quality-list

name	quality-list
description	Single source of truth for universal code-quality items. Definitions live in items/<slug>.md; audit and preflight skills reference items by slug.

Quality List (SSOT)

This skill is a definition file, not a runnable procedure. Skills that audit or preflight against universal code-quality apply these items by reference. When an item changes, referencing skills pick up the change automatically — do not copy item text into them. The Items index below is likewise the single source of truth for which items exist and which lane each belongs to: runners derive their active item set by reading this index, never by hardcoding a parallel slug list. Adding an item here propagates to every runner automatically.

Audit lanes

Each item is tagged for which audit lane it belongs to in done-check's split between fresh-context subagent audit and main-context audit:

• mechanical — judgable from literal diff text + literal code text + literal rule text alone, with no need for conversation history, plan context, or actual command execution. Delegated to a fresh-context subagent in done-check Step 2 to neutralize the author's blindspot for what their own comments and code actually say (vs what they meant them to say).
• contextual — requires plan / intent / review history that only the main context has, OR requires running a command against the working tree to gather evidence. Stays in main context.

A small number of items are dual-lane: their detection has both mechanical (literal-grep) and contextual (history-aware) signals. Such items appear in both audit lanes; consumers (done-check) route the relevant signal to the appropriate context. The current dual-lane item is ported-code-attribution (declared port = mechanical, undeclared port = contextual).

Each item's lane is declared once, in the Items index below (the — mechanical / — contextual suffix on each entry). Item files do not carry a lane tag in their H1 heading.

Items

Listed in canonical reading order. Reference items by slug (e.g., behavior-coverage); numbering is not stable and not part of the SSOT.

• invariant-derivation — contextual
• purpose-verification — contextual
• pattern-audit — contextual
• duplication-extraction — mechanical
• scope-discipline — contextual
• behavior-coverage — mechanical
• implementation-guards — mechanical
• impact-verification — mechanical
• test-execution — contextual
• completion-hygiene — contextual
• architectural-boundary — mechanical
• escape-hatch-necessity — contextual
• paired-artifact-drift — mechanical
• docstring-drift — contextual
• discovery-surfacing — contextual
• ported-code-attribution — mechanical (+ contextual half)
• signature-change-regression — mechanical
• public-doc-durability — mechanical
• public-api-surface — mechanical

Language-specific addenda live alongside this file as lang-<language>.md and supplement specific items with triggers and mitigation idioms (current examples: lang-cpp.md, lang-rust.md). An addendum section realizes an item concretely; it never bounds the item: its triggers and N/A criteria scope only that realization, and a diff outside the realization's constructs remains subject to the base item's conditions.