adlc-maintain

name	adlc-maintain
description	Run the decay-driven ADLC maintenance checks — stale skills, hot files to re-prosecute, stale tickets, and gate calibration (C10/C12).

adlc-maintain — fight decay (C10 / C12 + calibration)

Some assumptions rot over time or after a model/repo change: skill cache metadata goes stale, files churn enough to deserve re-prosecution, and gates that once held may now be defeatable. This skill runs those checks. It is idle-time work — run it on a schedule or after a model upgrade.

Prerequisite: adlc --version works (else npm i -g @adlc/cli). Report a single honest summary at the end, including any check that did not apply.

1. Skill rot — stale validation metadata (C10)

adlc skill-rot <skill-dir-or-glob> --json

• Exit 0: skills are fresh.
• Exit 2: one or more skills have stale validation metadata — list them and recommend re-validating (and --write to stamp freshness once re-checked).
• Exit 1 with nothing to verify: the targeted skills carry no validation metadata to check — informational, not a failure. Note it.

2. Model ratchet — hot files to re-prosecute (C12)

adlc model-ratchet --dry-run --json

• Lists the highest-churn / highest-dependency files (score), the best candidates to re-prosecute after model or repo drift. This is a plan, not a gate — it does not fail. Report the top files and suggest running the /adlc-prosecute skill (the six read-only prosecution agents) against them.
• With a --review-cmd, model-ratchet can run a review over those files and append findings to .adlc/findings.jsonl (which later feeds /adlc-distill).

3. Ticket prune — stale ticket hygiene

adlc ticket-prune --json

• Dry-run by default (this call never writes): reports tickets that look already shipped — either an explicit status: done-shaped field, or every declared scope glob resolving to a file already tracked on HEAD. This is a plan, not a gate — it does not fail on stale tickets (exit 0 either way; exit 1 only on an operational error such as a missing/invalid .adlc/tickets.json).

• List the stale tickets it finds and recommend confirming them by hand, then re-running with adlc ticket-prune --write to tombstone the rails-less ones (completed: true in place — never deletes outright, and the exact add-only diff an ordinary PR's rails-guard gate accepts). Treat --write as a human-confirmed action, not something this skill should run unattended — .adlc/tickets.json is a shared, hand-edited file.

• Rail-cleanup drift (issue #198). The --json output's needsCeremony array surfaces, in dry-run, the shipped tickets that still freeze rails (blocker: "rails-freeze"). These are the drift: a shipped ticket that was never marked completed: true, so its rails never expired (T36) and keep freezing sibling paths against unrelated future PRs. An ordinary PR structurally cannot complete them — rails-guard-ci denies field changes to existing base tickets — so completion is reserved for the protected-base admin ceremony. Report the needsCeremony ids and their frozen rails.

• Completing them (admin, on main only). After confirming each is genuinely shipped, an admin completes them one id at a time on a protected-base checkout of main (the diff an ordinary PR is denied, so it lands via the admin path):

  adlc ticket complete <id> --write --authorize --json
  

  Per-ticket by design: it names one id (no bulk recompute, no cross-ticket blast radius — though the id's own version is still resolved at run time, so verify it is still genuinely done before completing), goes through the ticket-store transaction, records completion evidence to .adlc/manifest.jsonl, and works on both the legacy and directory stores. Completing a ticket adds completed: true and expires its rails (T36). A preexisting-completed-field ticket carries a value someone set on purpose — leave it unless you mean to override it. Do not use the deprecated bulk ticket-prune --ceremony (evidence-less, legacy-store-only; #208).

Unbanked-cluster gate — recurring findings with no defense yet (P7 owner)

adlc lesson-foundry --gate

• Exit 0: every recurring finding cluster in .adlc/findings.jsonl has a banked lesson.
• Exit non-zero: it names the clusters that recur but are still undefended — surface them and run /adlc-distill to bank a defense.

This deterministic, keyless gate is the decay-time owner of the P5 → P7 bridge. It is not yet wired into the maintenance cron, but it is portable now: .adlc/findings.jsonl is tracked in git (ADR 0014), so the cluster set travels with the repo and the gate returns the same verdict anywhere it is checked out — including CI.

4. Gate fuzzing — can hostile candidates defeat the gates? (calibration)

Only run this if a gate suite exists at .adlc/gate-suite.json; without one the tool exits 1 (Gate suite not found) — note that calibration was skipped.

adlc gate-fuzzing --suite .adlc/gate-suite.json --prompt-only

• LLM-backed: in Copilot, use --prompt-only and play the adversary yourself against each gate in the suite. A gate you can defeat is a calibration gap — report it; the gate needs strengthening (the gate-fuzzing exit-2 condition when run with a provider).

5. Summarize

Report: stale skills (if any), the top hot files to re-prosecute, any stale tickets found (and whether they were archived), gate-fuzzing result or why it was skipped, and the recommended next actions. Repeated findings surfaced here flow into /adlc-distill.

Scheduling

The deterministic checks here (skill-rot, model-ratchet, ticket-prune) are keyless and run well on a cron — see the ready-to-use workflow at docs/ci/adlc-maintenance.yml. The LLM-backed gate-fuzzing runs via a scheduled Copilot session invoking this skill, where Copilot is the model and no API keys are needed — CI cron is the deterministic fallback for the other three when no scheduled session is configured.