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progress.sh check does not notice a Status line that contradicts the folder

Measured

With devdocs/progress/working/ empty — so no ticket holds a live lock — twenty tickets carried - **Status:** working in their body:

folder count matters?
backlog/ 6 yes — reads as "someone is on this"
unfinished/ 3 yes — same
done/ 10 no — archived record
rejected/ 1 no — archived record

tools/progress.sh check --strict reports 555 hygiene findings and none of them is this, which is exactly why it drifted: nothing was watching.

The nine live ones were corrected by hand. done/ and rejected/ were left alone deliberately — CLAUDE.md's rule is that a finished record is history and rewriting it falsifies what a past session actually did.

Why it is worth a check rather than a one-off sweep

The folder IS the lock (working/ = an agent is actively on it), so the body line is duplicated state and will drift again the moment someone edits one and not the other. A stale Status: working on a backlog ticket is a coordination cost: an agent scanning for work can read it as claimed and skip real work — the opposite of what the ranked queue is for.

Suggested fix

In check, for every ticket outside done/, rejected/ and decided/, compare the - **Status:** X line against the containing folder and report a mismatch. Cheap, and it makes the sweep unnecessary next time.

Two design calls worth making explicitly rather than by accident:

  1. Do not auto-rewrite. claim / resolve already move files; having check silently edit ticket prose would make it a mutating command, which it is not today.
  2. Consider dropping the body line entirely and letting the folder be the only source of truth — board-md can render the status from the path. That removes the class of bug instead of policing it, and is probably the better answer if nothing reads the body line programmatically.

Prio 40: cosmetic-adjacent, no wrong code comes out of it, but it is a small recurring drag on exactly the queue mechanism every lane depends on.

Gate

tools/progress.py --tier full (T's own gate) plus a scratch board where a ticket is moved without its Status line being touched, and check flags it.

DONE 2026-08-14 — check reports it; design call 2 deliberately not taken

check now compares the - **Status:** X body line against the containing folder. Three real drifts on the live board, all corrected:

ticket folder claimed
bug-pascal-uses-is-transitive blocked/ working
feature-real-dynlib-loader unfinished/ working
feature-signal-siginfo-ucontext backlog/ working

The hard part was what NOT to report

A naive folder-vs-line comparison finds 179 mismatches on this board, of which 3 matter. The other 176 are two kinds of false positive, and burying three findings under them is precisely how this drifted while check --strict was already printing 555 things:

So it fires only when the claim is lock-ish — working or urgent, the two a reader acts on — in either direction. backlog/ saying unfinished is cosmetic and stays silent.

Archives (done/, rejected/, decided/) are exempt, per CLAUDE.md: a finished record is history and rewriting it falsifies what a past session did.

Design call 1 honoured, design call 2 not taken

Not auto-repaired. check stays read-only; claim/resolve are what move tickets, and having check edit prose would make it mutating. Asserted in the devtest.

The body line was NOT dropped. The ticket suggested letting the folder be the only source of truth. Tempting, and it would delete the class rather than police it — but the line is load-bearing prose in a lot of tickets (Status: documented, not fixed, Status: pre-existing, Status: harness), so removing it mechanically would destroy real information. That is a separate, larger cleanup and not obviously worth it now that the drift is caught automatically.

Gate

tools/devtest_status_drift.py — 12 checks against a scratch board.

One trap worth recording: progress.py takes its ROOT from Path(__file__).parents[1], not from cwd, so running it with cwd=<scratch> silently checks the REAL board. The first version of this devtest did exactly that, and every negative case passed vacuously against a board that had just been cleaned — worse than no test. The script is now copied into the scratch tree.

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