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docs(skills): state the ablation-on-dist hazard as a resolution property, not a dogfood one - #9509

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claude/issue-8949-ablation-dist-generalize
Aug 18, 2026
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claude/issue-8949-ablation-dist-generalize

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Fixes #8949

What changed

Two .claude/** instruction files stated the "rebuild before you believe an ablation"
rule as a property of packages/qa/dogfood. Both now state it as a property of
resolution, which is what it actually is.

  • .claude/agents/os-dev.md — the ablation clause in the standing-clauses section,
    generalized in place (no new section).
  • .claude/skills/dogfood-verification/SKILL.md — the ablation bullet in section 2,
    generalized in place (no new section).

The condition, as both copies now state it

Any test whose subject resolves through the dependency's exports — which point at
that package's built dist/, not src/ — with no vitest alias redirecting the
specifier back to source. That set is enumerable and already enumerated:
KNOWN_UNALIASED_TEST_IMPORTS in scripts/check-test-source-alias.mjs.
packages/qa/dogfood is the most familiar instance, not the definition.

Two measured pairs are carried as the shortest possible provenance, as mechanism
illustration rather than as the rule body:

pair what happened
plugin-email to platform-objects 375 passes on an ablated field; 4 went red once the dep was rebuilt
plugin-auth to core legs meant to prove a new gate can fail ran the pre-mutation artifact and stayed green

The second pair is the one both files are written around. An un-rebuilt ablation there
does not return a null result — it returns "the gate did not fire", which in that
context reads as evidence the gate is broken rather than the harness. The expensive
outcome is a dev weakening a working gate until it fires, destroying the thing the
ablation was written to certify.

Both halves of the mechanical rule, now explicit in both copies

mutate  -> rebuild -> prove the marker is IN dist/
restore -> rebuild -> prove the marker is GONE   (--absent)

The restore half is the one that gets skipped: rebuilding after mutating is intuitive,
while remembering that restoring also needs a rebuild before the next measurement
is trustworthy is not. A marker left behind in dist/ keeps mutated code live for every
later suite run in that worktree, so the runs that follow measure the wrong tree.

Scope

Merge path

⛔ Human merge only. Standing maintainer ruling, 2026-08-11:
「所有 skills 的更新和 adr 类似,需要人工审核」. This PR is a draft; no AI seat should
mark it ready, add it to the merge queue, or arm auto-merge. It is awaiting a human
merge
, which on GitHub looks identical to "forgotten".

Verification

.claude/** prose only — no package source, no published surface, so no changeset
(skip-changeset).

Local gate union, all green at 2cfdd3bfb (the final commit of this branch):

gate result
pnpm check:doc-authoring 377 files clean
pnpm --filter @objectstack/lint run check:doc-formula-expressions 24 self-test cases; 396 files / 1411 TS blocks clean
pnpm check:skill-frame-sync 4 copies structurally isomorphic across 3 files
pnpm check:pm-skill-ratchet os-dev.md 341 lines, ceiling 399, headroom 58
pnpm check:pm-skill-id-lint 9 files clean; os-dev.md stays at zero issue-ID citations
pnpm check:agent-model-declared os-dev.md declares opus
pnpm check:nul-bytes 6136 text files, no raw control bytes
node scripts/check-adr-merge-approval.mjs 401 Bad credentials locally (expected — needs CI credentials)

pnpm check:pm-skill-id-lint was not in the dispatched gate list; it was picked up
by re-deriving the family from the actual diff
(node scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs over the two changed paths) and is green. That
re-derivation placed 8 families for this surface and matched no others.

The id-lint gate is why neither file cites an issue number: maintainer ruling
2026-08-12 keeps operative agent-protocol text free of issue-ID dereferences, so the
two measured pairs are named by package pair only.

Generated by Claude Code


Generated by Claude Code

The dev-agent definition and the dogfood skill both scoped the "rebuild
before you believe an ablation" rule to `packages/qa/dogfood`. The
condition is not the suite, it is the resolution path: any test whose
subject resolves through the dependency's `exports` (which point at that
package's built `dist/`, not `src/`) with no vitest alias redirecting the
specifier back to source. That set is already enumerated as
`KNOWN_UNALIASED_TEST_IMPORTS` in `scripts/check-test-source-alias.mjs`,
and dogfood is one instance of it rather than the definition.

Read narrowly, an ablation run in a plain unit suite gets trusted when it
proves nothing. Two measured pairs are carried as the shortest possible
provenance: `plugin-email` to `platform-objects` (375 passes on an ablated
field, 4 red once the dep was rebuilt) and `plugin-auth` to `core`, whose
legs existed to prove a new gate can fail. The second shape is why both
copies now name it: an un-rebuilt ablation there returns "the gate did not
fire", which reads as evidence the gate is broken rather than the harness,
and the expensive outcome is weakening a working gate until it fires.

Both halves of the mechanical rule are now explicit in both files -- the
mutate leg and the restore leg each rebuild and each prove the artifact.
The restore half is the one that gets skipped, and a marker left in
`dist/` keeps mutated code live for every later run in that worktree.

The authority for this framing is the preflight script's own header, which
already carries it; these two files were the lagging copies. The script is
deliberately untouched here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Rn7aaamsR99FXRqLcpL99q
@os-support-ai
os-support-ai marked this pull request as ready for review August 18, 2026 06:18
@os-support-ai
os-support-ai added this pull request to the merge queue Aug 18, 2026
Merged via the queue into main with commit b9f8077 Aug 18, 2026
24 of 25 checks passed
@os-support-ai
os-support-ai deleted the claude/issue-8949-ablation-dist-generalize branch August 18, 2026 06:37
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skills: the ablation-on-dist hazard is scoped to dogfood in os-dev.md and the dogfood skill, but it holds for every dist-resolved test

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