v0.8.0

[0.8.0] - 2026-09-15

Changed (breaking)

• The four old categories are gone: rhetorical-tic, structure, puffery
  and hedging. Nine new categories replace them, each named for the move
  the construct makes: self-rating (the writer grades their own prose or
  claim), closer (closes by restating or announcing the point), cadence
  (rhythm: repetition, parallelism, the long-then-short kicker), puffery
  (inflates the subject), false-correction (corrects a reading nobody
  offered), false-concession (performs balance or candor and gives nothing
  up), reader-address (instructs or flatters the reader),
  borrowed-metaphor (an engineering term applied to an argument), and
  punctuation (the mark itself). Every note, --select, and --ignore now
  use these nine names; the four old names are gone, not aliased, so a
  script still passing one gets a usage error instead of a silent no-op.
• The rule ellipsis-closer is renamed bare-auxiliary-closer. Nothing
  about its pattern, message, or fixtures changed, only the id.
• severity now rates only what the construct costs the prose (error,
  warning, info). A new field, confidence, rates how likely a match is
  a false positive (high, medium, low), and a low rule replaces what
  used to be default_on: false — it stays out of a normal run and needs
  --strict or its own id named directly to turn on.
• sloplint rules --json drops the default_on field and adds confidence
  and rationale for every rule. Each note in check output also gains a
  confidence field alongside severity.
• --select <category> no longer turns on that category's low-confidence
  rules. Naming a category now selects only its default-on rules; to run a
  low-confidence rule, pass --strict or name the rule's own id.
• Every rule's severity was re-rated for what the construct costs the prose,
  now that confidence carries the false-positive question on its own. The
  catalog reads 11 error, 56 warning, 13 info. Nothing shipped at
  error before: the eleven that do now are the ones that hurt a sentence in
  any register, the puffery family (puffery-words, rich-tapestry,
  vital-role, impact-noun-vague,
  trailing-significance-participle), the tautology and self-ranking moves
  (the-x-is-the-x, cleanest-x, most-honest-x), the fake balance
  (two-things-true, none-of-this-is-to-say) and vague-attribution.
  Twenty rules moved from info to warning, among them em-dash-overuse:
  one em dash is a style choice, three in a paragraph is the tell, so the
  dense form now costs more than em-dash. Any tool that keys off severity
  sees different values for the same text.

Fixed

• The test suite failed with no locale set, because spec/plugin_spec.rb
  read files without forcing UTF-8. Fixed to read as UTF-8 regardless of the
  environment's locale.
• The README and SPEC quoted an outdated rationale for no-x-no-y and an
  outdated sample of sloplint check output. Both are corrected and now
  pinned by tests, so a future drift between the docs and the code fails the
  build instead of sitting unnoticed.
• SPEC's description of the Rule model and of the package's file layout
  had fallen out of step with the code. Both are corrected to match.
• --help was missing count from its list of note keys, even though a
  note already includes it for rules that tally items. Added.

Added

• A test asserting that no rule id ever matches a category name, since
  --select and --ignore resolve a name against both and a collision
  would make one shadow the other.