0.4.0

Release notes

0.4.0 — 2026-09-20

Every one of the 118 engineering Rule items now carries the evidence that makes it active, where 16 did before. That is the substance of this release: a criterion you cite now tells you what its tools cannot decide, or shows you a worked pass and a worked failure, or names the fixtures that forward-test it.

Two contracts changed in ways that need action. Read Upgrade notes before updating if you emit findings or author Rule items.

Upgrade notes

• A finding now carries a maturity. findings-list moved to 2.0.0 because a previously absent element became required. Every finding states ready or provisional — how well prepared the criterion behind it is, taken from the Rule item that produced it. A finding with no deriving Rule item is ready. If you have your own reviewer emitting findings, add the element; if you consume findings, the value is additive and nothing you read today breaks.

• blocking is gone from Rule governance. workflow-rule-governance moved to 2.0.0. Its activation constraint used to scale obligations by "blocking item", a term nothing defined, so the population it reached was undecidable. Each obligation now names its enforcement class directly. If you cited the old wording, cite the class.

• An authored Rule item owes new rows. An automated item owes Verification, a tool-assisted item owes Tool limits, a judgment item owes Worked pass and Worked failure. The rows are conditional on enforcement, so an item missing one is reported as provisional rather than failing validation — your existing items keep working, and the report tells you what they still owe.

• cortex rejects an option a command does not define. cortex update replaces the command you have installed, so this takes effect the moment you update. A script passing an unrecognised flag used to have it ignored and now fails.

• Rollback: nothing in this release writes to your project. Pinning the previous tag restores the previous assets.

Added

• A Rule set for a value written down twice. literal-and-copy-quality, prefix LIT, seven items: one defining place for a value more than one runtime reads, display formats from a formatting API rather than string slicing, whole copy entries rather than concatenated fragments, full language coverage, fallback copies that agree with their source, no time-varying value in the display layer, and a declared, bounded enum where its values are natural-language words.

  None of the seven blocks a merge. The proposal behind them asked for five automated blocking items; the evidence was one project carrying three runtimes, and this repository admits an automated blocking item only after three representative shapes. Every item is tool-assisted or judgment until adopting projects supply that evidence.

• A design-time question about where a value lives. TDES-028 asks a technical design to name the single place each shared value is defined, how each runtime obtains it, and how a copy that cannot read that place is reconciled. It refuses a location stated as intent rather than a path.

• A check that keeps the findings contract from drifting. A review Skill that restates the finding element list, rather than citing the Spec, is now reported. Twelve Skills here had copied that list, so a change to the Spec reached fifteen consumers and silently missed twelve.

Changed

• Every Rule item states what its evidence cannot settle. All 47 tool-assisted items now say what their tool class cannot decide, so a clean tool run is never read as a passed item. A taint analyzer silently passes a sink it has no rule for; a benchmark cannot establish a complexity class from the points it measured; repeated green runs bound flakiness without disproving it.

• Every judgment item shows where the line is. All 41 now carry a worked pass and a worked failure. A judgment item has no tool to calibrate against, so the example is the only place you learn what its author meant. TDES-020 fails on "Postgres, because it is mature and widely adopted" and passes on a reason naming a property of the system being designed.

• Thirty automated items name their verification. Sixteen point at the fixtures that already forward-tested them, ten gained forward tests, and four read adopter — they govern a population this repository cannot host, such as a running service's indicators or a benchmark suite, and CONTRIBUTING now documents how an adopting project returns that evidence.

• The link-graph criteria describe a healthy graph. doc-health-criteria moved to 2.0.0.

• Twelve review Skills cite the findings Spec rather than restating what a finding carries.

Fixed

• A Rule that means to be modeled no longer drops silently out of validation. A misspelt model field used to remove a document from the checked set while the run stayed green.

• cortex no longer ignores an option a command does not define, and its confirm-or---yes branches collapsed into one condition.

• A malformed fixture now names its file. Two scripts reported a parse error with a line and column and no path.

Removed

• The inbound proposal channel. Four months, twelve messages, none acknowledged; nothing reached this repository through it. Proposals go through the contribution process in CONTRIBUTING.