Interactive example · from Keeping a Vault
The doctor's first run
Write that doctor script for the vault: broken links, bad filenames, stale actives.
Written: scripts/doctor.py, three checks, advisory output. Now comes the moment that decides whether we can ever trust it.
Pick the agent's next move, then see where it leads:
Months later: I just clicked three dead [[wikilinks]] in one afternoon. The doctor's been saying clean this whole time.
Found it: my link regex only matched standard markdown links. [[wikilinks]] never matched anything, so that check has scanned zero of them since day one. "0 broken links" was the check being blind, not the vault being healthy. A years-old vault scoring perfect on its first scan should have been the tell.
The clean first run, trusted: a probe that reports zero findings on its maiden voyage is broken until proven otherwise. Celebrating it shipped a blind checker as a health system. AF-01
First run: caught the bad filename... missed the planted wikilink. The regex only handled markdown links. Fixed, re-run: both plants flagged. Removing the plants; the honest run finds 11 real broken links and 3 stale actives. The 11 are real: I checked four by hand.
So the plant caught the blind spot before the blind spot cost anything.
I just tried to commit today's log and it's blocked by 14 findings in notes from 2024.
The gate holds today's work hostage to history's debt, and you've started committing with --no-verify to get past it, which means the doctor now runs never instead of always. The gate converted an advisory habit into a bypassed obstacle.
Gate-ification: blocking commits on advisory findings taxes the wrong moment and teaches routing-around. The doctor is taste infrastructure: it reports, the human decides, and it keeps getting run because it never bites.