lint

Comprehensive vault health audit. Read-only — never deletes, never edits. Report only.

Design rationale in .claude/skills/lint/RATIONALE.md (§N.M anchors).

Architecture (2026-07-08, script-first): the deterministic majority of the check registry (~45 of the registry's #1–#61, with #31 and #40 retired/unused — set-diffs, date arithmetic, regex, schema probes) is implemented in .claude/skills/lint/lint.py, following the generate_graph.py precedent. The script is the authoritative spec for those checks; this file specifies only the LLM-judgment checks and the merge procedure. Main-context cost drops from a full-vault read to one script call + targeted reads of flagged files.

Step 0: Pre-flight (MANDATORY — runs before Scope Resolution)

0.1: Acquire vault lock (mode-dependent)

Per .claude/skills/_shared/preflight.md Procedure 1. Even though /lint never writes to vault content files, a lock is still acquired so that concurrent writers (e.g., a mid-flip /sync manifest, an in-flight /prune sector edit) do not cause /lint to see transient inconsistent state and raise false-positive flags.

• Full mode (/lint with no arguments): acquire a vault-wide scope lock. Timeout budget: 5 minutes.
• Scoped mode (/lint TICKER): acquire a .vault-lock.readonly lock. Timeout budget: 2 minutes.

Capture the token emitted at Step 0.1. Verify ownership (Procedure 1.5) before subsequent Bash blocks. Release the lock explicitly in the final reporting Bash block via rm -f "$LOCK_FILE".

0.2: No rename-marker check

/lint is a read-only diagnostic skill and is an explicit exception in .claude/skills/_shared/preflight.md §2.1. lint.py #37 surfaces active .rename_incomplete.* markers as check output — hard-blocking would defeat lint's purpose.

Step 1: Deterministic pass — run lint.py

python3 .claude/skills/lint/lint.py              # full mode
python3 .claude/skills/lint/lint.py --ticker $T  # scoped mode

• Covers (authoritative in-script): #1–#6 (empty-only for #5), #8, #10, #11, #12/#13 (mechanical flags), #14 (heading presence), #15, #16, #17–#27, #28 (candidates), #29 (presence checks a/b/c), #30, #32–#39, #41–#67 (#31, #40 retired/unused). New 2026-07-09: #57 watermark-collapse alarm (pending-sync > 20% of vault notes → CRITICAL with sync-all-vs-advance guidance — the bulk-mtime failure class that silently breaks /sync default/all, /prune Phase 0.B, and /clean's safety-net); #58 snapshot-integrity (snapshot .md lacking snapshot_of:/snapshot_date: frontmatter + any non-.md artifact in Snapshots/ — the class invisible to /clean and unrestorable-by-spec for /rollback); #59 template-drift-at-birth (thesis <7d old already missing template sections → IMPORTANT immediately, split out of the #14 backlog — signals /thesis drifted from the template on that run). New 2026-07-14: #60 conviction-trigger falsifiability (active/monitoring thesis whose ## Conviction Triggers is a present-but-unfilled scaffold → IMPORTANT, or filled-but-carries-no-numeric/dated/named-observable-threshold → NICE; section-absent stays #14's job — the precondition _shared/trigger-touch.md depends on); #61 Key Metrics staleness (key_metrics_last_refreshed missing or >90d — IMPORTANT on high-conviction active, NICE elsewhere; consumes the field /numbers Step 11 writes). New 2026-07-15 (CHG-15, analytical tier): #62 non-consensus-names-consensus (candidate — active/monitoring thesis whose ## Key Non-consensus Insights states no consensus it opposes; LLM Step 2 confirms); #63 Mental-Models stable-ID aggregate (ONE NICE listing populated ## Mental Models sections lacking [G-#]/§ citations — a convention-adoption backlog, not per-thesis defects; hypothesis-vs-verdict framing judged in Step 2); #64 hedge-word ban (NICE — CLAUDE.md Writing Standards filler words in thesis/sector/macro spines, "significantly" excluded as often-quantitative, capped 3/file); #65 Summary-vs-frontmatter conviction consistency (candidate — Summary conviction word ≠ frontmatter; LLM confirms genuine stale statement vs conditional/negative prose); #66 weakly-sourced spine figures (NICE — [1×: …]/[est.] provenance tags that reached a thesis body, pairs with CHG-10). New 2026-07-29: #67 publish-flag coverage (thesis/sector/macro note missing the publish: frontmatter key → IMPORTANT — the GitHub→website sync silently skips it; publish: false passes as intentional unpublish; Research/ and Website/ out of scope by design).
• Exit codes: 0 = pass/nice-to-have · 1 = Important found · 2 = Critical found · 3 = self-validation failed (do NOT report partial results — fix the script invocation or escalate; the script's stderr states the cause).
• The script's report contains three severity sections plus a Judgment candidates section — those candidates are inputs to Step 2, not confirmed findings. Never copy candidates into the final report unreviewed.

Step 2: LLM-judgment pass

Read ONLY the files the script flagged or that these checks name. Do not re-run any check the script covers; do not full-read the vault.

5. Thin critical sections — for each #5 judgment candidate (section exists but under ~25 words), read the section and judge whether it is substantively empty (placeholder prose, restated heading) vs. legitimately terse. Substantively empty → Important.

6. Old financial data — for theses flagged by #6 or with conviction: high, read ## Key Metrics and judge whether the data vintage (as-of dates, quarter references) is older than 6 months. Stale → Nice to Have; stale AND driving a conviction claim → Important.

7. Unlinked mentions — using Grep (word-bounded ticker tokens across Theses/ Sectors/ Macro*/), identify notes that discuss a ticker with a thesis but never wikilink it. Judgment: distinguish substantive discussion (flag, Nice to Have) from passing mention (skip).

12/13. Conviction-evidence and Bull/Bear interpretation — for each #12 candidate and #13 flag from the script, read the thesis and judge whether the mechanical count/ratio reflects a real evidence gap or bias. Upgrade to Important only with a specific stated reason.

28. Partial-write confirmation — for each #28 candidate, read the flagged section and confirm whether it is genuinely truncated (mid-sentence, broken table) or a false positive (stylistic fragment, list item ending in a preposition-like token). Confirmed → Important, and name the likely matching snapshot in _Archive/Snapshots/ if one exists.

29. Registry reverse-check + semantic drift — the script verified registry→skill presence. Do the reverse: scan each producer SKILL.md's quoted Log-prefix strings (Drift-coupling blocks, Log-format fences) for prefixes NOT in _shared/log-prefixes.md → Important (orphan coupling). Also judge any #29 script finding for semantic (not just literal) drift before reporting.

30. Graph-primer anti-pattern review — for each #55 candidate, read the surrounding SKILL.md context and judge whether the matched phrase actually instructs primer-as-filter behavior (violation → Important) or is a negation/anti-pattern warning quoting the phrase (skip).

31. Non-consensus names its consensus — for each #62 candidate, read ## Key Non-consensus Insights and judge whether each insight actually states the consensus view it contradicts (prose or the CHG-11 Consensus: field). An insight that only asserts a positive view without naming what the market believes → Important (unfalsifiable positioning, not analysis); if the consensus is named in nearby prose the grep missed → skip.

32. Mental-Models hypothesis-vs-verdict framing — read the ## Mental Models sections listed in the #63 stable-ID aggregate (they are the populated ones). Judge whether "Triggers that fired" are held as hypotheses-to-test (READING PROTOCOL) or stated as verdicts/conclusions (e.g. "the moat is real, buy" rather than "layer-monopoly hypothesis — the falsifier is X"). Verdict framing → Important; note that the VLM lens's own Alpha verdict output-format field is legitimate and not itself a violation. The stable-ID absence is already reported mechanically (aggregate NICE) — do not re-flag it per-thesis.

33. Conviction Summary-vs-frontmatter — for each #65 candidate, read the ## Summary sentence containing the conviction word. Confirm it is a genuine stale statement (Summary asserts a conviction level that contradicts frontmatter, e.g. after a /status change) → Important; dismiss if the word appears in conditional/negative prose ("preclude high conviction until…", "would warrant medium") → skip. This is the INTC-class drift catcher.

Step 3: Merged report

Merge Step 1 findings (verbatim) with Step 2 confirmations into the standard format. Attribute each finding to its check ID. Drop unconfirmed candidates silently.

Critical (breaks research quality)

• [#ID] [Issue] — [File path] — [Specific problem]

Important (gaps in coverage)

Nice to Have (optimization)

Stats

(reproduce the script's Stats block, plus: judgment candidates reviewed / confirmed / dismissed)

Release the lock in the same final Bash block.

Maintenance contract

• lint.py is the spec of record for the deterministic checks. When a check's rules change, edit the script (and its docstring COVERED list), not this file.
• New deterministic checks go in the script; new judgment checks go in Step 2 here.
• The script never writes vault state and reads a point-in-time snapshot in <1s, which also shrinks the lock-contention window that motivated Step 0.1's 5-minute budget.
• Cross-skill contracts enforced: _shared/log-prefixes.md (#29), _shared/sector-resolution.md (#30/#34), _shared/hot-md-contract.md (#35/#42), _shared/graph-primer.md (#54/#55), _shared/preflight.md (#43).