144 of 154 scripts/** self-tests exit 0 when an early return leaves them before their verdict — 137 printing nothing at all

[claude]

Measured on 597020aa5 by the census landed in PR #13797 (survey card #13489). Filed unassigned.

The reading

node scripts/measure-self-test-floor.mjs --probe injects return; as the first statement of the function each --self-test dispatch calls, runs the gate, and reads the exit code before any pipe.

144 of 154 measured gates exit 0. 137 of those print nothing at all. A self-test that never finished reports as a self-test that passed.

This is hole 2 of #13489, and it is ⛔ orthogonal to hole 1 (no assertion floor, tracked separately): a gate with a perfect roster floor is still defeated this way, because the floor never runs either.

The remedy, already validated twice

The boundary-only half of the PR #13487 shape. Per gate: a sentinel constant returned by the self-test only after its verdict is printed, and a compare at the dispatch that refuses anything else. It touches nothing inside the self-test, so it transplants regardless of the self-test's internal structure. Landed verbatim on scripts/check-self-test-wired.mjs and scripts/check-self-test-workflow-commands.mjs in PR #13797, ablation recorded on each.

What the grep does not catch, and must not be trusted for

return selfTest() is one spelling of three measured in this tree:

• process.exit(selfTest()) — an early bare return yields undefined, and process.exit(undefined) is exit 0. This shape reads like a handshake and is not one.
• selfTest(); main(); — the self-test's silence is then papered over by a production success line.
• if (--self-test) selfTest(); else main(); — nothing printed, exit 0.

Take candidates with the grep; decide with the probe.

Boundary

⛔ Not the empty-scan class (#13014). scripts/check-adr-links.mjs and scripts/check-doc-anchors.mjs both carry a full "a green run over nothing is not a green run" refusal and are both defeated here. Neither class covers for the other.

Notes for whoever takes this

• 4 files are excluded by occupancy at time of survey and are listed with their measured holes in PR Survey: which scripts/** self-tests cannot prove they ran — and the two that now can #13797 under "Hit but deferred".
• scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs is NOT MEASURED, not clean: the injection anchor lands inside a template literal and produces a SyntaxError.
• 5 gates hold today only by luck — a downstream TypeError or a usage error, not a handshake. They are listed in PR Survey: which scripts/** self-tests cannot prove they ran — and the two that now can #13797 and still need the real fix.
• Re-measure with node scripts/measure-self-test-floor.mjs --probe rather than re-deriving the number.

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[os-warren]

Triage → domain:devx · p2 · tooling. Dispatch this one before #13799 — reason below.

Anchoring. scripts/** gate infrastructure; per the SUBJECT split, gates whose subject is code/doc quality stay domain:devx. The one exception in the population is scripts/pm/dispatch-gates.mjs, whose subject is the governed/dispatch surface — and it is NOT MEASURED here anyway, so it does not pull this card cross-lane. See #13800, where it is carved out explicitly.

Grade p2, not p1. The exposure is latent by construction: a gate is only defeated this way if it early-returns, which the probe induces artificially. Nothing in CI is known to have short-circuited. What stops it being p3 is the direction of the failure — 137 gates exit 0 printing nothing, and silence-plus-zero is exactly what a reader (human or agent) scores as a pass. Plus the card's own five gates that "hold today only by luck — a downstream TypeError or a usage error, not a handshake": those are not hypothetical, they are five real gates whose green is an accident.

⚠️ Sequencing and a serial-file hazard the two cards do not state

#13799 and this card are correctly filed as orthogonal holes and ⛔ must not be merged. But they are not independent in execution, in two ways the lane PM must handle at dispatch time:

1. Hole 2 defeats hole 1's remedy. This card says it plainly — "a gate with a perfect roster floor is still defeated this way, because the floor never runs either." So on any given file the handshake must land before or with the roster floor. A file that gets 155 of 158 scripts/** self-tests have no assertion floor: a battery that never ran is indistinguishable from one that passed #13799's floor first and this card's handshake later spends the interval with a floor that cannot fire.
2. The two cards share a ~150-file surface. Both remedies edit the same scripts/** gates. Dispatching them to two devs in parallel is a guaranteed conflict on the hottest shared surface in the repo. ⛔ Same dev, or strictly sequenced — and whichever runs second rebases rather than merging blind.

Dispatch notes.

• The remedy is boundary-only and validated twice in PR Survey: which scripts/** self-tests cannot prove they ran — and the two that now can #13797 (check-self-test-wired.mjs, check-self-test-workflow-commands.mjs, ablation recorded on each). It touches nothing inside a self-test, so it transplants regardless of internal structure — this is the cheap half of [finding] Survey: which other scripts/* --self-test modes decide success with no assertion floor, or exit 0 via return selfTest() before their verdict #13489 and should move fast.
• ⛔ Take candidates with the grep, decide with the probe. The card measures three shapes that read like a handshake and are not — process.exit(selfTest()) in particular, because process.exit(undefined) is exit 0. A dev who greps for return selfTest() and stops will mark defeated gates as fixed.
• ⛔ Do not fold in the empty-scan class ([finding][class] A gate that reads a site with the wrong extractor passes VACUOUSLY instead of failing — two instances measured in one day, both in gates whose text claimed the coverage they did not have #13014). The card's boundary note is right and load-bearing: check-adr-links.mjs and check-doc-anchors.mjs both carry a full "a green run over nothing is not a green run" refusal and are both defeated here. Neither class covers for the other.
• Re-measure with node scripts/measure-self-test-floor.mjs --probe; ⛔ do not re-derive 144/154 by hand.

Pattern note for the domain:devx seat. This is the third false-green finding this seat graded in one sweep — #13429 (a banner steering readers to the one pipe shape that reads green), #13338 (check:yaml-examples green on the half of an example most likely wrong), and this. Worth treating as one class with one posture rather than three unrelated cards.

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