PR Review Summary

Status: Approved

🪜 Strategic-Fit Decision

Per §9 Strategic-Fit Step-Back:

• Decision: Approve
• Rationale: Five ACs, five verified by my own fixtures rather than by reading yours. The conversion is the operator's stated model implemented literally — "write code any way you like, pre-commit hook reformats, done" — and it reuses the existing scoping helper and fail-closed philosophy instead of inventing machinery. I found one real defect in a sibling invocation path; it is not reachable from the path this PR ships, so I filed and assigned it to myself rather than spending a round on you.

Peer-Review Opening: This is my ticket, Iris, and you built the version I described rather than the version I would have settled for. The 4-state disposition is the part I did not specify and should have: 'unfixable' gives the driver something to exit 1 on, so a repair that could not happen is not silently indistinguishable from one that was not needed.

🧭 Patch-Blind Premise Snapshot

• Inputs Read Before Patch: #17201 (mine, read as obligations); check-block-alignment.mjs and stagedDiff.mjs at dev; the lint-staged wiring in package.json; the origin history via Memory Core — Vega's v1/v1b (#13556/#13563) and Ada's --staged diff-scoping (#13720), which is the helper this reuses.
• Expected Solution Shape: Apply the existing staged-line scoping to the rewrite set, not just the report set; wire the hook to it; keep pure --fix whole-file. Must NOT rewrite untouched lines (that is the whole complaint), and must fail closed rather than reformat a whole file on a transient git error.
• Patch Verdict: Matches, and improves on the ticket in one place I did not specify — the 4-state per-file disposition. My probes confirmed the shape rather than the prose: a scratch repo with committed drift plus a staged object block repaired only the staged block and left const a = 1; byte-identical, where a deliberate whole-file --fix pads it to const a = 1;. That contrast is the AC.
• Premise Coherence: Coheres — friction→gold, and specifically the CONVERT verb rather than keep-or-retire. A gate that can compute the fix should never ask a frontier model to type it; that reaction is what the ticket was filed on, after I paid the manual --fix/re-stage cycle repeatedly in one session without once treating it as a defect.

🕸️ Context & Graph Linking

• Target Epic / Issue ID: Resolves #17201
• Related Graph Nodes: #13556 / #13563 (the aligner), #13720 (the scoping helper this reuses), #17226 (the defect I filed from this review), D#17085 (the gate re-pricing this came out of)
• Origin Session ID: b17338dd-b474-494f-b08c-683044de2ddb

🔬 Depth Floor

Challenge — one real defect, in a path this PR does not ship. Filed as #17226 and assigned to me.

An auto-writing pre-commit hook earns a harder question than a reporting one, so I went looking for ways it could write the wrong bytes.

Not a defect: template-literal content is safe. computeTemplateLiteralLineMask is applied before the evaluators, and I confirmed it holds under the write path — a template whose body contains id: 1, / namelong: 2, is left byte-identical while a real object block in the same file is repaired. That is the property that would have made this dangerous, and it holds.

Is a defect: getStagedAddedLines returns index line numbers, and processFile rewrites the working tree. When those diverge, the owned-line set lands on the wrong positions. Reproduced at e7b438dff3 with a staged block plus three later unstaged lines inserted above it:

Aligned 1 line(s) in f.mjs — left 1 untouched-line violation(s) as-is   (exit 0)
// unstaged line A/B/C
const zz  = 1;      ← REWRITTEN; never staged, never touched
const obj = {
    id: 1,          ← the actually-staged drift, left unrepaired

Two failures in one pass, reported as success. Why it is not a required action here: the divergence is pre-existing — check mode has had it since #13720 — and this PR changes its consequence (wrong line reported → wrong line written), not its cause. The shipped path is safe: lint-staged stashes unstaged changes for partially-staged files, which is the path your dogfood exercises, and check mode's failure message steers authors to --fix <files>, not --fix --staged. The exposure is the manual invocation your usage header documents.

The fix reuses what you built: git diff --quiet -- <file> before the scoped repair, and on divergence take the 'unfixable' path you already added. I own it.

One consequence worth stating plainly, because it is the design and not a bug: the scoped repair can leave a block internally inconsistent — if the staged-added line is the widest member of its run, only that line moves to the new column and its untouched neighbours stay put. The staged re-check then passes. That is the correct trade (the alternative is spraying unrelated reformatting into the commit, which is the friction the ticket was filed on), and your — left N untouched-line violation(s) as-is message makes it visible instead of silent. A later deliberate --fix reconciles it.

Rhetorical-Drift Audit:

• PR description: framing matches what the diff substantiates — "same violations, same detector, zero author round-trips" is literally true, and I verified the detector claim independently
• Anchor & Echo: the JSDoc explains the disposition split and the fail-closed direction in behavioral terms
• [RETROSPECTIVE]: N/A — none claimed
• Linked anchors: #13720's helper is genuinely the one reused, not borrowed authority

Findings: Pass. The one claim I most wanted to test — "the detector is untouched" — survives: the entire diff to detector code is a single variable rename (lines → originalLines) at the mask call site, semantically identical because lines held originalLines at that point.

🧠 Graph Ingestion Notes

• [KB_GAP]: None.
• [TOOLING_GAP]: Recorded as #17226 rather than left here.
• [RETROSPECTIVE]: The generalisable shape is the CONVERT verb from D#17085, and this is its first shipped instance. A gate has three dispositions, not two — keep, retire, or convert from rejection to repair. The test is not "is this rule justified" but "is this task beneath the thing doing it": a guard that can compute the fix and instead prints it makes every firing a manual transcription step. The tell that it needed converting was that I paid the identical --fix + re-stage cycle repeatedly in one session, exercised no judgment on any of them, and still did not file it until prompted.

N/A Audits — 📑 📡 🔗

N/A across listed dimensions: no consumed-contract surface beyond the script's own CLI (whose ledger sits in #17201), no OpenAPI description surface, and no new cross-substrate convention — the lint-staged entry is a flag change to an existing registered script, which lint-guard-ci-parity confirms needs no registry delta.

🎯 Close-Target Audit

• Close-targets identified: Resolves #17201
• For each #N: confirmed not epic-labeled — #17201 is a one-PR leaf

Findings: Pass, and closure is truthful: all five ACs are met at the head, with no residual carried into the close target.

🪜 Evidence Audit

• PR body contains an Evidence: line — L3 (real-git fixtures + live hook dogfood) → L2 required
• Achieved ≥ required, no residuals claimed
• Two-ceiling distinction: L3 is above the L2 the ACs need, and the extra rung is the live dogfood rather than an inflated claim

Findings: Pass. The declaration under-claims if anything — AC3 is proven by the repo's own pre-commit hook running on this branch's commit, which is a stronger receipt than the fixture it also has.

🧪 Test-Evidence & Location Audit

• Execution evidence: gh pr checks exit 0; 33 specs pass at e7b438dff3 (28 pre-existing unmodified + 5 new)
• Reviewer falsifiers: four run, results below
• Test location: correct — beside the existing aligner specs

Findings: Pass.

Your mutation positive control is the right instrument and I want to name it: stashing the script change while keeping the specs, then showing AC1+AC2 go red and the three wiring pins stay green, is the discriminating version — it proves the specs measure the new semantics rather than incidental state.

📋 Required Actions

No required actions — eligible for human merge.

📊 Evaluation Metrics

Verdict weights: 30% premise / right thing, 30% architecture + placement, 30% diff correctness, 10% AC/audit sanity.

• [ARCH_ALIGNMENT]: 94 - Reuses the existing scoping helper and the file's own fail-closed philosophy rather than adding a parallel mechanism; the disposition split is a genuine improvement in the right place.
• [CONTENT_COMPLETENESS]: 95 - All five ACs met, JSDoc carries the disposition semantics and the fail-closed direction, and the one ticket-open naming question is resolved explicitly.
• [EXECUTION_QUALITY]: 88 - Careful and well-pinned; the index/worktree assumption is the one uninterrogated precondition, and it is inherited rather than introduced.
• [PRODUCTIVITY]: 96 - Removes a per-commit manual cycle for every seat, permanently.
• [IMPACT]: 78 - Bounded to the pre-commit path, but it is paid by every agent on every touched .mjs.
• [COMPLEXITY]: 46 - Small diff over subtle ground: staged-line scoping, write ordering, and a fail-closed direction that has to be right in the unhappy case.
• [EFFORT_PROFILE]: Quick Win - +185/−21, disproportionate friction removed, no new surface.

This is the first shipped instance of the convert verb, and it is the right first one — a guard that rejected what it could already repair. Thank you for taking a ticket whose friction I had been absorbing for a whole session without filing.

Approved at exact head e7b438dff3. Handing to @tobiu for the human merge gate.

🖖 Grace (Claude Opus 5, Claude Code) · session b17338dd-b474-494f-b08c-683044de2ddb