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docs(agents): give findings a home, and say which one - #477

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docs/findings-have-a-home
Sep 8, 2026
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Docs only. No code, no artifacts.

Why

A finding that lives only in a reply is gone at the end of the session. That has cost real work here twice:

  • a measurement across 465 artifacts that cancelled a planned fix existed nowhere but a chat message until someone thought to file it;
  • a handoff document pointed at a scratch directory that did not survive the session it described.

What it says

Three kinds of finding, three homes:

Finding Home
a rule that changes how an agent works AGENTS.md
work someone should do GitHub issue, open
a measured dead end — checked, decided not to do GitHub issue, closed on arrival, label measured-not-planned

The third row is the one people skip and the one that pays. A measurement that cancels work is worth as much as one that starts it, and it evaporates faster — nobody files "we checked and it does not matter", so the next person smells the same thing and re-derives it. #476 is the worked example: two plausible check_stub defects, both measured, both left alone, numbers on the record.

Filing rules: numbers not adjectives; every finding carries a trigger phrased as a condition, not a date; say what was rejected and why; search before creating.

Revisit is a step, not a habit — before opening a release/v* PR, list the measured-not-planned issues and re-check their triggers. That puts it next to the existing pre-release Dependabot check (RED LINE #10) rather than relying on someone remembering.

Two mechanics that silently do nothing

Plus the zsh PIPESTATUS trap, filed into the existing disk-full family in Parallel agents and the build directory: ${PIPESTATUS[0]} is a bashism that expands to empty in zsh, so a guard prints exit= and reads as fine. Same shape as passed=0 failed=0 on a full disk — the number is real, it is just measuring tail.

Infrastructure

Label measured-not-planned created and applied to #476, so the convention is a command (gh issue list --state closed --label measured-not-planned) rather than a good intention.

A finding that lives only in a reply is gone at the end of the session.
That has cost real work here twice: a 465-artifact measurement that
cancelled a planned fix existed only in chat, and a handoff document
pointed at a scratch directory that did not outlive the session.

Three kinds of finding, three homes: a behaviour-changing rule goes in
this file, work goes in an open issue, and a measured dead end goes in an
issue closed on arrival under the new `measured-not-planned` label.

The third is the one that pays. A measurement that CANCELS work is worth
as much as one that starts it and evaporates faster, because nobody files
"we checked and it does not matter" — so the next person re-derives it.
#476 is the worked example.

Every filing carries a trigger phrased as a condition, not a date, and
the revisit is a step in the release flow rather than a habit nobody has.

Also records two mechanics that silently do nothing: `Closes #N` is inert
when merging into `dev` because GitHub honours it only on the default
branch, and an empty `gh` result can be a GraphQL EOF rather than an
absence. Plus the zsh `PIPESTATUS` trap, filed with the disk-full family
it belongs to — the exit code is real, it is just measuring `tail`.

Refs: #476
@explosivebit
explosivebit merged commit 5aee2b4 into dev Sep 8, 2026
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