v0.13.1

🧹 The trim sweep can actually finish now

/dobby:trim-context had a humiliating secret: point it at a real repository and it would never finish. A field run against a 948-file codebase reached 1.2% coverage and could not write a single line of its ledger. Not slowly — never. Three rules in the sweep contract guaranteed it, and this release replaces all three with what actually worked when the same repository was swept by hand: −263,238 bytes across 165 files, gate green, zero executable lines touched.

📊 Judgment, not inventory

The old contract demanded one inventory row per eligible unit. On that repo, that meant 24,113 rows — the entire budget spent writing a table before a single judgment call happened.

Now the inventory is one row per file, ranked by comment-byte weight, and per-unit decisions happen inside the lot that touches the file. The Tree-sitter extractor stays exactly where it was (it was never the bottleneck — it ran once, cheaply, in seconds), but it is now the targeting input that ranks files into lots rather than the source of an exhaustive census.

✅ Approve once, then walk away

The old contract wanted every batch approved before any worker wrote a byte. At repository scale that gate can never clear — you'd be clicking approvals until the heat death of the universe.

Now you approve scope and aggressiveness once, up front: which tracks run, how aggressive, what's off-limits. Lots then run unattended. The sweep comes back to you only when the policy needs to change, or something blocks. Go make coffee.

💾 Progress that survives

The worst of the three: a single parse-error voided the entire sweep. 43 unparseable .sql migrations permanently vetoed coverage genuinely earned on ~900 other files, and every rerun started from zero.

Coverage is now incremental and checkpointed per lot. A file that couldn't be resolved simply carries no sub-key — which already meant "not covered", so there's no schema change — and the savings report names it with its reason. An interruption, a blocked lot, an unparseable migration: each costs only itself. Everything already verified stays verified.

The honesty invariant is untouched, and it's the whole point: the ledger never claims coverage it doesn't have. What changed is that missing coverage no longer erases real coverage.

🔒 Nothing gets certified without being validated

Four rounds of adversarial review chased one invariant through this design, and each round found it hiding a level deeper. All four were real:

• Comment lots could skip semantic review whenever the mechanical diff came back clean — but deleting a biome-ignore, a licence header or a security warning changes no executable line either. The exemption is gone: every lot gets the cheap mechanical proof and an independent semantic review.
• The checkpoint writer mutated the canonical ledger before validation. Now it stages to .dobby/sweeps.json.pending, the reviewer validates that staging file alone, and only the coordinator promotes it.
• /dobby:anti-slop shares that same ledger file — so it got the same staged-then-promoted ordering. Nothing else about it changed.
• Nothing bound a checkpoint to the lot that just passed, so a stale staging file could be promoted as someone else's coverage. The reviewer now verifies the increment's paths match the lot's file set exactly.

🎯 The recipe that worked, encoded

Lots of 6-8 files by weight (a 47-file lot exhausted one implementor at 13 files, 430K tokens, 257 tool calls). One track per brief — comment-trim or prose densification, never both, after a mixed brief produced a proud −186 bytes. Levers carried forward between lots, worth a steady ~−12% once discovered. And every brief now states its expected yield (~5% on comments, 12-14% on prose) with "leaving a file untouched is a correct outcome" said out loud, because an agent measured on bytes removed will find bytes to remove.

⚠️ One thing to know

rulesVersion moves from human-text-v1 to human-text-v2 — the preservation rules genuinely changed. If you somehow have an existing sweep ledger, its entries no longer certify, and the next run re-sweeps from scratch. In practice nobody does: writing a ledger is precisely what the old contract could never manage. 🙃

📦 Upgrading

bun update @kvnwolf/dobby

The CLI itself has no changes this release — everything above lives in the plugin, which autoUpdate carries to you from the marketplace. Bump the devDependency to keep the two surfaces in step.

Worth saying plainly: this is methodology, validated by 1,676 tests and four review rounds, but nobody has yet run the new sweep against a large repository end to end. That's the real test. If you point it at something big, the interesting question is whether it now reaches ledger finality — and the savings report will tell you exactly what it couldn't cover.