scripts/check-comment-runs.py early-returned on args.check_evidence, so the
flagged run answered the evidence question and said nothing at all about the
comment-run cap. The flagged form is the expensive one -- it needs a compiled
workspace -- which makes it the one a human runs alone; three agents hit this
independently in one campaign, and in one case a local gate went green while
CI went red on a three-line doc comment (improvise-ijql).
The cap moves into check_cap(), and --check-evidence now runs it first and
returns the worse of the two verdicts. The ticket's cheaper alternative -- keep
the early return and print a line saying the cap did not run -- is declined and
the reason is recorded: a provenance line qualifies an answer the run gave,
where a disclaimer qualifies one it did not, while still exiting 0. Exit 0 is
what CI branches on and what a human reads as clean, so the rule is stated over
the exit code: a tree with a long comment run must not pass any invocation that
can exit 0.
The guard is _dispatch_self_test, which runs the script as a subprocess against
a temporary tree -- the only level at which this is visible, since every unit in
the file was correct and the defect was in main()'s dispatch. Both arms were
demonstrated by injection: restoring the early return fails
"DISPATCH: --check-evidence: exited 0 over a four-line comment run", and forcing
the cap to always report a violation fails the clean arm for both invocations,
which is what stops an always-fail from satisfying the first.
Measured: the cap adds 0.29s to a 6.5s --check-evidence run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
Edward Langley
da564dc4c1