fix(validate): report a Purpose left as the archive placeholder - #1671
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kitimark wants to merge 7 commits into
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fix(validate): report a Purpose left as the archive placeholder#1671kitimark wants to merge 7 commits into
kitimark wants to merge 7 commits into
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When a delta introduces a capability with no usable `## Purpose`, archive
writes `TBD - created by archiving change <name>. Update Purpose after
archive.` into the new main spec. Three places already tell authors to
replace it -- the `specs` instruction ("including a leftover `TBD`
placeholder"), the sync-specs summary step ("so it gets written now rather
than lingering"), and the cli-archive contract -- but nothing reports that
it is still there.
`--strict` cannot reach it. The check meant to catch a Purpose nobody wrote
is a 50-character floor and the placeholder is 91 characters, so the one
rule that exists to catch a thin Purpose is satisfied by the exact text
meaning nobody wrote one: a Purpose reading "Does stuff." fails --strict
today, while one saying nothing at all passes.
Proposes reporting it as a warning against the spec's Purpose -- silent by
default, failing under --strict, so a project already carrying placeholders
keeps validating until it opts into the stricter gate. Detection is narrow:
the generated sentence wherever it appears, and otherwise only a `TBD`
opening the Purpose, so prose raising an open question is left alone.
Planning artifacts only; no source changes.
Refs Fission-AI#369
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
When a delta introduces a capability with no usable `## Purpose`, archive writes a placeholder into the new main spec. Nothing read it afterwards, so the capability kept a to-do in it while every command reported success. `--strict` could not reach it. The check that exists to catch a Purpose nobody wrote is a 50-character floor, and the placeholder clears it: a spec whose Purpose read "Does stuff." failed --strict, while a spec whose Purpose said nothing at all passed. Fission-AI#369 reported agents leaving the placeholder behind and stayed open seven months; every remedy since has been an instruction, which is the mechanism that report described as unreliable. validate now reports it as a warning against the Purpose, naming the line and saying to edit the main spec directly -- a delta's `## Purpose` is read only when the capability is created, so it cannot replace an existing one. Warning rather than error, because strict mode already means "warnings fail": a project carrying placeholders keeps validating by default and only --strict fails. Archive is untouched -- it validates rebuilt specs without --strict, so a spec archive writes still passes the validation it would have passed before, and the text archive writes is byte-identical. The placeholder is recognised through the same constants the writer composes it from, so the check cannot drift from the sentence it looks for -- the failure mode of a second, hand-copied spelling being a check that matches nothing and looks exactly like a check that found nothing. The one case that cannot be a lookup is an agent-written placeholder, kept to a `TBD` opening the Purpose: "the retry budget is TBD pending benchmarks" is authored prose and is left alone. Verified: 209 archive tests pass unchanged (the placeholder text is asserted literally, so the output is provably identical); full suite 138 files / 3993 tests; 36/36 strict spec validations; build, lint and typecheck clean. Against a project carrying four real placeholders, default mode still exits 0 and --strict fails exactly those four. Cross-platform CI is not yet confirmed -- it needs a pushed branch. Line endings are covered by tests asserting a CRLF spec and an LF spec produce identical findings, and the module does no path handling. Refs Fission-AI#369 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A mutation pass over the seven guards -- revert one, see which tests die -- found two that no test held. The prefix/suffix test did not exercise the guard it named. Its Purpose read "Explains what happens when archiving change my-change runs twice", which contains neither half of the generated sentence, so it passed whether or not the suffix was required. Matching on the prefix alone killed nothing. The Purpose now embeds the real prefix constant and asserts the suffix is absent, so the case is the one the name claims; the mutation kills it. The empty-Purpose early return was genuinely dead. Neither rule matches empty text, so removing the branch changed no behaviour and failed no test. Rather than keep a guard nothing can hold, the branch is gone and the comment says why an empty Purpose still yields null. The tests asserting that behaviour are unchanged and still pass. Every guard now dies under mutation: whole check removed from applySpecRules ......... 6 tests brevity no longer suppressed (else -> if) ....... 1 word boundary dropped from the TBD marker ....... 1 generated placeholder matched on prefix alone ... 1 line-ending normalisation removed ............... 2 section-boundary guard removed from locator ..... 1 Full suite 138 files / 3993 tests, lint and typecheck clean. Refs Fission-AI#1670 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The mutation work changed the implementation -- a test rewritten and a dead branch removed -- but no task covered it, so the plan claimed less work than was done. Added as group 6, marked complete, with why it was not planned. 5.4 now says what blocks it. It needs a pushed branch for the cross-platform matrix, and the note records that line endings are covered locally by tests asserting a CRLF spec and an LF spec produce identical findings, so a reader can tell the difference between unverified and unverifiable-from-here. The specs, proposal and design are unchanged and were checked: the delta's empty-Purpose clause constrains behaviour, not structure, and that behaviour is the same -- the redundant branch went, the rule did not. 26 of 27 tasks complete; the change still validates --strict. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
CI dispatched on the fork against this branch: lint & typecheck, and the test suite on linux-bash, macos-bash and windows-pwsh -- all green. The Windows job installed, built and ran the suite rather than short-circuiting, which is the part 5.4 existed to check, since the placeholder locator counts lines in files that may carry either ending. Recorded as a workflow_dispatch run on the fork, not the upstream pull-request run, because those are not the same gate and the note should not let a reader assume otherwise. Nix Flake Validation and Validate Release Tracking skipped: this branch touches neither the flake nor release tracking. 27 of 27 tasks complete. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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📝 WalkthroughWalkthrough
ChangesPurpose Placeholder Validation
Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to The change adds a narrowly scoped warning for archive-generated Purpose placeholders while preserving existing archive behavior and default validation success. No actionable merge-blocking risk remains beyond normal checks and review. Sequence Diagram(s)sequenceDiagram
participant openspec_validate
participant applySpecRules
participant findPurposePlaceholderIssue
openspec_validate->>applySpecRules: validate spec overview
applySpecRules->>findPurposePlaceholderIssue: inspect Purpose content
findPurposePlaceholderIssue-->>applySpecRules: issue with optional source line
applySpecRules-->>openspec_validate: warning or strict-mode failure
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Inline comments:
In `@src/core/validation/purpose-placeholder.ts`:
- Around line 67-87: Update findPlaceholderLine to return the 1-based line
containing PURPOSE_PLACEHOLDER_PREFIX when containsGeneratedPlaceholder matches
within the ## Purpose section, while retaining the existing first non-blank line
behavior for leading TBD text. Adjust the multiline test expectation to { line:
6 } and run the specified Vitest test.
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.changeset/validate-reports-purpose-placeholder.mdopenspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/.openspec.yamlopenspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/design.mdopenspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/proposal.mdopenspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/specs/cli-validate/spec.mdopenspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/tasks.mdsrc/core/specs-apply.tssrc/core/validation/constants.tssrc/core/validation/purpose-placeholder.tssrc/core/validation/validator.tstest/core/purpose-placeholder.test.tstest/core/validation.purpose-placeholder.test.ts
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The warning tells you which line to fix, and named the wrong one when the
generated sentence did not open the Purpose:
3 ## Purpose
4 Handles widget retries. <- warning pointed here
5
6 TBD - created by archiving ... <- placeholder is here
The locator asked "what is the first non-blank line after ## Purpose?"
rather than "where is the placeholder?". Those are the same line in five of
the six shapes a placeholder can take -- a leading TBD marker is the first
non-blank line by definition, and archive writes the generated sentence as
the section's only content -- so the two questions only diverge when a human
types prose above a leftover placeholder.
Pointing at that prose is worse than pointing nowhere: the reader sees a
sentence that is plainly fine and concludes the check is broken. design.md
already said a wrong line number is worse than none, and the delta already
required naming the line the placeholder is on, so this is the
implementation meeting a contract that was already written, not a change of
contract.
The locator is now told which rule matched. A leading marker keeps the
first-non-blank behaviour, because that is where it sits; the generated
sentence is located by its own text. When both match the leading marker
wins, being the earlier of the two.
Found by CodeRabbit on Fission-AI#1671. The finding was real despite its own
"Addressed" marker, which only tracked the file changing in a later commit.
Two test gaps let it through. The case that covered this input asserted
only that something was reported, never which line -- so it now asserts the
line, and a table pins every position a placeholder can occupy, each case
first checking that the line it expects really carries the placeholder. The
mutation pass could not have caught it either: mutation proves a test dies
when a guard is broken, and cannot invent an assertion nobody wrote.
Reverting the branch fails exactly the three new expectations. Full suite
4000 tests / 138 files, lint and typecheck clean.
Refs Fission-AI#1670
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ValidationIssue.line is optional and the project does not enable exactOptionalPropertyTypes, so a plain assignment typechecks and JSON output is unchanged - JSON.stringify drops undefined values. findPurposePlaceholderIssue already returns the key unconditionally, and the neighbouring push sites assign line plainly, so the conditional spread was the odd one out.
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Closes #1670.
Status
Full suite 3993 tests / 138 files green,
openspec validate --specs --strict36/36, lint, typecheck and build clean. CI green on linux-bash, macos-bash and windows-pwsh.What was wrong
openspec archivewrites a placeholder Purpose when a delta introduces a capability without a usable## Purpose, and nothing reported it afterwards. The check that exists to catch a Purpose nobody wrote is the 50-character brevity floor, and the placeholder's fixed text is 65 characters before the change name is even interpolated — so it clears that floor for every change name.The result was inverted, on released 1.9.0:
The spec that says nothing passes; the spec that says a little fails. A capability could carry the placeholder indefinitely while every command reported success — and a silent check is indistinguishable from a clean run.
This is the case #1431 left: that PR carries a delta's
## Purposeinto the new main spec, but when the delta has no Purpose at all, archive still writes the placeholder and nothing reports it. Every remedy on that path is an instruction — which is what #369 reported as unreliable in the first place.The project already treats the placeholder as something to fix, in three places:
schemas/spec-driven/schema.yaml("including a leftoverTBDplaceholder — edit the main spec directly"),sync-specs.ts("so it gets written now rather than lingering"), and thecli-archivespec. What was missing is anything that says it is still there.What it does
PURPOSE_PLACEHOLDER_PREFIX/SUFFIXinvalidation/constants.ts, composed at the write sitevalidation/purpose-placeholder.tsapplySpecRulesinvalidator.ts.changeset/Severity is a warning, so a project already carrying placeholders keeps validating by default and only
--strictfails.createReportalready defines strict as "warnings fail", so this is a choice between two existing behaviours rather than a new mechanism. An error would break every project with one on disk, on upgrade, for a documentation defect.Detection is deliberately narrow. The generated sentence counts wherever it appears in the Purpose. Otherwise only a
TBDopening the Purpose counts — which is what an agent writes when told to leave "a brief TBD placeholder". ATBDinside a sentence is authored prose: "the retry budget is TBD pending benchmarks" is a real Purpose with an open question in it, and reporting it would teach people to ignore the warning.Archive is unaffected. It validates rebuilt specs with a non-strict
Validator, so a warning cannot change that verdict — a spec archive writes still passes the validation it would have passed before. There is a test asserting exactly that call. The text archive writes is byte-identical: the 209 existing archive tests assert the placeholder literally and pass unchanged.Proof it works
Against a project whose four main specs have carried the placeholder since July — none of whose deltas had a
## Purpose, so #1431 would not have prevented any of them:On this repo,
--specs --strictstill reports 36/36. The two specs that mentionTBDinside scenarios rather than in a Purpose are untouched, since the rule only reads the Purpose.Every guard is load-bearing — reverting one at a time:
applySpecRuleselse if→if)TBDmarkerThat pass found two things worth fixing before this was opened. One test named the suffix guard but used a Purpose containing neither half of the generated sentence, so it passed whether or not the suffix was required; it now embeds the real prefix constant and asserts the suffix is absent. And an empty-Purpose early return turned out to be dead — neither rule matches empty text — so it is gone rather than kept as a guard no test can hold. The requirement that an empty Purpose goes unreported is unchanged and still asserted.
Two things for you to decide
TODOcount as well asTBD? Nothing produces one today, so I left it out; it is a one-line widening that changes no scenario here.I raised #1670 first because the framing is a judgement call rather than a defect — #1431 recorded that the placeholder always clears the floor, reading it as an invariant that PR traded away, and this reads the same fact as the mechanism by which the placeholder survives. Opening the PR alongside so there is something concrete to react to; happy to rework or drop it if you see the remaining case differently.
The branch also carries
openspec/changes/warn-on-purpose-placeholder/with the proposal, delta spec, design and tasks, following the dogfood pattern.Summary by CodeRabbit
New Features
openspec validatewarns when a spec’s Purpose contains the generated archive placeholder or begins withTBD.--strictto treat these warnings as validation failures.Bug Fixes
TBDtext, and archived specs retain existing behavior.