lore-check

name	lore-check
description	Use when asked whether the project's lore is healthy or still helping, or when the 30-day heartbeat suggests a re-check — audits coverage, link health, freshness, entry quality, adoption, and language health, read-only, then hands fixes off to lore-maintain, lore-capture, and lore-ul.

Lore Check

Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/lore-spec.md first — the entry-meta format, the "What lore is / isn't" boundary test, and the feedback-log format all come from there.

When to use

When you want to know whether a project's lore is healthy and actually pulling its weight: on an explicit request ("how healthy is our lore?", "is the lore still useful?"), or as a periodic check. Only meaningful when the repo has a docs/lore/ folder — if there is none, say so briefly and suggest lore-init, rather than reporting an empty audit.

This skill is read-only. It never edits, marks, or deletes anything — it produces a report and hands the fixes off.

Procedure

Run all seven checks, then produce one report. Use your file tools directly (Read, Grep, checking that paths exist) — there is no script to run.

1. ① Quality — the headline. For each entry, apply lore-spec's boundary test against the current code: "Could a competent engineer reading the code recover this on their own?" If yes, the entry is noise, not lore. Report the pass rate (for example 10/12). This leads because noise drowns out real lore — a base full of code-derivable entries is actively worse than a small clean one.
2. ② Coverage. Identify the codebase's top-level domains or subsystems, then compare against the existing areas. Report domains that have no lore at all — these are the gaps worth filling. Weight by the README's core marks: a core area with thin or no lore is a red flag, an uncovered peripheral area is merely a note. If no area is marked core yet, suggest asking the user which one is — as a report line, not an action.
3. ③ Link health. Grep every `code:` reference and check each path still exists on disk. Report the broken-link count and ratio.
4. ④ Freshness. Read each entry's updated: and status:. Report the age distribution, how many are older than ~180 days, and the active / resolved / obsolete breakdown.
5. ⑤ Retrievability. Check that every entry has complete, greppable meta (code:, updated:, status:), and that the README Areas table matches the folders actually on disk. If lore-consult can't find or link an entry, it can't surface it.
6. ⑥ Adoption. Read docs/lore/.lore-feedback.jsonl if it exists and aggregate per entry: how often each was surfaced, and the heeded / redundant / ignored split. Flag entries surfaced repeatedly but never heeded as review candidates. If the log is absent or empty, report "no data yet" — that is normal for a fresh base, not an error.
7. ⑦ Language. Resolve the glossary per lore-spec. For lore's own format (docs/lore/glossary.md / any <area>/terms.md): check every term's meta is complete (code:, updated:, status:). For an external root CONTEXT.md: skip the meta check — that file carries none by design — and audit content only. Either way, spot-check the codebase for banned names (not: / _Avoid_:) still used in domain positions — a heuristic sample judged in context, not an exhaustive lint. Also spot-check liveness the other way: does the term still appear anywhere in the codebase (and, in lore's format, does its code: type still exist)? A term that fails both is a dead word — a document whose language no longer appears in the code has stopped working; flag it as an obsolete candidate for lore-maintain. Fold in each term's adoption from the feedback log (keys glossary.md#<Term> or CONTEXT.md#<Term>). If both a root CONTEXT.md and docs/lore/glossary.md exist, flag the duplication — per lore-spec the external file is canonical; hand the merge to lore-maintain. If there is no glossary at all, report "no glossary yet — lore-ul can bootstrap one"; that is a note, not a failure.

Report

Produce one report. Give each dimension its own line with the raw numbers and a green / yellow status. Do NOT roll the seven into a single score — that hides what to fix. End with concrete next steps that point at the right skill:

• broken links, stale entries, suspected noise, low-adoption entries → lore-maintain
• coverage gaps → lore-capture
• incomplete term meta, banned-name drift, missing glossary → lore-ul

Yellow/green thresholds are heuristic: flag yellow when there is any broken link, the boundary-test pass rate is low, there are uncovered domains, or an entry is surfaced repeatedly with zero heeded. Don't chase precise numbers — the point is to steer the next action, not to grade.

After delivering the report, refresh the heartbeat stamp: write today's date to docs/lore/.lore-last-check (one line, YYYY-MM-DD), and make sure docs/lore/.gitignore ignores it. The SessionStart hook reads this stamp to suggest a re-check after ~30 days — it is how the health loop keeps running without anyone remembering to.

Guardrail

Read-only toward the lore itself, always. lore-check never edits, marks, deletes, or refreshes any lore content — every fix is a handoff to lore-maintain, lore-capture, or lore-ul, which carry their own confirmation steps. The one exemption is bookkeeping: the gitignored .lore-last-check stamp (and, per lore-spec, the feedback log) are metadata about the check, not lore.