Dogfood Cli

Dogfood the vigiles CLI (expert find + fix fan-out)

The repeatable method for finding real bugs in vigiles by running the tool on itself and on real plugins, then FIXING them — not filing them. This is how the 2026-07 batch found and fixed 14 source-traced bugs.

When to use

• "Dogfood the CLI", "find more bugs the source-traced way", "fan out agents to

audit vigiles on itself", "hunt for false positives in audit/lint".

• NOT for a single known bug (just fix it) and NOT for shipped consumer features

(this is a contributor-only dev process; .claude/ is not published).

The loop

fan out (parallel experts) → synthesize + VERIFY each finding → fix directly
   → regression test → build → targeted test → commit per theme → FULL SUITE → push

1. Fan out over DISTINCT surfaces

Spawn several agents (Sonnet — cheap parallel reads/traces; no synthesis needed per agent), each owning ONE surface so they don't overlap. The surface map that has paid off:

• compile / eject — round-trip correctness, frontmatter/data loss, integrity.
• audit / lint false-positives — a real plugin must stay CLEAN (don't cry

wolf); phantom paths; glob/quote tokens misread; comment-only matches.

• init / scaffold edge cases — no package.json, config-driven harness,

malformed frontmatter, --target, the scaffolded CI workflow, --test/--lint.

• config parse-don't-validate — .vigilesrc.json severities ("off"/0/1/2),

string-or-array keys, unknown values.

• CLI error UX — an unknown flag/harness must print a clean message + exit 2,

never a raw Node stack trace.

• cross-harness (CC + Codex) + browser/disk parity — scanFiles must match

scanPlugin byte-for-byte; a Codex-shaped repo must not be scanned as CC.

Tell each agent: SOURCE-TRACE every bug to file:line + a proposed fix. A finding without a trace is a lead, not a bug.

2. Synthesize + VERIFY yourself

Agents over-report. Before touching anything, reproduce each finding yourself (run the real built CLI on a tmp fixture or a vendored test/dogfood/* plugin). Discard what doesn't repro. Confirm the exact file:line.

3. FIX directly — don't file

A deterministic, source-traced bug needs no issue: fix it. File an issue ONLY when the fix is genuinely ambiguous (several valid interpretations, or an architecturally significant change the founder should weigh in on). "Fix, not file" is the founder's standing call for this loop.

Per fix:

• Repro → fix → regression test → npm run build → targeted vitest → commit.
• One theme per commit. Conventional Commit subject; end the body with the

Co-Authored-By: Claude … trailer. NEVER a session URL or a raw model id (public repo — see the no-session-links / model-identity rules).

• The fix must be high-precision — a false-positive fix must not silently

UNDER-detect (don't trade crying wolf for missing the real thing).

• Honor the architecture: a shared detector has ONE home (one-detector-no-drift);

core ⊄ adapter; no CC literal in src/core/** or the agnostic detectors.

Hard-won discipline (the lessons)

• Serialize/merge fixes that touch SHARED files (src/cli.ts,

src/scan-core.ts). Parallel edits to the same file conflict — do those sequentially, or give each agent its own git worktree (isolation: "worktree").

• RUN THE FULL SUITE before declaring done. A strict assertion in an

unrelated test file can only surface in the whole run — the I2 fix changed an install command and a strict regex in a different e2e file broke; per-file runs were all green, the full vitest run caught it.

• Rebuild after every source edit — the e2e tests run dist/cli.js, so a

stale dist/ silently tests the old code.

• Watch the parity gate. Any change to a scan detector must keep

scanFiles ↔ scanPlugin byte-identical (src/scan-files.test.ts); if the disk side gains a field, the browser side needs it too.

• Prettier + fmt:check before commit — markdown code spans need surrounding

spaces; CI runs fmt:check.

• Coverage gate is an allowlist (vitest.config.mjs coverage.include) — a

new file under it needs 100%; scan/cli files are NOT in it today.

The two recurring bug classes — hunt for them, then PREVENT the class

Almost every bug this repo has produced is one of two shapes. When you find one instance, GREP for its siblings, and add a GATE so the class can't come back.

1. An unverified assumption about an EXTERNAL contract

Code that guesses how an external thing behaves without checking: a CLI flag's format (the skills -s was assumed comma-separated, is space-separated → the install exited 1), a harness's frontmatter key (skills use allowed-tools, not tools:), git's behavior (git config origin in a subdir walks UP to the parent repo), module resolution (vigiles/testing can't resolve without a package.json), a linter's enabled-state (a checkstyle severity=ignore module is disabled).

• PARSE, DON'T VALIDATE the boundary. Read the REAL contract before coding —

the tool's --help, its arg parser in node_modules, git rev-parse, the linter's own status logic. Don't guess; verify.

• Add a UNIT assertion of the command/format's SHAPE, not just a

network/binary-gated e2e. The e2e that runs the real command SKIPS in dev (no network / no claude / no linter binary), so it's not a reliable guard — CI is the only place it runs. A unit test that parses the constructed command the SAME way the external tool does (e.g. the -s space-split assertion in setup-plan.test.ts) fails fast, offline, on a regression.

2. An incomplete fix — SOME call-sites of a pattern, not all

A pattern fixed in one place but left live elsewhere: audit/init honoured config.harness but test/eval/generate harness didn't; E1 fixed ScanAgent.path but not the frontmatter-family findings; comment-stripping was added to one detector but not the next.

• GREP for every instance of the pattern the moment you fix one.
• MAKE-INVALID-STATES-IRREPRESENTABLE — one choke-point. Route every caller

through a single helper (e.g. resolveCommandHarness) so a new call-site can't bypass it, and add a gate test that FAILS if the old path reappears (cli-harness-resolution.test.ts asserts cli.ts never calls the raw detector).

• Detectors that scan raw text share a hazard (matching inside comments /

examples / illustrative prose) — check the shared text-context helpers exist and are REUSED, not re-copied per detector, and keep the FP-guard fixtures green.

NOT this skill

The blind-agent onboarding dogfood (a fresh agent runs npx vigiles init on a real repo across an OS matrix in GHA + a subscription eval) is a SEPARATE, roadmapped e2e — do not fold its OS-matrix here. This skill is the in-repo find+fix loop; that one measures the cold onboarding experience end-to-end.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: zernie
• Source: zernie/vigiles
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://vigiles.sh

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.