improvise-q914 and improvise-j6x8 are one bug seen twice, and the second
measured it: `run_headless_commands` applied effects and never read
`app.view_state.status_msg`, setting `exit_code` only for parse errors. A
successful command and a refused one therefore produced byte-identical
output — nothing — and exit 0 for both. `improvise script` is the same
function, so it shared the hole exactly.
Three decisions, argued in `context/code/cli.md`:
**Everything to stderr.** The tempting split — stdout for a report, stderr
for a refusal — cannot be built honestly, because `status_msg` is a bare
`String` with no severity and both candidate classifiers are disproved by
code already in the tree. "A refusal aborted" is false: `AddItem` writes its
`Err` to the status and does not abort, and that is q914's own example. "A
refusal is anything that spoke" is false too: `cmd/fit.rs` reports the seed
that reproduces a fit on **success**. Guessing between them is the adjacent
check design-principles §7 names.
**Exit 1 on a parse error or an aborted batch, and no further.** Both are
real flags. A refusal that only writes a status is now printed but still
exits 0, because nothing can classify it; the README says so plainly rather
than over-promising, and closing it needs a severity on `ViewState`, which
is a wire change reaching the browser.
**No quiet flag.** Silence is never the default and `2>/dev/null` already
exists.
Also: a run that changed nothing no longer rewrites the document. Saving
unconditionally normalised it — `1e20` to its twenty digits — which turns a
hand-edited fixture into a silent no-op. The gate accumulates
`model_state.dirty` per command rather than reading it once at the end,
because `effect::Save` clears the flag and `[add-item, w elsewhere]` would
otherwise drop the edit.
And the three clap doc strings advertised JSON, which the parser refuses.
`tests/headless_cli.rs` pins all of it at the process boundary, where an
exit code and a stream exist. Six of its twelve tests fail at bf83294. The
rival worth injecting — print on the happy path, stay silent on the
refusal — fails five of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FC2jVn8Au7E9JPkw6bwXXH
Edward Langley
c13466f1d9