Learning 018: Anchor a command grammar instead of teaching it markdown
- Date: 2026-10-23
- Source: user-feedback (the author's comment on issue-498)
- Work item: issue-498 (follows learning-011)
What happened
Learning-011 planned to strip inline code and fenced blocks before the control grammar ran, so a keyword quoted in a review comment would not count. On the ticket the author proposed a simpler rule: a keyword counts only at the start of the message. That rule covers every case the stripper was meant to cover — inline code, a fence, a > quote, a list item and plain prose all put something other than the keyword first — without the parser understanding any markdown.
Learning
When untrusted text can trigger an action, constrain where the trigger may sit before reaching for a parser that decides what the text means. An anchor is one regex flag and is easy to reason about; a half-markdown parser is neither. And a body the grammar refuses to act on is still something a person said: route it as conversation, never settle it unread.
Action
- issue-498:
parse_commandmatches a keyword only at the start of the body, or at the start of a later line of a body that already opens with one; two different commands execute neither and the comment is routed as conversation (control-ambiguousis no longer a settled outcome).