec does not forbid — before any code is written. The edge probe reaches data-shape edges; it structurally cannot reach prohibitions. This is the missing instrument, running as Step 5.6 of spec-phase, after the edge probe.

Behavior: A two-stage, prose-orchestrated pass per requirement (no compiled recall engine — recall is inherently model-driven, ADR-550 D7b):

  1. Recall (adversarial probe): "What could this feature silently become that the author would NOT want, but the spec does not forbid?" — model-robust open-vocabulary elicitation across values/safety/ethics.
  2. Precision (one-pass classifier): drop routine-engineering items, keep genuine values/safety/ethics prohibitions — collapses the raw list to the load-bearing few.

Each surfaced prohibition is resolved to exactly one of three states:

State Meaning Downstream effect
resolved Confirmed a real must-NOT NEGATIVE acceptance criterion written into the SPEC ## Prohibitions (must-NOT) section; lifted into plan-phase must_haves.prohibitions (its own sibling block, never truths)
dismissed Not a genuine prohibition (requires a non-empty reason) Recorded with its reason; empty dismissals are rejected
unresolved Deferred Soft-gates the spec; surfaced as a planner assumption

Each resolved prohibition carries a verification tier — test (a negative test can enforce it) or judgment (only human/LLM judgment can). At verify time, judgment-tier prohibitions route to a never-silent / never-hard-halt soft gate (autonomous emits an unverified-prohibition — human review recommended flag); test-tier prohibitions are enforced via the deterministic check prohibition-enforcement gate — green when the wired negative test / lint rule passes, hard-gate (flagged, non-green) when missing or failing, in both interactive and autonomous modes (#1259, ADR-550 D5d). Under --auto, the probe never auto-dismisses. Canon-bound concerns (OWASP / GDPR / fairness) are referred to /gsd-secure-phase rather than minting SPEC prohibitions (ADR-550 D6).

The load-bearing wire is the plan-phase lift into must_haves.prohibitions, so the section is not merely documentation.

Deterministic prohibition-check descriptor source (#1278). A resolved test-tier prohibition MAY carry an optional check descriptor — the flat-scalar keys check_kind (node-test | lint-rule), check_target, and check_rule (lint-rule only) — authored at spec-phase. projectProhibitions projects these scalars deterministically and verify-phase reads them back to locate the check handed to check prohibition-enforcement, so a wired, passing test closes the gap with zero manual descriptor authoring (previously the verify-phase LLM had to invent {kind, target, rule} each run, #1259). The descriptor is optional and backward-compatible — a descriptor-less prohibition parses and disposes byte-identically to today — and fail-closed: a partial, invalid, or absent descriptor falls through to the producer's existing fail-closed locate, never a silent green. failFirst stays a verify-time caller attestation (machine-proven fail-first is tracked in #1279).

Requirements:

  • REQ-PROHIB-01: The prohibition pass MUST run after the edge probe and emit a ## Prohibitions (must-NOT) SPEC section.
  • REQ-PROHIB-02: Stage 1 MUST ask the adversarial recall question; Stage 2 MUST drop routine-engineering items and keep values/safety/ethics prohibitions.
  • REQ-PROHIB-03: A dismissed resolution MUST require a non-empty reason.
  • REQ-PROHIB-04: --auto MUST never auto-dismiss.
  • REQ-PROHIB-05: plan-phase MUST lift resolved prohibitions into must_haves.prohibitions (never truths).
  • REQ-PROHIB-06: A well-formed but unwired test-tier prohibition MUST fail closed at verify time — never a silent pass.
  • REQ-PROHIB-07: A test-tier prohibition with a machine-proven-fail-first, genuinely-passing (non-vacuous) wired mechanical check (a node --test negative test OR a lint/AST rule) MUST dispose green and be satisfiable; a missing, un-provable, or non-passing check MUST hard-gate (flagged, non-green) in both interactive and autonomous modes. Fail-first is machine-proven, not caller-attested (#1279, ADR-550 D5d): before a clean pass greens, the producer independently runs the wired check against a known violation (the descriptor's violationFixture) and confirms it goes RED — a lint rule via the violating fixture, a node test via the violating subject injected through the GSD_PROHIB_SUBJECT convention; absent a violation source it fails closed, never falling back to attestation. (Enforcement half shipped #1259; deterministic descriptor auto-locate in #1278.)

Reference: Prohibition Probe