Design Contracts

smriti Design Contract Guardrails

This skill activates whenever you are adding or modifying a CLI command, changing JSON output, touching telemetry/logging code, or altering config defaults in the smriti project.

Contract 1 — Dry Run

Mutating commands MUST support --dry-run

The following commands write to disk, the database, or the network. Every one of them must honour --dry-run:

When --dry-run is active:

• stdout must describe what would happen (e.g. Would ingest N sessions).
• stderr must note what was skipped (No changes were made (--dry-run)).
• Exit code follows normal success/error rules — dry-run is NOT an error.
• If --json is also set, the output envelope must include "meta": { "dry_run": true }.

Read-only commands MUST reject --dry-run

These commands never mutate state. If they receive --dry-run, they must print a usage error and process.exit(1):

search, recall, list, status, show, compare, projects, team, categories

Contract 2 — Observability / Telemetry

Never log user content

The following are forbidden in any console.log, console.error, or log/audit output:

• Message content (.content, .text, .body)
• Query strings passed by the user
• Memory text or embedding data
• File paths provided by the user (as opposed to system-derived paths)

✅ OK to log: command name, exit code, duration, session IDs, counts, smriti version.

Telemetry default must be OFF

• SMRITI_TELEMETRY must default to 0/false/"off" — never 1.
• Telemetry calls must be guarded: if (telemetryEnabled) { ... }.
• Any new telemetry signal must be added to smriti telemetry sample output.

Contract 3 — JSON & CLI Versioning

JSON output is a hard contract

The standard output envelope is:

{ "ok": true, "data": { ... }, "meta": { ... } }

Rules:

• Never remove a field from data or meta — add @deprecated in a comment instead.
• Never rename a field.
• Never change a field's type (e.g. string → number).
• New fields in data or meta must be optional.
• If you must replace a field: add the new one AND keep the old one with a _deprecated: true sibling or comment.

CLI interface stability

Once a command or flag has shipped:

• Command names: frozen.
• Flag names: frozen. You may add aliases (e.g. --dry-run → -n) but not rename.
• Positional argument order: frozen.
• Deprecated flags: must keep working, must emit a stderr warning.

Pre-Submission Checklist

Before finishing any edit that touches src/index.ts or a command handler:

• If command is mutating → --dry-run is supported and guarded
• If command is read-only → --dry-run is rejected with a usage error
• No user-supplied content appears in console.log/console.error
• If JSON output changed → only fields were added, not removed/renamed/retyped
• If a new flag was added → it does not conflict with any existing flag name
• Telemetry default remains off in config.ts

If any item fails, fix it before proceeding.

Source: zero8dotdev/smriti — distributed by TomeVault.