Codometer Triage

Acting on a codometer failure

A --check run reports three different kinds of finding, and they call for three different responses. Reading which one occurred, rather than reacting to "the check failed," is most of this skill.

A breach

A metric went past a limit declared for it. The report names the metric, the limit's value, and its severity:

• warn prints the breach and leaves the exit code alone. Nothing about the run fails; it is advance notice that a number is moving in a direction worth watching.
• fail exits 1, and only when the run asked --check limits for a gate at all — a bare codometer measuring the same breach reports nothing wrong, because nothing asked it to gate.

The instinctive fix — raising the limit's value — is not an option. The limit exists to keep a promise about the codebase's shape; loosening it on the same change that broke the promise erases the evidence the check existed to produce, and the next breach starts from a codebase that is already worse. Reduce what is actually being measured instead:

• A size breach: shrink the target's own output — trim a dependency, split a bundle, delete dead code — rather than the number that reports it. The codometer-configure skill covers declaring a target and pointing it at compiled output correctly, which is a common reason a size looks larger than the code that produced it: a target measuring more than it should.
• A convention-count breach (too many of something, or too few): the count is usually accurate — the fix is in the code the counter is watching, not in the counter's value.
• A comment or documentation budget breach reports differently: it names a file and a line rather than a metric, because the thing measured is one block rather than a repository-wide total. Condense that block, or move the detail into documentation that has room for it. Check which reader measured it before trusting the count — shell, TOML, SQL, and HCL use a line scanner that reads a comment marker inside a string literal as a comment, and Python's comments go unmeasured entirely when the interpreter cannot be run. The codometer-configure skill has both caveats in full.

If the limit's number was simply wrong for what this metric should hold going forward — not because of this change, but as a standing decision — that is a deliberate edit to make and explain on its own, never a side effect of getting one check to pass.

Staleness

--check reports compares a committed report against a fresh measurement and fails when they disagree, whether or not any limit is involved. Two causes produce this, and only one of them is a real regression:

• The code actually changed and the committed report was never re-measured. Re-run with --write to refresh it.
• The runtime changed. Compressed sizes are Node-version dependent — the bundled zlib differs release to release — so a report written on one Node version and checked on another reads as stale with zero code changes involved. Check on the exact runtime the repository pins for everything else before concluding the source moved.

A breach and staleness are reported as separate findings even when they come from the same run; do not read one as a symptom of the other.

A run that failed outright

Distinct from both of the above: the run itself could not finish, collected into failures in the report rather than folded into any metric.

• A limit bound to nothing. The metric path names no measurement the run actually took — misspelled, or naming an analysis its target never ran, or genuinely ambiguous between two targets. Fix the path in the configuration; the codometer-configure skill covers how a metric path resolves and why an ambiguous one is refused rather than guessed.
• A target matched no files while carrying a limit. Declaring a limit against a target asserts its files exist, so an empty match means the glob stopped matching or the build that should have produced those files never ran — check the build step before touching the configuration. A target nobody limited that matches nothing is unremarkable and reports no failure.

Every failure in one run is collected and reported together, so treat a report naming three as three things to fix, not one flaky run to retry.

Before reaching for --write

Remember that --write and --check are independent flags with no inferred relationship between them — the codometer-measure skill has the full flag table. --write --check reports in particular is refused outright: nothing can be stale in a report the same run just wrote, so that combination is a configuration mistake to fix, not a way to force a report current.