Vault Lint

Vault Lint — Knowledge Base Health Check

Inspired by Karpathy's "Lint" philosophy: periodically scan the vault to surface inconsistencies, broken links, orphan pages, and data gaps.

Workflow

Step 1: Environment Detection

1a. Detect vault root — follow ../../_shared/common-steps.md "Vault Detection" section.

1b. Scan all article files:

Glob("**/*.md", path="$VAULT_ROOT")

Exclude .claude/, .git/, .playwright-mcp/, reviews/, node_modules/ directories. Build the file list $ALL_ARTICLES.

Step 2: Six Checks

Check 1: Broken Links

Scan all articles for [[wikilink]] and [[wikilink|alias]]:

Grep("\\[\\[.*?\\]\\]", path="$VAULT_ROOT", glob="**/*.md", output_mode="content")

For each wikilink:

1. Extract the link target (the part before |)
2. Look for a matching file in $ALL_ARTICLES (filename without .md extension)
3. No match → record as broken link, note the source file and line number

Check 2: Orphan Pages

For each file in $ALL_ARTICLES:

1. Extract the filename (without path and extension)
2. Search all other articles for [[filename]] or [[filename|
3. No inbound links → record as orphan page

Exclude index.md, README.md, CLAUDE.md (these naturally have no inbound links).

Check 3: index.md Consistency

1. Read $VAULT_ROOT/index.md
2. Compare against $ALL_ARTICLES:
   • Entry in index.md but file doesn't exist → ghost entry
   • File exists but no entry in index.md → missing entry
3. Check whether total_articles count in the index.md header is accurate

Check 4: Cross-Reference Suggestions

For each article:

1. Extract 3-5 core keywords (from title and tags)
2. Search other articles for these keywords
3. If article A frequently mentions core concepts of article B but has no [[B]] link → suggest adding a cross-reference

This check is time-intensive; limit to 10 most recently modified articles per run.

Check 5: Summary Quality

Check entries in index.md:

• Summary is empty or too short (< 10 chars) → flag as "insufficient summary"
• Summary doesn't match actual article content (compare against first 50 lines) → flag as "stale summary"

Check 6: Frontmatter Completeness

For each file in $ALL_ARTICLES (excluding index.md, README.md, CLAUDE.md):

1. Check for YAML frontmatter (starts and ends with ---)
2. Validate required fields are present and non-empty: title, date, tags, type, confidence, related, summary
3. Validate type value is in the allowed set: concept, deep-dive, comparison, practice, guide, overview
4. Validate confidence value is in the allowed set: high, medium, low
5. Validate related is a list with each item in "[[...]]" format (empty list [] is acceptable)

Issue severity:

• Missing frontmatter — file has no YAML frontmatter block
• Missing field — a required field is absent
• Invalid value — type or confidence is not in the allowed enum

Step 3: Generate Health Report

Aggregate results into a structured report, output to terminal:

# Vault Health Report — {date}

## Overview
- Total articles: {count}
- Health status: {healthy / needs attention / needs repair}

## Broken Links ({count})
| Source File | Broken Target | Line |
|------------|---------------|------|
| ... | ... | ... |

## Orphan Pages ({count})
- {filename} — no other article links to this page

## index.md Consistency
- Ghost entries: {list}
- Missing entries: {list}
- Count drift: index says {n}, actual {m}

## Suggested Cross-References
- [[A]] <-> [[B]] (shared keywords: {keywords})

## Summary Quality
- Insufficient: {list}
- Possibly stale: {list}

## Frontmatter Issues ({count})
| File | Issue Type | Details |
|------|-----------|---------|
| ... | ... | ... |

Step 4: Auto-Fix (Optional)

Provide auto-fix for these issues:

1. Missing index.md entries: read the missing article's frontmatter, append to index.md per the Index Update steps in ../../_shared/common-steps.md
2. Count drift in index.md: update total_articles and last_updated
3. Ghost entries: remove from index.md

No confirmation needed before auto-fix (these are low-risk metadata corrections).

Broken link fixes, orphan page handling, cross-reference additions — report only, do not auto-modify article content.

4. Missing or incomplete frontmatter — report only, do not auto-modify (requires content understanding to correctly infer type/confidence).