Audit Coupled Constant

/audit-coupled-constant

Before declaring an edit to a coupled constant complete, grep the constant's value globally to verify every site moved together. The author-maintained SEE ALSO trail is a maintenance contract, not enforcement — when one site is missed, the trail silently lies in the other sites.

Origin. This skill emerged from a cold-review finding. A 60s retry budget was raised to 180s across 3 of 4 call sites; the 4th (packages/<pkg>/src/flows/rename.ts:297) was missed because the SEE ALSO comments in the 3 known sites never mentioned it. Two independent cold reviewers caught it via global grep; the original diagnosis trusted the SEE ALSO trail. The lesson generalizes far beyond retry budgets.

Boundary

Use audit-coupled-constant when you are about to declare done on an edit that touches a constant whose value is duplicated across multiple files, OR whose comments name other files via "SEE ALSO" / "keep in sync" / "matches" / "mirrors" cross-references. Common shapes:

• Retry / timeout budgets (240 × 250ms, 60_000, 60s)
• Pagination page sizes / query limits (PAGE_SIZE = 25)
• Feature-flag strings or keys
• Magic numbers reflecting external invariants (max upload size, max URL length, schema version)
• Shared regex patterns or validation thresholds

Do NOT use for constants that are truly local to one file, for purely-imported constants where only the import site moved (the named symbol is the single source), or for constants enforced by the type system (e.g., a TypeScript as const literal imported everywhere — the compiler is your audit).

Step 1 — Identify the constant + its shapes

A coupled constant appears in code under multiple shapes. List every shape you might find before grepping:

• Raw value in code: 240, 60_000, 0.5, "warn"
• Named symbol (if extracted): RETRY_BUDGET_MS, MAX_PAGE_SIZE
• Value-as-comment in documentation: // 60s budget, /* 240 × 250ms */
• Unit suffix in documentation: 60s, 60000ms, 1min
• Composite expressions that reduce to the value: 60 * 1000, 1000 * 60 * 60
• String tokens the value participates in: log lines, error messages, JSON fixtures, test names

Write the list of shapes down before grepping. Missing a shape is the most common cause of a missed site.

Step 2 — Grep each shape across the relevant scope

Run a separate grep for each shape. Use Grep / ripgrep, not find or recursive Read. Examples:

# raw value
Grep "\\b240\\b" --type ts        # word-boundary avoids 1240, 2401, etc.

# unit-suffixed comment
Grep "60s" --type ts -i

# composite expression
Grep "240 *\\* *250"

# named symbol (if extracted)
Grep "RETRY_BUDGET_MS"

Set the scope to the package or repo level — coupled constants often span src + tests + scripts. For monorepos, audit each affected package.

Step 3 — Reconcile the hits

Group hits into three categories:

• Moved together — site already updated to the new value as part of your edit. ✓ No action.
• Missed site — site still holds the old value but should move. Update + verify the SEE ALSO chain mentions this site after the update.
• Intentionally different — site holds a different value by design (e.g., test budget intentionally wider than prod, or development tier intentionally lower). Document the intent at the site itself with a comment like // Intentionally different from registry-reset.ts: tests need 3× the budget for singleFork load. This prevents the next auditor from misclassifying it.

If you cannot tell which category a site belongs in, halt the edit and ask the author or git blame the comment that introduced the value.

Step 4 — Repair the SEE ALSO trail

For any newly-found coupled site, add bidirectional SEE ALSO comments so the next auditor doesn't have to re-discover the relationship:

// SEE ALSO: <other-file-1>.ts <function> — keep budgets in sync (180s).
// SEE ALSO: <other-file-2>.ts <function> — keep budgets in sync (180s).

Critically: also UPDATE the SEE ALSO comments in the EXISTING sites to mention the newly-found site. The trail must be bidirectional, or the next person to touch any one site won't know to look at the new one.

Step 5 — Emit the audit report

Brief, structured. One section per scope swept:

audit-coupled-constant report
  constant: <name or value>
  shapes searched: 240, 60_000, 60s, RETRY_BUDGET_MS
  scope: packages/<pkg>
  sites found: 4
    src/flows/registry-reset.ts:90    moved together ✓
    src/scaffold/delete.ts:42          moved together ✓
    tests/_helpers/fs-retry.ts:47      moved together ✓
    src/flows/rename.ts:297            MISSED — update + add SEE ALSO trail
  intentionally-different sites: 0
  SEE ALSO trail updated: yes (added rename.ts to the 3 existing sites)

Rules

• MUST list every shape the constant can appear in (raw value, named symbol, unit-suffixed comment, composite expression, embedded in strings) before grepping.
• MUST run a separate grep for each shape — one grep per shape, not a single broad grep.
• MUST classify each hit into moved-together / missed / intentionally-different. Halt the edit if you can't classify confidently.
• MUST update SEE ALSO comments in the existing sites when you find a new site — the trail must be bidirectional.
• MUST NOT trust SEE ALSO comments as enforcement. They are documentation that decays.
• MUST NOT declare an edit done before the audit report shows all sites moved (or are intentionally-different with explicit documentation).
• SHOULD pair with /cold-review for high-stakes coupled-constant edits (retry budgets that ship to users, schema versions, feature flags wired into rollouts).

Anti-patterns

• "I updated the SEE ALSO sites — done." The SEE ALSO trail's set of named sites may be a subset of all coupled sites. Grep first; trust the trail second.
• Trusting word-boundary grep for short numbers. 240 matches 1240, 2403, etc. without \\b. Always use word-boundary for digit-only constants under 1000.
• Skipping the unit-suffixed comment shape. Many sites carry the value as a comment (// 60s budget) even when the code uses a named symbol. Comments don't move with code refactors and are the silent-drift source.
• Treating intentionally-different as "moved together — skip." If the site is intentionally different, the comment at the site must say so. Otherwise the next auditor will flag it as drift and the cycle repeats.
• Auditing only your own edit's scope. The constant may appear in a test fixture, a doc snippet, a script, or a docstring inside a sibling package. Audit the whole repo unless you can prove a tighter scope.
• Adding SEE ALSO to the new site without updating the old sites. Trail must be bidirectional. One-way SEE ALSO is worse than none — it gives false confidence.

Edge cases

• The constant is a TypeScript as const exported from one file. If all consumers import the symbol (not the value), the compiler enforces the invariant — no audit needed. But if any consumer copy-pasted the value as a literal (often in test fixtures or JSON), grep the raw value to catch those.
• The constant changed unit (60s → 3min instead of 60s → 180s). Add the new unit-suffixed shape to the grep list. Old comments with the old unit are now drift; update them.
• The repo has migrated from raw values to named symbols mid-history. Grep both shapes; older sites may still carry the raw value.
• The constant is platform-conditional (isWindows ? 240 : 1). Audit each branch separately. The Windows branch and the POSIX branch are two coupled invariants, not one.

Outputs

• Audit report (above shape) emitted to chat or written to the active retro / handoff result artifact.
• Updated SEE ALSO comments in all coupled sites (bidirectional trail).
• File path + line number for each MISSED site (so the caller knows where to patch).
• Documented // Intentionally different from <other-site>: <reason> comment at any divergent site.

Pairings

• Before /cold-review: the audit closes the most common Critical finding category ("missed coupled site"). Run audit first; cold-review confirms the audit was thorough.
• After a budget raise, page-size change, or magic-number tweak: standard hygiene. Treat this skill the same way you treat the typecheck — automatic.
• Inside /handoff-execute Phase 4 (Execute): when the brief involves a budget / timeout / threshold raise, invoke this audit as part of the execute phase, not as an afterthought.

Out of scope

• This skill does NOT find new constants that should be coupled but aren't yet (e.g., two unrelated files independently hardcoding the same retry value). That's an improve-codebase-architecture job (extract-constant refactor).
• This skill does NOT enforce future drift. The SEE ALSO trail it repairs will decay again over time. Periodic re-audit is the price of human-maintained cross-references.
• This skill does NOT replace a typecheck-enforced as const extraction when it's feasible. Prefer language-level enforcement when the constant is purely internal; this skill handles the cases where extraction isn't practical (external interfaces, cross-package fixtures, comment-embedded values).

Human output. This skill's handler-facing output obeys the human-output contract (human-output/SKILL.md).

Self-improvement. On completion, run the Self-Improvement Protocol (self-improve/SKILL.md): if this run surfaced a concrete, blocking-or-recurring weakness in this skill, propose a specific fix for the handler to approve. Conservative — silent otherwise. Never auto-apply.