@descent-vtt/spec-guard 0.5.1 → 0.7.0

package/README.md

@@ -1,868 +1,1094 @@
-# spec-guard
-
-**Executable architecture assertions for Markdown specs & ADRs.**
-
-Turn the claims your design documents make about your codebase into assertions
-that run in CI, in milliseconds, with no runtime dependencies.
-
-```md
-The retired payment gateway is gone from the service layer.
-
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src/services" symbol="LegacyPaymentGateway" -->
-```
-
-If someone reintroduces `LegacyPaymentGateway`, CI fails and points at the line
-of the ADR that promised it was gone.
-
----
-
-## Why this exists
-
-Architecture Decision Records, RFCs and technical briefs are full of hard claims
-about a repository:
-
-- *"`LegacyPaymentGateway` no longer exists anywhere in the service layer."*
-- *"There is exactly one `UserSessionManager`."*
-- *"No secret is ever read from `process.env` outside `src/config`."*
-
-Every one of those claims is true on the day it is written and unverified from
-the day after. Prose does not fail a build. Six months later the document is
-still confidently asserting something the code stopped doing in March.
-
-That has always been an annoyance. It became a defect multiplier the moment
-coding agents started reading these documents as ground truth. An agent that
-reads *"module X does not exist yet"* will happily build a second X. A reviewer
-who trusts *"this symbol occurs zero times"* skips the grep. Stale documentation
-is now executable in the worst sense: it executes inside someone's head, or
-inside a model's context window, and produces work that has to be thrown away.
-
-spec-guard makes the claims executable in the good sense. It reads directives
-written as ordinary HTML comments - invisible in every Markdown renderer - and
-checks them against the real tree with ripgrep. A stale claim becomes a failing
-build with a line number, not a landmine.
-
-## Quickstart
-
-```bash
-npm install --save-dev @descent-vtt/spec-guard
-npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
-```
-
-**The package is scoped; the command is not.** Once installed, the binary is
-plain `spec-guard`, so `npx spec-guard`, `npm scripts` and a global install all
-use that name:
-
-```bash
-npm install -g @descent-vtt/spec-guard   # then: spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
-```
-
-Without a local install, `npx` needs the full package name - `npx spec-guard`
-on its own would resolve to a different package on the registry:
-
-```bash
-npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
-```
-
-Add a directive to any Markdown file, directly under the sentence it makes
-executable:
-
-```md
-## Decision
-
-Session state has exactly one owner.
-
-<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" -->
-```
-
-Run it:
-
-```bash
-npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --verbose
-```
-
-```text
-spec-guard 1 spec · 1 assertion · ripgrep
-
-✔ docs/adr/0007-sessions.md:5  @assert-count "UserSessionManager" (1 match) in src
-
-1 passed · 7ms
-✔ every spec assertion holds
-```
-
-And when it drifts:
-
-```text
-✖ docs/adr/0007-sessions.md:5  @assert-count
-    "UserSessionManager" must appear exactly 1 time in src
-    expected exactly 1 match, found 3
-      src/auth/UserSessionManager.ts:12:14   export class UserSessionManager {
-      src/legacy/sessions.ts:4:22            import { UserSessionManager } from '../auth';
-      src/workers/refresh.ts:9:10            const manager = new UserSessionManager();
-
-0 passed · 1 failed · 9ms
-```
-
-Exit code 1. The ADR is now a test.
-
-## Directives
-
-Every directive is an HTML comment. It may span multiple lines. Attribute values
-may use double or single quotes, and a bare attribute means `="true"`.
-
-### `@assert-absence` - this symbol is gone
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src/controllers,src/services" symbol="LegacyPaymentGateway" -->
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src/" symbol="STRIPE_SECRET_KEY" expected="0" -->
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src/" symbol="TODO" expected="5" reason="burn down the backlog" -->
-```
-
-Fails when the symbol occurs more than `expected` times (default `0`).
-`max="..."` is accepted as a synonym for `expected`.
-
-### `exclude` - everywhere except
-
-Most real rules are "nowhere except one place", not "not here":
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="process.env" exclude="src/config/**" -->
-```
-
-That is the rule this README opens with - *no secret is ever read from
-`process.env` outside `src/config`* - written as one assertion instead of a
-hand-maintained list of every directory that is not `src/config`.
-
-`exclude` follows gitignore rules, which are **not** the same as `glob`'s:
-
-| Pattern | Excludes |
-| --- | --- |
-| `tests` | any directory or file named `tests`, at any depth, and everything under it |
-| `src/config` | that directory and everything under it |
-| `src/config/**` | the same, written explicitly |
-| `*.test.ts` | any file with that name shape, at any depth |
-
-The difference is deliberate. `glob="*.ts"` filters files, so basename matching
-is what you want; `exclude="tests"` means the directory, because that is what
-people mean when they write it - and it is what `rg -g '!tests'` does. Both
-engines implement the same rule, and a parity matrix asserts they agree on it.
-
-List attributes accept commas or whitespace, so both of these work:
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="src/legacy/** tests" -->
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="src/legacy/**,tests" -->
-```
-
-(A path containing a space therefore cannot be written; there is no quoting
-inside an attribute value.)
-
-### `comments` - the note about a deletion is not the deletion
-
-You delete a symbol and leave the explanation where the next person will look:
-
-```ts
-// LegacyThing was removed in ADR-398; do not reintroduce it.
-```
-
-A plain text search reads that comment as an occurrence, so the assertion that
-keeps the symbol deleted fails on the sentence proving it was deleted. Both
-fixes are bad: delete the note and lose the reason, or delete the rule.
-
-So matches inside comments do not count:
-
-```md
-<!-- comments are ignored by default -->
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="LegacyThing" -->
-
-<!-- ...unless you ask for them -->
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="Copyright" comments="include" -->
-```
-
-`comments="include"` is right for assertions that really are about text — a
-licence header, or a name that must appear nowhere in the repository at all.
-
-Because this is the one thing that can turn a failing run green without anyone
-touching code, a run that passed this way says so:
-
-```
-⚠ 1 match inside comments was not counted; add comments="include" to count it
-
-1 passed · 7ms
-✔ every spec assertion holds
-```
-
-Comment syntax is known for around 59 extensions across 9 families (JS/TS, C,
-C#, Rust, Go, Python-style `#`, SQL-style `--`, markup, and formats with no
-comments at all). Strings are tracked too, because `//` inside a URL is not a
-comment and reading it as one would hide real code. Where spec-guard is unsure —
-an unknown extension, an unterminated literal — the text counts as code, and the
-report says which files it could not classify. A match wrongly kept is a visible
-failure you can argue with; a match wrongly dropped is a lie.
-
-## What gets searched
-
-An assertion is worth exactly as much as the set of files behind it, so
-spec-guard is explicit about that set and never quietly narrows it.
-
-**Four directory names are skipped**, and nothing else:
-
-| Skipped | Why |
-| --- | --- |
-| `.git`, `.hg`, `.svn` | version-control stores hold compressed copies of code you deleted on purpose |
-| `node_modules` | code you did not write, which your architecture rules are not about |
-
-Everything else is searched. That includes **hidden directories** - `.github`,
-`.husky`, `.claude-rules`, `.agents` - because that is where CI, hooks and agent
-rules live, and a rule that cannot see your workflow files is not enforcing much.
-It also includes `dist`, `build`, `out` and `coverage`, because spec-guard
-cannot tell build output from a directory of build scripts, and guessing wrong
-means a rule silently stops covering anything.
-
-`.gitignore` is not consulted. It describes what git should carry, not what a
-rule covers - and ripgrep applies it only inside a git repository, so honouring
-it made the same tree answer differently depending on whether a `.git` directory
-happened to exist above it.
-
-To narrow scope, say so in the assertion:
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="dist coverage" -->
-```
-
-`--no-default-skips` removes even those four, for a run that has to be certain.
-
-### Nothing is skipped quietly
-
-A file spec-guard could not read, or one whose bytes are not text but which
-contained the symbol anyway, is a gap in the answer rather than a detail of it.
-Those are reported, and `--strict` fails on them:
-
-```text
-✖ docs/adr.md:3  @assert-absence
-    "ApiKey" must not appear in .
-    expected no matches, found 0, and 1 file could not be inspected
-    ⚠ 1 match in 1 binary file not counted: build/app.bin
-```
-
-The counts are in `--json` too, as `skipped` on each result.
-
-### `@assert-count` - this symbol occurs exactly / at least / at most N times
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" -->
-<!-- @assert-count target="src/ui/" symbol="PrimaryButton" min="1" -->
-<!-- @assert-count target="src/core/" symbol="DeprecatedHelper" max="3" -->
-<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="Repository" min="2" max="10" -->
-```
-
-Requires `expected`, or `min` and/or `max`. `expected` cannot be combined with
-`min`/`max`.
-
-An exact count is the most brittle assertion in the set: a test that merely
-mentions the symbol will break it. spec-guard does not silently skip test files
-for you - an assertion that quietly ignores part of the tree is the failure mode
-this tool exists to prevent - so say what you mean:
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-count target="src" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" exclude="*.test.ts *.spec.ts" -->
-```
-
-`min="1"` is often the better rule anyway: it says "this exists" without
-breaking every time someone writes a second test.
-
-### `@assert-import-absence` / `@assert-import-count` - dependencies, not text
-
-The rules architecture documents actually contain are usually about
-dependencies, and a text search answers those badly in both directions - it
-matches a mention in a comment, and it misses `export * from '../db'`.
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-import-absence target="src/ui" module="src/db" reason="the UI talks to services, not storage" -->
-<!-- @assert-import-count target="src" module="axios" max="1" -->
-```
-
-These read the dependency rather than the text, in **five languages**:
-
-| Language | Extensions | Reads |
-| --- | --- | --- |
-| JavaScript / TypeScript | `.js .mjs .cjs .jsx .ts .mts .cts .tsx` | `import`, `export ... from`, `require()`, `import()` |
-| Python | `.py .pyi` | `import a.b`, `from .rel import x`, `importlib.import_module("x")` |
-| Go | `.go` | `import "x"` and grouped `import ( ... )`, including aliases and `_` |
-| Rust | `.rs` | `use a::{b, c}` with nested groups, `pub use`, `extern crate` |
-| C# | `.cs .csx` | `using`, `using static`, `global using`, `using X = A.B` |
-
-No parser and no new dependency. JavaScript gets a full tokenizer because a
-module reference can appear anywhere in an expression; the other four are read
-by masking comments and string literals with the classifier from
-[ADR-0006](docs/adr/0006-comment-classification.md) and then reading statements
-off what is left. Tree-sitter would have cost 94 MB unpacked against this
-package's 0.33 MB - [ADR-0008](docs/adr/0008-polyglot-imports.md) has the
-measurements, and the list of things a real parser would genuinely see that
-this does not.
-
-Module patterns are matched against the resolved `/`-separated path *and*
-against the specifier as written, so `module="System.Text.Json"` and
-`module="System/Text/Json"` both work. Matching is case-sensitive, so a rule
-spanning C# and Go needs both conventions:
-`module="app/db/** App/Db/**"`.
-
-The unit counted is **files** that depend on the module. For JavaScript and
-TypeScript it understands:
-
-| Form | Counted |
-| --- | --- |
-| `import { A } from 'x'`, `import 'x'`, `import * as ns from 'x'` | yes |
-| `import type { A } from 'x'` | yes, unless `types="ignore"` |
-| `export * from 'x'`, `export { A } from 'x'` | yes - a re-export is a dependency, and a barrel file is how layering rules usually get broken |
-| `require('x')` | yes, with a literal argument |
-| `import('x')` | yes, with a literal argument |
-| `import(name)`, `require(expr)` | **no - reported, see below** |
-
-Relative specifiers are resolved by path arithmetic, so `module="src/db"`
-matches `../db/client.js` seen from `src/ui/`, and Python's `from ..core import
-x` resolves against the importing file the same way. There is deliberately no
-filesystem resolution: tsconfig `paths` aliases and package `exports` maps are
-not followed, so an alias is written out as itself (`module="@app/db"`).
-
-**It tells you what it could not see.** Roughly 1% of module references in real
-code are dynamic, and about 0.09% of files defeat the tokenizer outright. Both
-are reported rather than counted as clean:
-
-```text
-✔ docs/adr.md:1  @assert-import-absence "src/db" (0 matches) in src/core
-⚠ 1 module reference could not be resolved statically
-⚠   src/core/plugin.ts:1 import(name)
-```
-
-The count is still true of everything that could be seen; the warning is what
-stops it being mistaken for a complete answer. `--strict` turns those warnings
-into failures. Files in scope that are not JavaScript or TypeScript are counted
-and reported too, so a rule pointed at the wrong tree says "analysed 2 of 3
-files" rather than quietly passing - and if *none* of them can be read, the
-assertion fails rather than passing on an empty analysis.
-
-[ADR-0005](docs/adr/0005-import-assertions.md) has the measurements and the
-reasoning behind each boundary.
-
-### `@assert-present` - this file exists
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-present file="SECURITY.md" -->
-<!-- @assert-present file="config/production.json,config/staging.json" -->
-```
-
-Passes when every listed path exists relative to `--root`. Directories count.
-
-### Attributes
-
-| Attribute | Applies to | Meaning |
-| --- | --- | --- |
-| `target` | absence, count | Comma-separated paths to search, relative to `--root`. Default `.` |
-| `symbol` | absence, count | The literal string to search for (or a regex with `regex="true"`) |
-| `file` | present | Comma-separated paths that must exist |
-| `expected` | absence, count | Upper bound for absence; exact count for count |
-| `min` / `max` | count (`max` also on absence) | Inclusive bounds |
-| `glob` | absence, count | Include-only file filters, e.g. `*.ts,*.tsx` (ripgrep `-g` semantics) |
-| `exclude` | absence, count | Paths to leave out, gitignore-style: `src/config/**`, `tests`, `*.test.ts` |
-| `regex` | absence, count | Treat `symbol` as a regular expression |
-| `word` | absence, count | Require word boundaries, so `Primary` does not match `PrimaryButton` |
-| `ignore-case` | absence, count | Case-insensitive matching |
-| `comments` | absence, count | `ignore` (default) or `include` for matches inside comments |
-| `module` | import assertions | Which dependency, matched like `exclude` |
-| `types` | import assertions | `include` (default) or `ignore` for `import type` |
-| `allow-empty` | absence, count, import assertions | Tolerate a scope that holds no files. Off by default - see below |
-| `baseline` | absence, import-absence | Known violations that do not count: `path` or `path:count` |
-| `ratchet` | absence, import-absence | `two-sided` (default) or `one-way` - see below |
-| `reason` | all | Human-readable justification, printed on failure |
-
-Unknown attributes are an error, not a shrug: `expct="1"` fails the run instead
-of silently asserting nothing.
-
-### `allow-empty` - an assertion that covers nothing is a failure
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="services" symbol="Legacy" glob="*.ts" -->
-```
-
-If `services/` holds no `.ts` file, that rule passes every time, forever,
-without inspecting anything - and in the report it is indistinguishable from a
-rule that inspected a thousand files and found nothing. So it fails instead:
-
-```text
-✖ docs/adr.md:3  @assert-absence
-    "Legacy" must not appear in services
-    no files were inspected, so this assertion verified nothing
-    (add allow-empty="true" if that is expected)
-```
-
-The usual causes are a `glob` matching no extension in the tree, an `exclude`
-that swallowed the target, or a directory somebody emptied. Where covering
-nothing yet is the honest state of the world - a rule written before the code
-it guards - `allow-empty="true"` says so, and `--allow-empty-scope` says it for
-a whole run.
-
-### `baseline` - adopting a rule the codebase already breaks
-
-A strict rule introduced into a mature codebase lands on violations that already
-exist. `exclude` turns those into a permanent blind spot, and `expected="5"`
-cannot tell "one fixed, one added" from "nothing happened". A baseline names
-them:
-
-```md
-<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="LegacyGateway"
-     baseline="src/legacy/gateway.ts:2
-               src/legacy/adapter.ts" -->
-```
-
-The rule now holds when no file outside the list matches and no file inside it
-matches more than it declares. A bare path means one match.
-
-**It ratchets in both directions.** New debt fails, obviously. So does debt that
-has been *paid* and left on the list, because an entry the code no longer
-supports is a spec asserting something untrue:
-
-```text
-    expected no matches, found 0; the baseline is out of date and must be
-    pruned: src/legacy/adapter.ts (no longer matches)
-```
-
-The fix is deleting the line the message names. `ratchet="one-way"` relaxes that
-half to a report-only note. Every run says how many matches the baseline
-excluded, because a pass bought by an exemption is never silent.
-
-To adopt a rule on a codebase that already violates it:
-
-```bash
-spec-guard docs/adr.md --print-baseline
-```
-
-prints the attribute that would exempt exactly today's violations, for you to
-paste in. It prints; it does not edit. [ADR-0009](docs/adr/0009-debt-baselines.md)
-explains why that distinction is the whole design, and why there is no `--fix`
-for architecture rules.
-
-## CLI
-
-```bash
-spec-guard [patterns...] [options]
-```
-
-| Option | Description |
-| --- | --- |
-| `-r, --root <path>` | Codebase root that assertions resolve against (default: cwd) |
-| `-v, --verbose` | Print passing assertions too |
-| `--fail-fast` | Stop at the first failing assertion |
-| `--json` | Machine-readable report on stdout (same as `--format json`) |
-| `--format <human\|json\|sarif>` | Output format. `sarif` uploads to GitHub code scanning |
-| `--engine <auto\|rg\|js>` | Search engine (default `auto`: scanner for small trees, ripgrep for big ones) |
-| `--strict` | Treat analysis that could not be completed as a failure |
-| `--allow-missing-targets` | Warn instead of failing when a `target` path does not exist |
-| `--allow-empty-scope` | Warn instead of failing when an assertion inspects no files |
-| `--print-baseline` | Print the `baseline="..."` that would exempt today's violations, and exit |
-| `--no-default-skips` | Search `.git`, `.hg`, `.svn` and `node_modules` too |
-| `--include-specs` | Also count matches inside the spec files themselves |
-| `--max-snippets <n>` | Failure snippets per assertion (default 5) |
-| `--concurrency <n>` | Search passes in flight at once (default 8) |
-| `--allow-empty` | Exit 0 when no spec file matched the patterns (about the run, not an assertion) |
-| `--color` / `--no-color` | Force colour on or off (`NO_COLOR` honoured) |
-
-Patterns are expanded by spec-guard itself, so quoted globs behave identically
-on Windows, macOS and Linux. A directory expands to the Markdown files in it.
-
-### Exit codes
-
-| Code | Meaning |
-| --- | --- |
-| `0` | Every assertion held |
-| `1` | An assertion failed, or a directive was malformed |
-| `2` | spec-guard could not run: bad usage, no spec files matched, `--engine rg` with no ripgrep |
-
-## CI integration
-
-```yaml
-# .github/workflows/specs.yml
-name: Specs
-on: [push, pull_request]
-
-jobs:
-  spec-guard:
-    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
-    steps:
-      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
-      - uses: actions/setup-node@v5
-        with:
-          node-version: '22'
-      - run: npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" "README.md" --verbose
-```
-
-That job needs nothing else installed. GitHub-hosted runners do **not** ship
-ripgrep on `PATH` - spec-guard's own CI reports `engine: javascript` there - so
-the fallback is what actually runs, and it produces identical results. If your
-repository is large enough that you want ripgrep's speed, install it first:
-
-```yaml
-      - run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y ripgrep
-```
-
-Or point spec-guard at a binary you already have with `SPEC_GUARD_RG=/path/to/rg`.
-
-As a pre-commit hook (assuming a local install, so the bare command resolves):
-
-```bash
-npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --fail-fast
-```
-
-### Annotations on the pull request
-
-`--format sarif` writes a SARIF 2.1.0 document, which GitHub turns into a
-comment on the offending line:
-
-```yaml
-      - run: npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --format sarif > spec-guard.sarif || true
-      - uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
-        with:
-          sarif_file: spec-guard.sarif
-          category: spec-guard
-```
-
-That job needs `permissions: security-events: write`. One alert per broken rule
-rather than per match - the thing that broke is the rule - anchored on the first
-offending line, with the directive as a related location because that is often
-where the fix goes. Alerts carry a fingerprint derived from what the assertion
-is about rather than where its matches landed, so inserting a line above a
-violation does not close the alert and open a new one.
-
-**There is no language server, and that is a decision rather than a gap.**
-spec-guard's claims are about a whole repository - "this symbol appears nowhere
-in `src`" - and a language server is handed one buffer at a time. Answering a
-repository-wide question on every keystroke means rescanning the tree on every
-keystroke; the alternative is answering a smaller question and calling it the
-same one. The CLI does a full run of this repository in about 130 ms, so a
-pre-commit hook or a watch loop already closes the feedback gap without a
-daemon, an extension per editor, or a protocol version matrix.
-
-## How it works
-
-```text
-parser  ──▶ Directive[] ──▶ runner ──▶ Assertion[] ──▶ engine ──▶ AssertionResult[] ──▶ reporter
-(pure)                      (I/O)                     (rg | js)                        (pure)
-```
-
-1. **Parse.** Markdown is scanned for `<!-- @assert-* -->` comments. Fenced code
-   blocks and inline code spans are masked first, so documentation that shows
-   the syntax (like this README) never executes it.
-2. **Resolve.** Each directive becomes a typed assertion. Bad numbers, unknown
-   booleans, unknown attributes and paths escaping `--root` are rejected here,
-   before any I/O.
-3. **Search.** Assertions that share a target list and flags are answered by a
-   *single* pass over the tree.
-4. **Report.** ANSI output with the spec location, the expectation, the observed
-   count, and up to five real snippets; or JSON for tooling.
-
-### Performance
-
-Scanning a tree costs about the same whether you look for one symbol or twenty,
-so spec-guard groups assertions by target set and flags and answers each group
-in one pass.
-
-`auto` then picks between the two engines **per search group**, because they
-have different shapes of cost: ripgrep is dominated by process startup and
-barely notices tree size, while the built-in scanner has no startup cost and
-grows linearly. Starting a process to search a handful of files is a bad trade.
-Re-measured for 0.4.0 on Windows 11 / Node 24, median of three, one symbol over
-a synthetic tree:
-
-| files | scanner | ripgrep | |
-| --- | --- | --- | --- |
-| 100 | **17 ms** | 214 ms | scanner, 12.9x |
-| 500 | **70 ms** | 263 ms | scanner, 3.8x |
-| 1,000 | 216 ms | **181 ms** | ripgrep, 1.2x |
-| 3,000 | 735 ms | **222 ms** | ripgrep, 3.3x |
-| 5,000 | 1,046 ms | **241 ms** | ripgrep, 4.3x |
-
-The decision uses a bounded enumeration as its probe: spec-guard walks the
-target set until it either finishes - in which case the file list is already in
-hand and the scanner runs against it, with no process and no second walk - or
-exceeds a budget, in which case ripgrep takes over. The crossover above sits
-between 500 and 1,000 files, which is what the Windows budget of 512 encodes;
-on Linux it is far lower, because what is really being measured is process
-spawn cost. `scripts/bench-engines.mjs` reproduces this, and
-[ADR-0004](docs/adr/0004-adaptive-engine.md) has the full tables.
-
-Treat single measurements from one machine with suspicion. On the development
-machine used here, an absence assertion over 2,000 files measures 303 ms with
-the scanner and 399 ms with ripgrep, but ripgrep's own spread across five runs
-was 379-1039 ms - wide enough that the two are not really distinguishable at
-that size. The order-of-magnitude differences at the ends of the table are the
-part worth trusting.
-
-0.5.0 added four language analysers, a scope probe on every assertion and a
-baseline pass, so the obvious question is what that cost. Both versions were run
-against the same synthetic 1,000-file tree, alternating rounds inside one
-process so that this machine's load - which varies by a factor of two over a
-session - falls on both equally:
-
-| | median | min |
-| --- | --- | --- |
-| 0.4.0 | 908.8 ms | 493.7 ms |
-| 0.5.0 | 913.4 ms | 496.6 ms |
-
-0.5% apart, against a run-to-run spread far wider than that. The two versions
-also returned identical counts for all five assertions, which is the more
-useful half of the result.
-
-0.5.1 replaced three hand-maintained "are these the same question" field lists
-with one, and the surviving version serialises the exclude set where the old one
-compared it by identity - a hot path made slower on purpose, so it was measured
-rather than assumed. Same tree, same alternating rounds:
-
-| | median | min |
-| --- | --- | --- |
-| 0.5.0 | 925.1 ms | 432.1 ms |
-| 0.5.1 | 830.6 ms | 428.5 ms |
-
-The medians are 10% apart and the minima are level, which is this machine's
-noise band doing most of the talking - the honest reading is "no regression",
-not "10% faster". The plausible mechanism for any real gain is that the runner
-now groups by the engine's own definition of a shared pass, so a group of five
-where two requests disagree is run as three and two rather than being refused
-whole and run as five. Counts identical across all five assertions, again.
-
-Two honest caveats:
-
-- **The reported engine is the one that ran, not the one available.** On a small
-  repository `--json` reports `"engine": "javascript"` even with ripgrep
-  installed. That is the optimisation working, not a failure to find `rg`.
-- **The engines are one implementation, not two that agree.** This used to say
-  that ripgrep was the reference and the scanner merely matched it "on
-  everything the test suite covers", with a note that the two treated
-  `.gitignore` and ignored directories differently and that you should pin an
-  engine if it mattered. It did matter: on a tree with eight copies of a symbol
-  the scanner found two and ripgrep found four. Since 0.4.0 ripgrep answers only
-  *which files contain this text*, and the scanner does all the counting,
-  classification and reporting for both. `--engine` now changes how long a run
-  takes and nothing about its verdict, and the suite asserts that on trees built
-  from every case that used to split them.
-
-## Programmatic API
-
-```ts
-import { runSpecGuard, formatReport } from '@descent-vtt/spec-guard';
-
-const report = await runSpecGuard({
-  patterns: ['docs/**/*.md'],
-  root: process.cwd(),
-});
-
-if (!report.ok) {
-  console.error(formatReport(report, { color: true, verbose: false }));
-  process.exitCode = 1;
-}
-```
-
-`runSpecGuard` returns the full report: every assertion, its bounds, the
-observed count, match locations, warnings and timings. The parser
-(`parseDirectives`) and reporter (`formatReport`, `formatJson`) are pure
-functions you can use on their own.
-
-## Design decisions
-
-This tool was specified loosely and built opinionatedly. Where the
-implementation departs from the obvious reading of the brief, here is why.
-
-**Spec files are excluded from their own searches.** An ADR that says
-"`LegacyGateway` must not appear" contains the string `LegacyGateway`. Without
-this rule, absence assertions would fail on the document asserting them - the
-single most confusing possible first-run experience. `--include-specs` restores
-the naive behaviour, and counts the prose of your specs; the directives
-themselves stay uncounted, because a directive is an HTML comment and a rule
-whose own text trips it can never be satisfied. `comments="include"` counts even
-those.
-
-**Fenced code and inline code are masked before parsing.** A README documenting
-the syntax must not execute it. Masking preserves byte offsets, so reported line
-numbers stay exact. (This is subtle: pairing backtick runs the naive way
-desynchronises after a stray unmatched run and un-masks real prose. spec-guard
-uses CommonMark's equal-length pairing rule, and there is a regression test.)
-
-**Malformed directives fail the run.** A typo like `expct="1"` could be ignored
-as "not a directive". It is instead an error, because a spec tool whose typos
-silently assert nothing is worse than no spec tool.
-
-**Four attributes were added beyond the original brief** - `word`, `regex`,
-`glob` and `ignore-case` - because `symbol="Primary"` matching `PrimaryButton`
-is the first thing every user hits, and `reason` because a failure message
-should say *why* the rule exists.
-
-**`min`/`max` are accepted on `@assert-absence` too.** "At most 5 TODOs" is an
-absence claim with a budget, and burning a budget down is a real workflow.
-
-**The engine is detected lazily.** Probing with `rg --version` up front costs a
-process spawn (~27 ms on Windows) on the critical path of every run, including
-runs where ripgrep is missing. Discovering its absence from the first real
-search is free.
-
-**Assertions that share a target list share one pass over the tree.** This used
-to need a proof: merging literals into a ripgrep alternation can lose matches
-through containment (`Primary` / `PrimaryButton`) and dovetailing (`abc` / `cd`
-in `abcd`), so spec-guard checked for both and fell back to separate passes.
-Since 0.4.0 it does not need the proof, because ripgrep no longer counts
-anything - it answers only *which files contain this text*, and the scanner
-counts each pattern separately over the shared file contents. The batching
-checks were deleted along with the risk they guarded.
-
-**Exit code 2 exists.** "Your specs failed" and "spec-guard could not run" are
-different facts, and CI should be able to tell them apart.
-
-**A missing `target` fails the run.** It used to warn and search what was left,
-which meant an assertion pointed at a renamed directory searched nothing, found
-nothing, and reported success — the exact shape of a green check that verified
-nothing. `--allow-missing-targets` restores the old behaviour for repositories
-where a path is legitimately optional.
-
-**Hidden directories are searched, and `.gitignore` is not consulted.** An
-audit of 0.3.0 found the tool reporting a clean pass on a repository whose
-forbidden symbol sat in `.github/workflows/ci.yml`; the scanner and ripgrep also
-disagreed with each other, finding two matches and four on the same tree. Scope
-is now one policy that both engines are driven by, the skip list is four names
-long, and anything spec-guard could not inspect is reported rather than assumed
-clean ([ADR-0007](docs/adr/0007-search-scope.md)).
-
-**Comments are excluded by default, and the exclusion is reported.** Counting
-the note that records a deletion as an occurrence of the thing deleted punishes
-the documentation this tool exists to keep honest ([ADR-0006](docs/adr/0006-comment-classification.md)).
-The reverse risk — a rule that quietly stops checking anything because every
-match now sits in a comment — is why every run says how many matches it dropped.
-
-**An assertion that inspected no files fails.** It is the same defect as a
-missing `target` seen from a different angle: a rule whose scope is empty passes
-forever and reads exactly like a rule that found nothing. Turning this on found
-a vacuous assertion inside this repository's own test suite on the first run.
-`allow-empty="true"` covers the honest case of a rule written before the code it
-guards.
-
-**Four more languages, and no parser.** Import assertions read Python, Go, Rust
-and C# as well as JavaScript. Not by adding four tokenizers - by reusing the
-comment and string lexer that already existed, masking the source with it, and
-reading statements off what is left. Tree-sitter would have been the modern
-answer and costs 94 MB unpacked against this package's 0.33 MB; the four things
-a real parser would genuinely see that this cannot are listed in
-[ADR-0008](docs/adr/0008-polyglot-imports.md) rather than glossed over.
-
-**There is no `--fix`.** Every edit a machine can make to a failing boundary
-assertion is an edit that records the rule no longer holding: widen the bound,
-add an exclusion, append to the baseline, insert an ignore comment. A one-flag
-path from red to green is a bad button for a person and a much worse one for an
-agent whose loop terminates on a green build. `--print-baseline` prints what you
-could paste; it does not paste it ([ADR-0009](docs/adr/0009-debt-baselines.md)).
-
-## spec-guard checks itself
-
-The invariants in [`docs/adr/0001-invariants.md`](docs/adr/0001-invariants.md)
-and [`docs/adr/0002-directive-format.md`](docs/adr/0002-directive-format.md) are
-executed against this repository on every CI run. The CLI never calls
-`console.log`, nothing outside the engine spawns a process, and the parser and
-reporter never touch the filesystem - because those documents say so, and the
-build fails if they stop being true.
-
-This README is executable too:
-
-<!-- @assert-present file="src/parser.ts,src/engine.ts,src/reporter.ts,src/runner.ts,src/cli.ts,src/comments.ts" -->
-
-## Development
-
-```bash
-npm install
-npm run build      # tsc -> dist/
-npm test           # vitest
-npm run test:coverage
-npm run test:mutation  # stryker (~16 min in CI; over two hours locally)
-npm run lint       # tsc --noEmit
-npm run selfcheck  # run spec-guard on its own docs
-```
-
-The test suite runs every assertion case against **both** engines and asserts
-they agree, so the fallback cannot quietly drift from ripgrep. `@vscode/ripgrep`
-is a devDependency purely so that the ripgrep path is exercised on every
-platform in CI, including machines that have no `rg` on PATH; it ships a
-prebuilt binary and is never a runtime dependency.
-
-### Mutation testing
-
-Coverage says a line ran. It does not say an assertion would notice if the line
-behaved differently. This repository measures the difference: line coverage is
-**100%**, and **97.65%** of 4,299 mutants are killed in CI, with no file below
-95%. The second number is the one worth reading - and it is the ceiling, not a
-way-point: every surviving mutant has been checked individually and the 101 that
-are left produce byte-identical output.
-
-That gap is the point. The first run scored 77.23%, and the weakest file was the
-reporter at 65.48% - not because it lacked tests, but because its tests were
-almost all `toContain` against colourless output. A mutant could prepend a junk
-line, drop a colour, or turn `remaining > 0` into `remaining >= 0` and every
-test still passed. Exact whole-output comparison took it to 87.30%. The engine
-and the walker were then rewritten for testability rather than papered over with
-more tests, which is what moved them from 75%/78% to 83%/93%.
-
-The most recent pass took every module to its ceiling, and its value was not the
-number. Writing down four contracts that had only ever been checked through
-their effect on a match count turned up four wrong answers: two assertions on
-one symbol answered each other's comment handling, an unreadable directory went
-unreported on any repository small enough to scan in process, snippets from CRLF
-files carried a carriage return into the terminal, and an invalid pattern was
-reported with its error message twice. Seventeen branches turned out to be
-unable to decide anything and were deleted rather than pinned; thirty-five
-negative controls - each defect reintroduced one at a time - confirm the suite
-goes red for every one, and the changes meant to be invisible were checked
-against 6,976 files of real code, reference for reference, against the published
-0.5.0 build.
-
-Then the survivors themselves were checked rather than excused. All 130 were
-applied one at a time and run through a fingerprint of 4,176 observations, and
-**29 of them turned out not to be equivalent at all** - a Rust brace counter
-that only matters when a second statement follows, a type-only test that marks
-`import A, { B } from 'x'` type-only when loosened, a comment check that opens a
-block comment on `2*3`. All 29 are now tested and all 29 die. All of it is in
-[ADR-0003](docs/adr/0003-mutation-testing.md), including a Stryker limitation
-found on the way: a mutant that stops a test file *loading* is reported as
-survived even though the suite is in fact killing it.
-
-CI runs it in **two tiers**, both gated at 97%. Branches and pull requests run
-Stryker incrementally, reusing the verdict for any mutant whose source and
-covering tests are both unchanged. Pushes to `main`, the weekly schedule and
-manual runs do the full sweep, which is the authoritative number and the one
-quoted above; a full sweep is also what publishes the cache the branches start
-from, so an incremental verdict can never be built on another incremental
-verdict.
-
-The full sweep was 6m54s at 2,118 mutants, 15m51s at 3,493, and is 17m at
-4,299. That growth is why the tiers exist: a check that gets quietly more
-expensive every release is a check somebody eventually proposes lowering.
-
-Run it locally with `npm run test:mutation` if you like, but do not calibrate
-anything on the result: on the Windows machine this was developed on the same
-suite takes over two hours against 21 minutes hosted, and it scores *higher*,
-because far more mutants hang there and Stryker counts a hang as a kill. Linux
-CI is the measurement.
-
-Eight cautionary tales are in [ADR-0003](docs/adr/0003-mutation-testing.md): a
-run whose score was pure fiction because the mutants were never activated, a
-tuning knob that lifted the score six points without adding a test, the platform
-gap above, the baseline being re-anchored when a tokenizer arrived, and a score
-that rose partly because code carrying hard-to-kill mutants was deleted rather
-than because tests improved, and the 0.5.0 sweep that failed the build at 83.77%
-because a suite can be thorough about the thing it was written to test and
-silent about the machinery underneath it, and the excuse that let the tokenizer
-sit at 73% for three releases because "that kind of code carries more equivalent
-mutants" sounded like judgement rather than an unchecked assumption - along with
-the real bugs that chasing the gate uncovered, and a class of mutant the runner
-reports as survived while the suite is in fact killing it.
-
-## Requirements
-
-- Node.js 22 or newer (native ESM)
-- ripgrep optional - used when present, replaced by a built-in scanner when not
-
-## License
-
-MIT
+# spec-guard
+
+**Executable architecture assertions for Markdown specs & ADRs.**
+
+Turn the claims your design documents make about your codebase into assertions
+that run in CI, in milliseconds, with no runtime dependencies.
+
+```md
+The retired payment gateway is gone from the service layer.
+
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src/services" symbol="LegacyPaymentGateway" -->
+```
+
+If someone reintroduces `LegacyPaymentGateway`, CI fails and points at the line
+of the ADR that promised it was gone.
+
+---
+
+## Why this exists
+
+Architecture Decision Records, RFCs and technical briefs are full of hard claims
+about a repository:
+
+- *"`LegacyPaymentGateway` no longer exists anywhere in the service layer."*
+- *"There is exactly one `UserSessionManager`."*
+- *"No secret is ever read from `process.env` outside `src/config`."*
+
+Every one of those claims is true on the day it is written and unverified from
+the day after. Prose does not fail a build. Six months later the document is
+still confidently asserting something the code stopped doing in March.
+
+That has always been an annoyance. It became a defect multiplier the moment
+coding agents started reading these documents as ground truth. An agent that
+reads *"module X does not exist yet"* will happily build a second X. A reviewer
+who trusts *"this symbol occurs zero times"* skips the grep. Stale documentation
+is now executable in the worst sense: it executes inside someone's head, or
+inside a model's context window, and produces work that has to be thrown away.
+
+spec-guard makes the claims executable in the good sense. It reads directives
+written as ordinary HTML comments - invisible in every Markdown renderer - and
+checks them against the real tree with ripgrep. A stale claim becomes a failing
+build with a line number, not a landmine.
+
+## Quickstart
+
+```bash
+npm install --save-dev @descent-vtt/spec-guard
+npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
+```
+
+**The package is scoped; the command is not.** Once installed, the binary is
+plain `spec-guard`, so `npx spec-guard`, `npm scripts` and a global install all
+use that name:
+
+```bash
+npm install -g @descent-vtt/spec-guard   # then: spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
+```
+
+Without a local install, `npx` needs the full package name - `npx spec-guard`
+on its own would resolve to a different package on the registry:
+
+```bash
+npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md"
+```
+
+Add a directive to any Markdown file, directly under the sentence it makes
+executable:
+
+```md
+## Decision
+
+Session state has exactly one owner.
+
+<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" -->
+```
+
+Run it:
+
+```bash
+npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --verbose
+```
+
+```text
+spec-guard 1 spec · 1 assertion · ripgrep
+
+✔ docs/adr/0007-sessions.md:5  @assert-count "UserSessionManager" (1 match) in src
+
+1 passed · 7ms
+✔ every spec assertion holds
+```
+
+And when it drifts:
+
+```text
+✖ docs/adr/0007-sessions.md:5  @assert-count
+    "UserSessionManager" must appear exactly 1 time in src
+    expected exactly 1 match, found 3
+      src/auth/UserSessionManager.ts:12:14   export class UserSessionManager {
+      src/legacy/sessions.ts:4:22            import { UserSessionManager } from '../auth';
+      src/workers/refresh.ts:9:10            const manager = new UserSessionManager();
+
+0 passed · 1 failed · 9ms
+```
+
+Exit code 1. The ADR is now a test.
+
+## Directives
+
+Every directive is an HTML comment. It may span multiple lines. Attribute values
+may use double or single quotes, and a bare attribute means `="true"`.
+
+### `@assert-absence` - this symbol is gone
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src/controllers,src/services" symbol="LegacyPaymentGateway" -->
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src/" symbol="STRIPE_SECRET_KEY" expected="0" -->
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src/" symbol="TODO" expected="5" reason="burn down the backlog" -->
+```
+
+Fails when the symbol occurs more than `expected` times (default `0`).
+`max="..."` is accepted as a synonym for `expected`.
+
+### `exclude` - everywhere except
+
+Most real rules are "nowhere except one place", not "not here":
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="process.env" exclude="src/config/**" -->
+```
+
+That is the rule this README opens with - *no secret is ever read from
+`process.env` outside `src/config`* - written as one assertion instead of a
+hand-maintained list of every directory that is not `src/config`.
+
+`exclude` follows gitignore rules, which are **not** the same as `glob`'s:
+
+| Pattern | Excludes |
+| --- | --- |
+| `tests` | any directory or file named `tests`, at any depth, and everything under it |
+| `src/config` | that directory and everything under it |
+| `src/config/**` | the same, written explicitly |
+| `*.test.ts` | any file with that name shape, at any depth |
+
+The difference is deliberate. `glob="*.ts"` filters files, so basename matching
+is what you want; `exclude="tests"` means the directory, because that is what
+people mean when they write it - and it is what `rg -g '!tests'` does. Both
+engines implement the same rule, and a parity matrix asserts they agree on it.
+
+List attributes accept commas or whitespace, so both of these work:
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="src/legacy/** tests" -->
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="src/legacy/**,tests" -->
+```
+
+(A path containing a space therefore cannot be written; there is no quoting
+inside an attribute value.)
+
+### `comments` - the note about a deletion is not the deletion
+
+You delete a symbol and leave the explanation where the next person will look:
+
+```ts
+// LegacyThing was removed in ADR-398; do not reintroduce it.
+```
+
+A plain text search reads that comment as an occurrence, so the assertion that
+keeps the symbol deleted fails on the sentence proving it was deleted. Both
+fixes are bad: delete the note and lose the reason, or delete the rule.
+
+So matches inside comments do not count:
+
+```md
+<!-- comments are ignored by default -->
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="LegacyThing" -->
+
+<!-- ...unless you ask for them -->
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="Copyright" comments="include" -->
+```
+
+`comments="include"` is right for assertions that really are about text — a
+licence header, or a name that must appear nowhere in the repository at all.
+
+Because this is the one thing that can turn a failing run green without anyone
+touching code, a run that passed this way says so:
+
+```
+⚠ 1 match inside comments was not counted; add comments="include" to count it
+
+1 passed · 7ms
+✔ every spec assertion holds
+```
+
+Comment syntax is known for around 59 extensions across 9 families (JS/TS, C,
+C#, Rust, Go, Python-style `#`, SQL-style `--`, markup, and formats with no
+comments at all). Strings are tracked too, because `//` inside a URL is not a
+comment and reading it as one would hide real code. Where spec-guard is unsure —
+an unknown extension, an unterminated literal — the text counts as code, and the
+report says which files it could not classify. A match wrongly kept is a visible
+failure you can argue with; a match wrongly dropped is a lie.
+
+## What gets searched
+
+An assertion is worth exactly as much as the set of files behind it, so
+spec-guard is explicit about that set and never quietly narrows it.
+
+**Four directory names are skipped**, and nothing else:
+
+| Skipped | Why |
+| --- | --- |
+| `.git`, `.hg`, `.svn` | version-control stores hold compressed copies of code you deleted on purpose |
+| `node_modules` | code you did not write, which your architecture rules are not about |
+
+Everything else is searched. That includes **hidden directories** - `.github`,
+`.husky`, `.claude-rules`, `.agents` - because that is where CI, hooks and agent
+rules live, and a rule that cannot see your workflow files is not enforcing much.
+It also includes `dist`, `build`, `out` and `coverage`, because spec-guard
+cannot tell build output from a directory of build scripts, and guessing wrong
+means a rule silently stops covering anything.
+
+`.gitignore` is not consulted. It describes what git should carry, not what a
+rule covers - and ripgrep applies it only inside a git repository, so honouring
+it made the same tree answer differently depending on whether a `.git` directory
+happened to exist above it.
+
+To narrow scope, say so in the assertion:
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="TODO" exclude="dist coverage" -->
+```
+
+`--no-default-skips` removes even those four, for a run that has to be certain.
+
+### Nothing is skipped quietly
+
+A file spec-guard could not read, or one whose bytes are not text but which
+contained the symbol anyway, is a gap in the answer rather than a detail of it.
+Those are reported, and `--strict` fails on them:
+
+```text
+✖ docs/adr.md:3  @assert-absence
+    "ApiKey" must not appear in .
+    expected no matches, found 0, and 1 file could not be inspected
+    ⚠ 1 match in 1 binary file not counted: build/app.bin
+```
+
+The counts are in `--json` too, as `skipped` on each result.
+
+### `@assert-count` - this symbol occurs exactly / at least / at most N times
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" -->
+<!-- @assert-count target="src/ui/" symbol="PrimaryButton" min="1" -->
+<!-- @assert-count target="src/core/" symbol="DeprecatedHelper" max="3" -->
+<!-- @assert-count target="src/" symbol="Repository" min="2" max="10" -->
+```
+
+Requires `expected`, or `min` and/or `max`. `expected` cannot be combined with
+`min`/`max`.
+
+An exact count is the most brittle assertion in the set: a test that merely
+mentions the symbol will break it. spec-guard does not silently skip test files
+for you - an assertion that quietly ignores part of the tree is the failure mode
+this tool exists to prevent - so say what you mean:
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-count target="src" symbol="UserSessionManager" expected="1" exclude="*.test.ts *.spec.ts" -->
+```
+
+`min="1"` is often the better rule anyway: it says "this exists" without
+breaking every time someone writes a second test.
+
+### `@assert-import-absence` / `@assert-import-count` - dependencies, not text
+
+The rules architecture documents actually contain are usually about
+dependencies, and a text search answers those badly in both directions - it
+matches a mention in a comment, and it misses `export * from '../db'`.
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-import-absence target="src/ui" module="src/db" reason="the UI talks to services, not storage" -->
+<!-- @assert-import-count target="src" module="axios" max="1" -->
+```
+
+These read the dependency rather than the text, in **five languages**:
+
+| Language | Extensions | Reads |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| JavaScript / TypeScript | `.js .mjs .cjs .jsx .ts .mts .cts .tsx` | `import`, `export ... from`, `require()`, `import()` |
+| Python | `.py .pyi` | `import a.b`, `from .rel import x`, `importlib.import_module("x")` |
+| Go | `.go` | `import "x"` and grouped `import ( ... )`, including aliases and `_` |
+| Rust | `.rs` | `use a::{b, c}` with nested groups, `pub use`, `extern crate` |
+| C# | `.cs .csx` | `using`, `using static`, `global using`, `using X = A.B` |
+
+No parser and no new dependency. JavaScript gets a full tokenizer because a
+module reference can appear anywhere in an expression; the other four are read
+by masking comments and string literals with the classifier from
+[ADR-0006](docs/adr/0006-comment-classification.md) and then reading statements
+off what is left. Tree-sitter would have cost 94 MB unpacked against this
+package's 0.33 MB - [ADR-0008](docs/adr/0008-polyglot-imports.md) has the
+measurements, and the list of things a real parser would genuinely see that
+this does not.
+
+Module patterns are matched against the resolved `/`-separated path *and*
+against the specifier as written, so `module="System.Text.Json"` and
+`module="System/Text/Json"` both work. Matching is case-sensitive, so a rule
+spanning C# and Go needs both conventions:
+`module="app/db/** App/Db/**"`.
+
+The unit counted is **files** that depend on the module. For JavaScript and
+TypeScript it understands:
+
+| Form | Counted |
+| --- | --- |
+| `import { A } from 'x'`, `import 'x'`, `import * as ns from 'x'` | yes |
+| `import type { A } from 'x'` | yes, unless `types="ignore"` |
+| `export * from 'x'`, `export { A } from 'x'` | yes - a re-export is a dependency, and a barrel file is how layering rules usually get broken |
+| `require('x')` | yes, with a literal argument |
+| `import('x')` | yes, with a literal argument |
+| `import(name)`, `require(expr)` | **no - reported, see below** |
+
+Relative specifiers are resolved by path arithmetic, so `module="src/db"`
+matches `../db/client.js` seen from `src/ui/`, and Python's `from ..core import
+x` resolves against the importing file the same way. There is deliberately no
+filesystem resolution: tsconfig `paths` aliases and package `exports` maps are
+not followed, so an alias is written out as itself (`module="@app/db"`).
+
+**It tells you what it could not see.** Roughly 1% of module references in real
+code are dynamic, and about 0.09% of files defeat the tokenizer outright. Both
+are reported rather than counted as clean:
+
+```text
+✔ docs/adr.md:1  @assert-import-absence "src/db" (0 matches) in src/core
+⚠ 1 module reference could not be resolved statically
+⚠   src/core/plugin.ts:1 import(name)
+```
+
+The count is still true of everything that could be seen; the warning is what
+stops it being mistaken for a complete answer. `--strict` turns those warnings
+into failures. Files in scope that are not JavaScript or TypeScript are counted
+and reported too, so a rule pointed at the wrong tree says "analysed 2 of 3
+files" rather than quietly passing - and if *none* of them can be read, the
+assertion fails rather than passing on an empty analysis.
+
+[ADR-0005](docs/adr/0005-import-assertions.md) has the measurements and the
+reasoning behind each boundary.
+
+### `@assert-layers` - dependencies point one way
+
+"Domain must not depend on infrastructure" across three layers is three
+import rules, and across five it is ten - a triangle nobody writes down, and
+the row somebody forgets when a layer is added. One directive states the order:
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-layers target="src" order="src/domain, src/application, src/infrastructure" -->
+```
+
+**Order runs from the layer everything may depend on to the layer that may
+depend on everything.** A file may import from its own layer and from any layer
+listed before it; importing from a layer listed after it is a violation, and
+the report says which way it went:
+
+```text
+✖ docs/architecture.md:12  @assert-layers
+    src must keep its layers in order, src/domain < src/application < src/infrastructure
+    expected no violating files, found 1
+      src/domain/user.ts:3:1  src/domain -> src/infrastructure: import ../infrastructure/db.js
+```
+
+A layer is a pattern in the same language as `module=` and `exclude`, which is
+why this works in all five languages above: `src/domain` is anchored at the
+root, and a bare `domain` matches that segment anywhere - in `src/domain/user.ts`,
+in Python's `app.domain.user`, in Rust's `crate::domain::user`. A layer may also
+be a single file; `order="src/parser.ts, src/cli.ts"` understands that
+`./parser.js` is `src/parser.ts`.
+
+The unit is files, and `max`, `types`, `exclude` and `baseline` mean what they
+mean on `@assert-import-absence`. Three things fail rather than pass, because
+each is a rule that would otherwise check less than it says: a layer that
+matches no file (`order="domain, aplication"`), a file two layers both claim,
+and a target that does not exist. Files that no layer claims are left alone and
+counted, so a directory nobody assigned shows up as a number rather than as
+silence.
+
+### `@assert-import-cycle` - no file depends on itself
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-import-cycle target="src" types="ignore" -->
+```
+
+A cycle is reported as one concrete loop, with the line of every import on it:
+
+```text
+✖ docs/architecture.md:20  @assert-import-cycle
+    src must have no import cycles (type-only imports ignored)
+    expected no import cycles, found 1
+      src/orders/cart.ts:4:1  src/orders/cart.ts:4 -> src/billing/invoice.ts:2 -> src/orders/cart.ts
+```
+
+The count is **knots, not loops**: a set of files each reachable from the others
+counts once however many routes run around it, so adding an import inside a
+tangle that already exists does not move the number. `max="2"` adopts the rule
+on a codebase that already has two, and fails on the third.
+
+`types="ignore"` asks the runtime question - erased imports create no load-order
+cycle - and the default asks the coupling one. This repository needs both: its
+`src/` has exactly one cycle, and it is type-only.
+
+**Cycles are JavaScript and TypeScript only**, because a cycle needs to know that
+`./b.js` *is* `src/b.ts`, and in the other four languages an import names a
+module, package or namespace rather than a file. A scope with no JavaScript or
+TypeScript in it fails instead of reporting no cycles. The resolver is a short,
+fixed table - the TypeScript source of an emitted `.js`, the path as written,
+the path with each extension, the directory's `index` - checked against files
+the walk already found, never against the disk.
+
+It says what it could not follow. An import that should have become an edge and
+did not - a relative path matching no file, or an alias like `@/db` or
+`#internal/db` that cannot be a package - is reported, and fails the run under
+`--strict`. An alias spelled like a real package, `@app/db` through `tsconfig`
+paths, is the one thing it cannot see and cannot report: that would mean
+reading `tsconfig.json`, which is the resolver
+[ADR-0011](docs/adr/0011-layers-and-cycles.md) declines to become, for the
+reasons it gives.
+
+### `@assert-present` - this file exists
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-present file="SECURITY.md" -->
+<!-- @assert-present file="config/production.json,config/staging.json" -->
+```
+
+Passes when every listed path exists relative to `--root`. Directories count.
+
+### Attributes
+
+| Attribute | Applies to | Meaning |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| `target` | absence, count | Comma-separated paths to search, relative to `--root`. Default `.` |
+| `symbol` | absence, count | The literal string to search for (or a regex with `regex="true"`) |
+| `file` | present | Comma-separated paths that must exist |
+| `expected` | absence, count | Upper bound for absence; exact count for count |
+| `min` / `max` | count (`max` also on absence) | Inclusive bounds |
+| `glob` | absence, count | Include-only file filters, e.g. `*.ts,*.tsx` (ripgrep `-g` semantics) |
+| `exclude` | absence, count | Paths to leave out, gitignore-style: `src/config/**`, `tests`, `*.test.ts` |
+| `regex` | absence, count | Treat `symbol` as a regular expression |
+| `word` | absence, count | Require word boundaries, so `Primary` does not match `PrimaryButton` |
+| `ignore-case` | absence, count | Case-insensitive matching |
+| `comments` | absence, count | `ignore` (default) or `include` for matches inside comments |
+| `module` | import-absence, import-count | Which dependency, matched like `exclude` |
+| `order` | layers | The layers, from the one everything may depend on to the one that may depend on everything |
+| `types` | import assertions, layers, cycles | `include` (default) or `ignore` for `import type` |
+| `allow-empty` | absence, count, import assertions, layers, cycles | Tolerate a scope that holds no files, or a layer that matches none. Off by default - see below |
+| `baseline` | absence, import-absence, layers | Known violations that do not count: `path` or `path:count` |
+| `ratchet` | absence, import-absence, layers | `two-sided` (default) or `one-way` - see below |
+| `reason` | all | Human-readable justification, printed on failure |
+
+Unknown attributes are an error, not a shrug: `expct="1"` fails the run instead
+of silently asserting nothing.
+
+### `allow-empty` - an assertion that covers nothing is a failure
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="services" symbol="Legacy" glob="*.ts" -->
+```
+
+If `services/` holds no `.ts` file, that rule passes every time, forever,
+without inspecting anything - and in the report it is indistinguishable from a
+rule that inspected a thousand files and found nothing. So it fails instead:
+
+```text
+✖ docs/adr.md:3  @assert-absence
+    "Legacy" must not appear in services
+    no files were inspected, so this assertion verified nothing
+    (add allow-empty="true" if that is expected)
+```
+
+The usual causes are a `glob` matching no extension in the tree, an `exclude`
+that swallowed the target, or a directory somebody emptied. Where covering
+nothing yet is the honest state of the world - a rule written before the code
+it guards - `allow-empty="true"` says so, and `--allow-empty-scope` says it for
+a whole run.
+
+### `baseline` - adopting a rule the codebase already breaks
+
+A strict rule introduced into a mature codebase lands on violations that already
+exist. `exclude` turns those into a permanent blind spot, and `expected="5"`
+cannot tell "one fixed, one added" from "nothing happened". A baseline names
+them:
+
+```md
+<!-- @assert-absence target="src" symbol="LegacyGateway"
+     baseline="src/legacy/gateway.ts:2
+               src/legacy/adapter.ts" -->
+```
+
+The rule now holds when no file outside the list matches and no file inside it
+matches more than it declares. A bare path means one match.
+
+**It ratchets in both directions.** New debt fails, obviously. So does debt that
+has been *paid* and left on the list, because an entry the code no longer
+supports is a spec asserting something untrue:
+
+```text
+    expected no matches, found 0; the baseline is out of date and must be
+    pruned: src/legacy/adapter.ts (no longer matches)
+```
+
+The fix is deleting the line the message names. `ratchet="one-way"` relaxes that
+half to a report-only note. Every run says how many matches the baseline
+excluded, because a pass bought by an exemption is never silent.
+
+To adopt a rule on a codebase that already violates it:
+
+```bash
+spec-guard docs/adr.md --print-baseline
+```
+
+prints the attribute that would exempt exactly today's violations, for you to
+paste in. It prints; it does not edit. [ADR-0009](docs/adr/0009-debt-baselines.md)
+explains why that distinction is the whole design, and why there is no `--fix`
+for architecture rules.
+
+## Document status - drafts and superseded ADRs
+
+An ADR has a life. It is `Proposed` before anyone agrees to it, and `Superseded`
+long before anyone deletes it - because deleting it deletes the reason a
+decision was made.
+
+spec-guard reads that status from the document and honours it. A document whose
+status is `draft`, `proposed`, `rejected`, `deprecated` or `superseded` is
+parsed, validated, reported - and not executed.
+
+Three spellings are recognised, because three are in use:
+
+<!-- Shown fenced on purpose: spec-guard masks code before reading a status. -->
+
+```md
+---
+status: proposed
+---
+```
+
+```md
+## Status
+
+Accepted (0.3.0).
+```
+
+```md
+**Status:** accepted
+```
+
+Front-matter wins, then the `## Status` section, then the bold label (which is
+only read above the first `##`). Anything else - `Provisional`, `In review`, a
+misspelled `Supersedded`, or no status at all - keeps enforcing. That asymmetry
+is deliberate: an unanticipated word that keeps enforcing is a visible failure
+with an obvious fix, while one that stops enforcing is a green build over a rule
+nobody is checking.
+
+Withholding is never quiet:
+
+```text
+○ docs/adr/0011-queues.md is Proposed. - 2 assertions not executed
+
+12 passed · 2 not in force · 48ms
+```
+
+By name, not by count - the same fact reaches `--format json` as `inactiveSpecs`
+and `--format sarif` as a note-level execution notification. A withheld
+directive is still checked for typos and bad attributes, so a draft's mistake is
+found on the day it is written rather than on the day it is accepted.
+`--ignore-status` runs everything, which is how you ask whether a draft would
+pass if you accepted it today.
+
+[ADR-0010](docs/adr/0010-spec-status.md) has the full reasoning, including why
+there is no per-directive `if-status` attribute.
+
+## Asking before writing - `query` and the MCP server
+
+A run tells you, after the fact, that code broke a rule. `spec-guard query`
+tells you which rules a file is under before you touch it:
+
+```bash
+spec-guard query src/domain/user.ts --spec "docs/**/*.md"
+```
+
+```text
+src/domain/user.ts
+  3 rules from 2 documents
+
+  ADR-0004: No legacy client  (docs/adr/0004-legacy.md, accepted)
+    :12 @assert-absence  "LegacyClient" must not appear in src
+
+  ADR-0011: Layering constraints  (docs/adr/0011-layers.md, accepted)
+    :40 @assert-layers  src must keep its layers in order, src/domain < src/application < src/infrastructure
+      layer: src/domain (1 of 3)
+      may import: src/domain
+      must not import: src/application, src/infrastructure
+      reason: the domain depends on nothing
+    :41 @assert-import-absence  src/domain must not import "pg"
+
+  1 more rule would govern this path if docs/adr/0014-clocks.md (proposed) were in force; --ignore-status lists it
+
+14 spec files read in 6.1ms
+```
+
+It answers from the specs alone, without reading the codebase, so it works for
+a file that does not exist yet. A directory lists every rule that could reach a
+file under it. `--json` is the same answer for a script. Rules in documents that
+are not in force are counted and named, never silently left out.
+
+The arithmetic that decides whether a rule governs a path is tested against the
+walk a real run makes, file for file, under both engines and on randomly
+generated trees. [ADR-0012](docs/adr/0012-query-and-mcp.md) lists the three
+things it cannot see: file content (binary, oversized, unreadable), symbolic
+links, and letter case on case-insensitive filesystems.
+
+### The MCP server
+
+`spec-guard mcp` serves the same answer to an AI agent over the
+[Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io) on stdio, with no
+dependency on the MCP SDK. Register it with your client as a stdio server; the
+usual `mcpServers` entry is:
+
+```json
+{
+  "mcpServers": {
+    "spec-guard": {
+      "command": "npx",
+      "args": ["spec-guard", "mcp", "--spec", "docs/**/*.md"]
+    }
+  }
+}
+```
+
+The root defaults to the directory the client starts the server in; pass
+`--root` if yours starts servers somewhere else. On Windows, `npx` is a `.cmd`
+script that a client spawning without a shell cannot launch; point `command` at
+`node` and the first argument at
+`node_modules/@descent-vtt/spec-guard/bin/spec-guard.js` instead. Run flags such
+as `--engine`, `--strict`, `--ignore-status` and `--allow-missing-targets` apply
+to its checks.
+
+| Tool | What it does |
+| --- | --- |
+| `get_architectural_rules(path, include_inactive?)` | The query above, as text and as structured content |
+| `check_architecture(paths?)` | A run. Given paths, only the rules that govern them, each over its whole scope, with every violation marked as in those paths or not |
+
+| Resource | What it holds |
+| --- | --- |
+| `spec://rules` | Every rule in force, as JSON |
+| `spec://doc/{+path}` | Any spec document, in force or not |
+
+Both protocol eras are served: clients that open with `initialize` (revisions
+2024-10-07 to 2025-11-25), and clients on 2026-07-28 that put the protocol
+version on every request and probe with `server/discover`. Nothing is cached, so
+an ADR edited mid-session is read as edited. ADR-0012 has the shapes, the
+sources they follow, and what is deliberately not implemented.
+
+## CLI
+
+```bash
+spec-guard [patterns...] [options]     # execute the directives
+spec-guard query <paths...> [options]  # the rules in force for files or directories
+spec-guard mcp [options]               # serve the rules over MCP on stdio
+```
+
+| Option | Description |
+| --- | --- |
+| `-r, --root <path>` | Codebase root that assertions resolve against (default: cwd) |
+| `--spec <pattern>` | A spec glob or path, repeatable. `query` and `mcp` take their specs only from here |
+| `-v, --verbose` | Print passing assertions too |
+| `--fail-fast` | Stop at the first failing assertion |
+| `--json` | Machine-readable report on stdout (same as `--format json`) |
+| `--format <human\|json\|sarif>` | Output format. `sarif` uploads to GitHub code scanning |
+| `--engine <auto\|rg\|js>` | Search engine (default `auto`: scanner for small trees, ripgrep for big ones) |
+| `--strict` | Treat analysis that could not be completed as a failure |
+| `--allow-missing-targets` | Warn instead of failing when a `target` path does not exist |
+| `--allow-empty-scope` | Warn instead of failing when an assertion inspects no files |
+| `--print-baseline` | Print the `baseline="..."` that would exempt today's violations, and exit |
+| `--no-default-skips` | Search `.git`, `.hg`, `.svn` and `node_modules` too |
+| `--ignore-status` | Execute directives in draft, proposed and superseded documents too |
+| `--include-specs` | Also count matches inside the spec files themselves |
+| `--max-snippets <n>` | Failure snippets per assertion (default 5) |
+| `--concurrency <n>` | Search passes in flight at once (default 8) |
+| `--allow-empty` | Exit 0 when no spec file matched the patterns (about the run, not an assertion) |
+| `--color` / `--no-color` | Force colour on or off (`NO_COLOR` honoured) |
+
+Patterns are expanded by spec-guard itself, so quoted globs behave identically
+on Windows, macOS and Linux. A directory expands to the Markdown files in it.
+
+### Exit codes
+
+| Code | Meaning |
+| --- | --- |
+| `0` | Every assertion held |
+| `1` | An assertion failed, or a directive was malformed |
+| `2` | spec-guard could not run: bad usage, no spec files matched, `--engine rg` with no ripgrep |
+
+## CI integration
+
+```yaml
+# .github/workflows/specs.yml
+name: Specs
+on: [push, pull_request]
+
+jobs:
+  spec-guard:
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    steps:
+      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
+      - uses: actions/setup-node@v5
+        with:
+          node-version: '22'
+      - run: npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" "README.md" --verbose
+```
+
+That job needs nothing else installed. GitHub-hosted runners do **not** ship
+ripgrep on `PATH` - spec-guard's own CI reports `engine: javascript` there - so
+the fallback is what actually runs, and it produces identical results. If your
+repository is large enough that you want ripgrep's speed, install it first:
+
+```yaml
+      - run: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y ripgrep
+```
+
+Or point spec-guard at a binary you already have with `SPEC_GUARD_RG=/path/to/rg`.
+
+As a pre-commit hook (assuming a local install, so the bare command resolves):
+
+```bash
+npx spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --fail-fast
+```
+
+### Annotations on the pull request
+
+`--format sarif` writes a SARIF 2.1.0 document, which GitHub turns into a
+comment on the offending line:
+
+```yaml
+      - run: npx @descent-vtt/spec-guard "docs/**/*.md" --format sarif > spec-guard.sarif || true
+      - uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
+        with:
+          sarif_file: spec-guard.sarif
+          category: spec-guard
+```
+
+That job needs `permissions: security-events: write`. One alert per broken rule
+rather than per match - the thing that broke is the rule - anchored on the first
+offending line, with the directive as a related location because that is often
+where the fix goes. Alerts carry a fingerprint derived from what the assertion
+is about rather than where its matches landed, so inserting a line above a
+violation does not close the alert and open a new one.
+
+**There is no language server, and that is a decision rather than a gap.**
+spec-guard's claims are about a whole repository - "this symbol appears nowhere
+in `src`" - and a language server is handed one buffer at a time. Answering a
+repository-wide question on every keystroke means rescanning the tree on every
+keystroke; the alternative is answering a smaller question and calling it the
+same one. The CLI does a full run of this repository in about 130 ms, so a
+pre-commit hook or a watch loop already closes the feedback gap without a
+daemon, an extension per editor, or a protocol version matrix.
+
+## How it works
+
+```text
+parser  ──▶ Directive[] ──▶ runner ──▶ Assertion[] ──▶ engine ──▶ AssertionResult[] ──▶ reporter
+(pure)                      (I/O)                     (rg | js)                        (pure)
+```
+
+1. **Parse.** Markdown is scanned for `<!-- @assert-* -->` comments. Fenced code
+   blocks and inline code spans are masked first, so documentation that shows
+   the syntax (like this README) never executes it.
+2. **Resolve.** Each directive becomes a typed assertion. Bad numbers, unknown
+   booleans, unknown attributes and paths escaping `--root` are rejected here,
+   before any I/O.
+3. **Search.** Assertions that share a target list and flags are answered by a
+   *single* pass over the tree.
+4. **Report.** ANSI output with the spec location, the expectation, the observed
+   count, and up to five real snippets; or JSON for tooling.
+
+### Performance
+
+Scanning a tree costs about the same whether you look for one symbol or twenty,
+so spec-guard groups assertions by target set and flags and answers each group
+in one pass.
+
+`auto` then picks between the two engines **per search group**, because they
+have different shapes of cost: ripgrep is dominated by process startup and
+barely notices tree size, while the built-in scanner has no startup cost and
+grows linearly. Starting a process to search a handful of files is a bad trade.
+Re-measured for 0.4.0 on Windows 11 / Node 24, median of three, one symbol over
+a synthetic tree:
+
+| files | scanner | ripgrep | |
+| --- | --- | --- | --- |
+| 100 | **17 ms** | 214 ms | scanner, 12.9x |
+| 500 | **70 ms** | 263 ms | scanner, 3.8x |
+| 1,000 | 216 ms | **181 ms** | ripgrep, 1.2x |
+| 3,000 | 735 ms | **222 ms** | ripgrep, 3.3x |
+| 5,000 | 1,046 ms | **241 ms** | ripgrep, 4.3x |
+
+The decision uses a bounded enumeration as its probe: spec-guard walks the
+target set until it either finishes - in which case the file list is already in
+hand and the scanner runs against it, with no process and no second walk - or
+exceeds a budget, in which case ripgrep takes over. The crossover above sits
+between 500 and 1,000 files, which is what the Windows budget of 512 encodes;
+on Linux it is far lower, because what is really being measured is process
+spawn cost. `scripts/bench-engines.mjs` reproduces this, and
+[ADR-0004](docs/adr/0004-adaptive-engine.md) has the full tables.
+
+Treat single measurements from one machine with suspicion. On the development
+machine used here, an absence assertion over 2,000 files measures 303 ms with
+the scanner and 399 ms with ripgrep, but ripgrep's own spread across five runs
+was 379-1039 ms - wide enough that the two are not really distinguishable at
+that size. The order-of-magnitude differences at the ends of the table are the
+part worth trusting.
+
+0.5.0 added four language analysers, a scope probe on every assertion and a
+baseline pass, so the obvious question is what that cost. Both versions were run
+against the same synthetic 1,000-file tree, alternating rounds inside one
+process so that this machine's load - which varies by a factor of two over a
+session - falls on both equally:
+
+| | median | min |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| 0.4.0 | 908.8 ms | 493.7 ms |
+| 0.5.0 | 913.4 ms | 496.6 ms |
+
+0.5% apart, against a run-to-run spread far wider than that. The two versions
+also returned identical counts for all five assertions, which is the more
+useful half of the result.
+
+0.5.1 replaced three hand-maintained "are these the same question" field lists
+with one, and the surviving version serialises the exclude set where the old one
+compared it by identity - a hot path made slower on purpose, so it was measured
+rather than assumed. Same tree, same alternating rounds:
+
+| | median | min |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| 0.5.0 | 925.1 ms | 432.1 ms |
+| 0.5.1 | 830.6 ms | 428.5 ms |
+
+The medians are 10% apart and the minima are level, which is this machine's
+noise band doing most of the talking - the honest reading is "no regression",
+not "10% faster". The plausible mechanism for any real gain is that the runner
+now groups by the engine's own definition of a shared pass, so a group of five
+where two requests disagree is run as three and two rather than being refused
+whole and run as five. Counts identical across all five assertions, again.
+
+Two honest caveats:
+
+- **The reported engine is the one that ran, not the one available.** On a small
+  repository `--json` reports `"engine": "javascript"` even with ripgrep
+  installed. That is the optimisation working, not a failure to find `rg`.
+- **The engines are one implementation, not two that agree.** This used to say
+  that ripgrep was the reference and the scanner merely matched it "on
+  everything the test suite covers", with a note that the two treated
+  `.gitignore` and ignored directories differently and that you should pin an
+  engine if it mattered. It did matter: on a tree with eight copies of a symbol
+  the scanner found two and ripgrep found four. Since 0.4.0 ripgrep answers only
+  *which files contain this text*, and the scanner does all the counting,
+  classification and reporting for both. `--engine` now changes how long a run
+  takes and nothing about its verdict, and the suite asserts that on trees built
+  from every case that used to split them.
+
+## Programmatic API
+
+```ts
+import { runSpecGuard, formatReport } from '@descent-vtt/spec-guard';
+
+const report = await runSpecGuard({
+  patterns: ['docs/**/*.md'],
+  root: process.cwd(),
+});
+
+if (!report.ok) {
+  console.error(formatReport(report, { color: true, verbose: false }));
+  process.exitCode = 1;
+}
+```
+
+`runSpecGuard` returns the full report: every assertion, its bounds, the
+observed count, match locations, warnings and timings. The parser
+(`parseDirectives`) and reporter (`formatReport`, `formatJson`) are pure
+functions you can use on their own.
+
+## Design decisions
+
+This tool was specified loosely and built opinionatedly. Where the
+implementation departs from the obvious reading of the brief, here is why.
+
+**Spec files are excluded from their own searches.** An ADR that says
+"`LegacyGateway` must not appear" contains the string `LegacyGateway`. Without
+this rule, absence assertions would fail on the document asserting them - the
+single most confusing possible first-run experience. `--include-specs` restores
+the naive behaviour, and counts the prose of your specs; the directives
+themselves stay uncounted, because a directive is an HTML comment and a rule
+whose own text trips it can never be satisfied. `comments="include"` counts even
+those.
+
+**Fenced code and inline code are masked before parsing.** A README documenting
+the syntax must not execute it. Masking preserves byte offsets, so reported line
+numbers stay exact. (This is subtle: pairing backtick runs the naive way
+desynchronises after a stray unmatched run and un-masks real prose. spec-guard
+uses CommonMark's equal-length pairing rule, and there is a regression test.)
+
+**A document's lifecycle status is read; a directive's is not.** Status is
+document-level and visible in every rendered Markdown view. A per-directive
+`if-status` attribute would be a switch disabling one assertion inside an
+accepted ADR, invisible to anyone who does not read the raw source - and the
+one thing a mechanism for not running an assertion must never be is invisible.
+
+**Malformed directives fail the run.** A typo like `expct="1"` could be ignored
+as "not a directive". It is instead an error, because a spec tool whose typos
+silently assert nothing is worse than no spec tool.
+
+**Four attributes were added beyond the original brief** - `word`, `regex`,
+`glob` and `ignore-case` - because `symbol="Primary"` matching `PrimaryButton`
+is the first thing every user hits, and `reason` because a failure message
+should say *why* the rule exists.
+
+**`min`/`max` are accepted on `@assert-absence` too.** "At most 5 TODOs" is an
+absence claim with a budget, and burning a budget down is a real workflow.
+
+**The engine is detected lazily.** Probing with `rg --version` up front costs a
+process spawn (~27 ms on Windows) on the critical path of every run, including
+runs where ripgrep is missing. Discovering its absence from the first real
+search is free.
+
+**Assertions that share a target list share one pass over the tree.** This used
+to need a proof: merging literals into a ripgrep alternation can lose matches
+through containment (`Primary` / `PrimaryButton`) and dovetailing (`abc` / `cd`
+in `abcd`), so spec-guard checked for both and fell back to separate passes.
+Since 0.4.0 it does not need the proof, because ripgrep no longer counts
+anything - it answers only *which files contain this text*, and the scanner
+counts each pattern separately over the shared file contents. The batching
+checks were deleted along with the risk they guarded.
+
+**Exit code 2 exists.** "Your specs failed" and "spec-guard could not run" are
+different facts, and CI should be able to tell them apart.
+
+**A missing `target` fails the run.** It used to warn and search what was left,
+which meant an assertion pointed at a renamed directory searched nothing, found
+nothing, and reported success — the exact shape of a green check that verified
+nothing. `--allow-missing-targets` restores the old behaviour for repositories
+where a path is legitimately optional.
+
+**Hidden directories are searched, and `.gitignore` is not consulted.** An
+audit of 0.3.0 found the tool reporting a clean pass on a repository whose
+forbidden symbol sat in `.github/workflows/ci.yml`; the scanner and ripgrep also
+disagreed with each other, finding two matches and four on the same tree. Scope
+is now one policy that both engines are driven by, the skip list is four names
+long, and anything spec-guard could not inspect is reported rather than assumed
+clean ([ADR-0007](docs/adr/0007-search-scope.md)).
+
+**Comments are excluded by default, and the exclusion is reported.** Counting
+the note that records a deletion as an occurrence of the thing deleted punishes
+the documentation this tool exists to keep honest ([ADR-0006](docs/adr/0006-comment-classification.md)).
+The reverse risk — a rule that quietly stops checking anything because every
+match now sits in a comment — is why every run says how many matches it dropped.
+
+**An assertion that inspected no files fails.** It is the same defect as a
+missing `target` seen from a different angle: a rule whose scope is empty passes
+forever and reads exactly like a rule that found nothing. Turning this on found
+a vacuous assertion inside this repository's own test suite on the first run.
+`allow-empty="true"` covers the honest case of a rule written before the code it
+guards.
+
+**Four more languages, and no parser.** Import assertions read Python, Go, Rust
+and C# as well as JavaScript. Not by adding four tokenizers - by reusing the
+comment and string lexer that already existed, masking the source with it, and
+reading statements off what is left. Tree-sitter would have been the modern
+answer and costs 94 MB unpacked against this package's 0.33 MB; the four things
+a real parser would genuinely see that this cannot are listed in
+[ADR-0008](docs/adr/0008-polyglot-imports.md) rather than glossed over.
+
+**There is no `--fix`.** Every edit a machine can make to a failing boundary
+assertion is an edit that records the rule no longer holding: widen the bound,
+add an exclusion, append to the baseline, insert an ignore comment. A one-flag
+path from red to green is a bad button for a person and a much worse one for an
+agent whose loop terminates on a green build. `--print-baseline` prints what you
+could paste; it does not paste it ([ADR-0009](docs/adr/0009-debt-baselines.md)).
+
+## spec-guard checks itself
+
+The invariants in [`docs/adr/0001-invariants.md`](docs/adr/0001-invariants.md)
+and [`docs/adr/0002-directive-format.md`](docs/adr/0002-directive-format.md) are
+executed against this repository on every CI run. The CLI never calls
+`console.log`, nothing outside the engine spawns a process, and the parser and
+reporter never touch the filesystem - because those documents say so, and the
+build fails if they stop being true.
+
+This README is executable too:
+
+<!-- @assert-present file="src/parser.ts,src/engine.ts,src/reporter.ts,src/runner.ts,src/cli.ts,src/comments.ts" -->
+
+## Development
+
+```bash
+npm install
+npm run build      # tsc -> dist/
+npm test           # vitest
+npm run test:coverage
+npm run test:mutation  # stryker (~16 min in CI; over two hours locally)
+npm run lint       # tsc --noEmit
+npm run selfcheck  # run spec-guard on its own docs
+```
+
+The test suite runs every assertion case against **both** engines and asserts
+they agree, so the fallback cannot quietly drift from ripgrep. `@vscode/ripgrep`
+is a devDependency purely so that the ripgrep path is exercised on every
+platform in CI, including machines that have no `rg` on PATH; it ships a
+prebuilt binary and is never a runtime dependency.
+
+### Mutation testing
+
+Coverage says a line ran. It does not say an assertion would notice if the line
+behaved differently. This repository measures the difference: line coverage is
+**100%**, and **97.65%** of 4,299 mutants are killed in CI, with no file below
+95%. The second number is the one worth reading - and it is the ceiling, not a
+way-point: every surviving mutant has been checked individually and the 101 that
+are left produce byte-identical output.
+
+That gap is the point. The first run scored 77.23%, and the weakest file was the
+reporter at 65.48% - not because it lacked tests, but because its tests were
+almost all `toContain` against colourless output. A mutant could prepend a junk
+line, drop a colour, or turn `remaining > 0` into `remaining >= 0` and every
+test still passed. Exact whole-output comparison took it to 87.30%. The engine
+and the walker were then rewritten for testability rather than papered over with
+more tests, which is what moved them from 75%/78% to 83%/93%.
+
+The most recent pass took every module to its ceiling, and its value was not the
+number. Writing down four contracts that had only ever been checked through
+their effect on a match count turned up four wrong answers: two assertions on
+one symbol answered each other's comment handling, an unreadable directory went
+unreported on any repository small enough to scan in process, snippets from CRLF
+files carried a carriage return into the terminal, and an invalid pattern was
+reported with its error message twice. Seventeen branches turned out to be
+unable to decide anything and were deleted rather than pinned; thirty-five
+negative controls - each defect reintroduced one at a time - confirm the suite
+goes red for every one, and the changes meant to be invisible were checked
+against 6,976 files of real code, reference for reference, against the published
+0.5.0 build.
+
+Then the survivors themselves were checked rather than excused. All 130 were
+applied one at a time and run through a fingerprint of 4,176 observations, and
+**29 of them turned out not to be equivalent at all** - a Rust brace counter
+that only matters when a second statement follows, a type-only test that marks
+`import A, { B } from 'x'` type-only when loosened, a comment check that opens a
+block comment on `2*3`. All 29 are now tested and all 29 die. All of it is in
+[ADR-0003](docs/adr/0003-mutation-testing.md), including a Stryker limitation
+found on the way: a mutant that stops a test file *loading* is reported as
+survived even though the suite is in fact killing it.
+
+CI runs it in **two tiers**, both gated at 97%. Branches and pull requests run
+Stryker incrementally, reusing the verdict for any mutant whose source and
+covering tests are both unchanged. Pushes to `main`, the weekly schedule and
+manual runs do the full sweep, which is the authoritative number and the one
+quoted above; a full sweep is also what publishes the cache the branches start
+from, so an incremental verdict can never be built on another incremental
+verdict.
+
+The full sweep was 6m54s at 2,118 mutants, 15m51s at 3,493, and is 17m at
+4,299. That growth is why the tiers exist: a check that gets quietly more
+expensive every release is a check somebody eventually proposes lowering.
+
+Run it locally with `npm run test:mutation` if you like, but do not calibrate
+anything on the result: on the Windows machine this was developed on the same
+suite takes over two hours against 21 minutes hosted, and it scores *higher*,
+because far more mutants hang there and Stryker counts a hang as a kill. Linux
+CI is the measurement.
+
+Eight cautionary tales are in [ADR-0003](docs/adr/0003-mutation-testing.md): a
+run whose score was pure fiction because the mutants were never activated, a
+tuning knob that lifted the score six points without adding a test, the platform
+gap above, the baseline being re-anchored when a tokenizer arrived, and a score
+that rose partly because code carrying hard-to-kill mutants was deleted rather
+than because tests improved, and the 0.5.0 sweep that failed the build at 83.77%
+because a suite can be thorough about the thing it was written to test and
+silent about the machinery underneath it, and the excuse that let the tokenizer
+sit at 73% for three releases because "that kind of code carries more equivalent
+mutants" sounded like judgement rather than an unchecked assumption - along with
+the real bugs that chasing the gate uncovered, and a class of mutant the runner
+reports as survived while the suite is in fact killing it.
+
+## Requirements
+
+- Node.js 22 or newer (native ESM)
+- ripgrep optional - used when present, replaced by a built-in scanner when not
+
+## License
+
+MIT