bhouvana Every knowingly-accepted limitation from a Critical-tier decision is
marked with an instinct: comment naming the limitation and what would
remove it (references/provenance-out.md, case 5). This collects them
into one ledger so a deliberate, scoped-for-now tradeoff can't quietly
become a permanent, unexamined one.
Scan
Grep the repo for the marker, anchored to a comment prefix so it matches
actual inline comments and not prose that merely mentions the convention
(a plain grep -rn "instinct:" was tried while writing this skill and
returned two dozen false positives — docs, ADRs, this file itself, and the
sync-marker's own regex source in hooks/lib.js — none of them real debt):
grep -rnE '(#|//) ?instinct:' --include=*.py --include=*.js --include=*.ts .
(extend the pattern with other comment prefixes — --, ;, <!-- — for
the target stack). This also naturally excludes the sync-marker convention
(instinct:shared, instinct:host-specific), which appears inside HTML
comments and regex source, not as a #///-prefixed inline marker.
Output
One row per marker, grouped by file:
<file>:<line> — <what was limited>. removes when: <the trigger named in the comment>.
Flag any marker with no named removal trigger — those are the ones most likely to rot into permanent, unexamined debt, exactly the failure mode the convention exists to prevent.
End with <N> markers, <M> with no removal trigger. Nothing found:
No instinct: debt. Clean ledger. — an expected, normal result for a
codebase that hasn't needed the escape hatch yet, not a sign the
convention is broken or unused.
Boundaries
Reads and reports only, changes nothing. If a finding warrants action — a marker whose trigger condition has actually arrived — that's a new request through the Gate, not something this report resolves itself.