Correctness Gate

correctness-gate

The project names a set of critical modules ({{critical_modules}}) and one gate command ({{gate_command}}). The contract: if any critical module changed, "done" may not be said until the gate passes. Silent breakage in these modules does not crash — it quietly changes numbers, and wrong numbers end up in the paper. The gate is the tripwire.

When to use

• Any edit lands inside {{critical_modules}} — run the gate before reporting completion.
• The gate is red and you must decide: bug, or intentional formulation change?
• A new module is becoming result-critical and should enter the gate's scope.

When NOT to use

• Changes outside {{critical_modules}} (orchestration, plotting, docs) — the general test suite and review suffice; do not inflate the gate's scope with noise.
• As a substitute for the full test suite — the gate is a fast, named correctness contract, not total coverage.
• Verifying a scientific claim — that is the verifier agent (the gate checks the machinery, not the conclusion).

Runbook

1. Detect scope contact: git diff --name-only HEAD filtered against {{critical_modules}}. No contact → done, no gate needed.
2. Run the gate fresh: {{gate_command}}. Never reuse a previous run's output.
3. Green → state the result with numbers ("gate: N tests passed") and proceed.
4. Red → stop all completion claims and branch:
   • Bug — the change broke pinned behavior. Fix until green, then step 2 again.
   • Intentional formulation change — the pinned expectations themselves must move. Get explicit user approval, update the gate's tolerances/pins in the same change, record the decision (decision-log), and only then report green. Passing silently by loosening a tolerance without approval is the one unforgivable move.

What a good gate looks like

Verified patterns from working practice (adapt, don't copy blindly):

• Analytic pins: small scenarios with hand-derivable expected values, asserted within a stated tolerance (e.g. ±2%).
• Cross-form parity: when two independent implementations of the same computation exist (a production form and a reference form), the gate asserts they agree on shared scenarios — the strongest silent-breakage detector available.
• Oracle checks: an independent, simpler computation (closed-form case, brute-force small instance) that the main machinery must reproduce.
• Divergence assertions: where two quantities should differ by design, assert that they do — agreement would mean a collapsed distinction.

A gate of a few dozen focused tests that runs in minutes beats a thousand-test suite nobody runs before claiming "done".

Enforcement (documented, not shipped)

This pack ships no executable hooks. If your harness supports lifecycle hooks, the exemplar pattern is a stop hook: on turn end, diff the working tree against {{critical_modules}}; on contact, run {{gate_command}}; on failure, block the completion claim and feed the last ~25 lines of test output back with the bug-or-intentional question. Implement it in your project if you want mechanical enforcement; this skill is the discipline either way.

Rules

1. The gate list is closed and named. {{critical_modules}} is declared in the config block, not inferred per-turn; changing the list is a decision-log entry.
2. Red gate = no "done", no "ready", no "works". Not in commit messages, not in chat, not in the build log.
3. Tolerance/pin updates require approval and a decision entry. The gate's expectations are part of the project's scientific record.
4. A red gate blocks phase closure (phase-gate step 2) regardless of checklist state.
5. Keep the gate fast. A slow gate gets skipped; move slow scenarios to the nightly/full suite and keep the gate under a few minutes.

Configuration

• {{critical_modules}} — glob list of result-critical paths.
• {{gate_command}} — the single command that runs the gate (e.g. pytest tests/test_correctness.py).

Provenance & maintenance

Generalized from a named correctness-gate rule and its stop-hook enforcement in a working computational-research repository (scope-diff → gate-run → red-means-bug-or-intentional protocol, cross-form parity testing, tolerance-update-with-approval); see the pack's examples/ directory for the worked exemplar mapping. The gate patterns listed are verified practice; the hook sketch is a description of working code, shipped here as documentation only.

Re-verify in your project:

• {{gate_command}} — runs and is green on a clean tree (a red gate on main is an emergency, not a baseline).
• git diff --name-only HEAD | grep -E '<critical pattern>' — the scope filter actually matches your critical paths.
• time {{gate_command}} — still fast enough to run on every touch.