Execution Log: record-feedback writes markdown that fails the project's own markdownlint

Append-only log of progress for the user's visibility.

Phase transitions

Phase	Entered	Reviewed/approved by	Notes
phase-selection	2026-08-16	@MadaraUchiha-314	Declared by the owner filing #247 with a diagnosis, a suggested fix and a designated branch, then pointing a cloud session at it. brainstorming skipped — the ticket is the diagnosis; design-critic-review not selected (no critic is configured in this repository, reviews.critics: []). See Deviations from the standard gates.
requirements-definition	2026-08-16	pending — this branch's PR	bugfix.md (a bug). Three requirements: lint-clean output, an unrewritten paper trail, and a regression test that does not depend on Node.
design	2026-08-16	pending — this branch's PR	Two branches in one hook. Three candidate shapes measured against the pinned linter before choosing; the ticket's own suggestion is among the two rejected, with the reason.
test-planning	2026-08-16	pending — this branch's PR	13 rows, 5 in scope; every n/a carries a reason. Two rows added to the catalogue: linter conformance, repository gates.
tasks-breakdown	2026-08-16		9 tasks, one red root of three.
implementation	2026-08-16		TDD: the red run captured and committed before the fix.
verification	2026-08-16		Every planned activity ran; nothing replanned, nothing skipped. Two lint findings in this work item's own artifacts, fixed before T13 was ticked.
needs-review	2026-08-16		3 self-review rounds; no critic configured.
complete

Pull requests

PR	Scope / tasks	Status
this branch's PR	The whole work item — the spec chain and the fix.	open

Progress entries

2026-08-16 — measured the linter before designing against it

• Phase: requirements-definition → design
• Did: reproduced MD036 against the repository's own .markdownlint-cli2.jsonc with the pinned markdownlint-cli2@0.18.1, then ran all three candidate shapes through it rather than reasoning about the rule.
• Found, and it changed the design: the ticket's blockquote suggestion passes — but only because MD036 does not descend into blockquotes. That is a linter implementation detail, not a documented promise, so the fix would rest on a rule not firing. The chosen shape (**@handle** wrote:) fails MD036's premise outright instead.
• Also found: blockquoting the body is not a defence at all. MD025, MD004 and MD010 all still fire inside a blockquote, and the quoting adds MD027 of its own — which is why the fix is confined to the text the harness itself authors, and why "lint the reviewer's words" is out of scope rather than merely unimplemented.
• Checked before assuming: record-feedback is the only write_text under cli/the_loop/graph/hooks/, so the defect has one site. The one other place the harness writes emphasis (sideeffects.py:96) posts to GitHub, not to a linted file, and carries trailing text anyway.
• Next: the red root — three tests, one failing run.

2026-08-16 — red, then two branches, then the linter itself

• Phase: tasks-breakdown → implementation → verification
• Did: wrote the three tests, captured the failing run as evidence/red.md, then replaced the block assembly with the two branches from the design. The existing gate scenario was strengthened at the same time: it asserted "tighten the nit" in text, which a reflowing recorder would also satisfy, and now asserts the body verbatim.
• One thing worth stating: the regression is caught by asserting the emitted shape (no line is emphasis and nothing else), not by shelling out to markdownlint. The suite runs without Node, and a test that skips when npx is missing would have stopped guarding this the first time it ran in a Python-only environment. The real linter runs once, at verification, as evidence — evidence/shapes.md.
• Caught by the gate this ticket is about: the first whole-repository markdownlint run failed on this work item's own artifacts — an MD038 in bugfix.md and an MD010 in the evidence file, where the captured linter output quotes a hard tab back at us. Fixed and disabled-with-a-reason respectively, before T13 was ticked.
• Checkpoint/tests: 2225 passed, 1 skipped; ruff, ruff format, pyright and validate_config clean; markdownlint 0 errors over every **/*.md. Evidence in evidence/.
• Next: capability doc, decision-089, the PR and its briefing.

Verification results

Only when this work item declared test-planning away (issue-179). This item kept the plan, so its results live in testing-plan.md §Verification results and this section stays as the template left it.

What was verified	Command	Outcome	Evidence
		pass | fail	link or evidence/<file>

Design critic review

Only when this work item selected the opt-in design-critic-review phase (issue-188). Not selected: reviews.critics is empty in this repository, so no second harness is configured to read the locked design.

Round	Critic (<harness>/<model>)	Outcome	Findings → disposition	Link
		new findings | zero (converged) | escalated | unavailable

Review cycles

Cycle	Type (self/critic/security)	Reviewer	Outcome	Link
1	self	the-loop	new findings — the shape assertion's regex flagged **a** and **b**, which MD036 leaves alone, so the helper now checks the delimiter is not repeated inside; the two helpers moved above their first use	this branch
2	self	the-loop	new findings — bugfix.md asserted MD012 for the empty-body case without ever running the linter on it. Measured (both mid-file and at EOF) and added as evidence/shapes.md §4; the claim held, but it was a claim	this branch
3	self	the-loop	zero (converged) — artifact gates re-read against the shipped graph: ## Requirements + ## Security considerations in bugfix.md, ## Security design in design.md, the four gated sections in testing-plan.md, ## Capability docs and ## Documentation here	this branch
—	critic	n/a	unavailable — reviews.critics is empty in this repository, so no second harness is configured. Does not count toward reviews.criticReviewCount	harness-config
4	security	the-loop checklist	pass — see the gate below	this branch

Security review (gate)

• Mechanism: the-loop checklist (security.review.mechanism: auto)
• Outcome: pass. The change is string assembly between an existing read_text and an existing write_text, behind an authorization boundary it does not touch: _authorized_comments still decides whose text is read at all, the self-authored marker still drops the harness's own comments, and no new value is interpolated from the event — the only text added is two literals. The untrusted comment body was, and remains, written verbatim into a checked-in file; that is the paper trail working as designed (decision-042), and this work item deliberately did not narrow it, because narrowing it means rewriting a human's words. Both negative tests guarding the boundary were re-run and pass.
• Human sign-off: n/a — risk tier 2 (a single hook's output formatting; no path in autonomy.sensitivePaths is touched), below security.review.humanSignOffMinTier: 4

Final validation evidence

Every acceptance criterion has a run behind it, in testing-plan.md §Verification results.

Criterion	Proved by
R1.1 — the attribution is not emphasis alone	test_a_recorded_review_never_writes_emphasis_alone_on_a_line, red in evidence/red.md and green in evidence/green.md; the real linter in evidence/shapes.md §1–2 (2× MD036 before, 0 after)
R1.2 — an empty body records no blank-line pair	test_a_comment_with_no_body_is_recorded_without_a_blank_line_pair; evidence/shapes.md §4 shows the MD012 it replaces
R1.3 — the recorded artifact passes markdownlint	evidence/shapes.md §2, and make lint over every **/*.md in evidence/check.md
R2.1, R2.2 — handle kept, body verbatim	the strengthened gate scenario, which now asserts the body verbatim rather than as a substring
R2.3 — still append-only under ## Review comments	the same scenario, unchanged in that respect
R3.1 — a regression test that fails before and passes after	evidence/red.md → evidence/green.md, same tests, only the hook between them
R3.2 — no Node dependency in the suite	the assertion is on the emitted shape; the linter runs once at verification, as evidence

Capability docs

Capability doc	What changed	History row
process-graph.md	The record-feedback behaviour statement in §Shipped hooks now states what the hook writes, not only that it writes: the **@handle** wrote: attribution and why, the empty-body line, and the rule that the reviewer's body is never rewritten to satisfy a linter	issue-247, linking this spec and decision-089

Documentation

Document

What changed

none

No user-facing document described the recorded block's format, so none was made wrong by changing it. Checked: README.md does not mention record-feedback; the skill's reference/testing.md mentions it only to say design-approval records into both artifacts, which is unchanged; the five bundled templates carry a ## Review comments blurb that describes the guarantee (append-only, attributed) rather than the markup, and it stays true. The durable rule this work item established is a decision, not a doc page — decision-089

Deviations from the standard gates

• phase-selection was answered by the ticket, not by the checklist comment. This work started from a cloud session pointed at #247 rather than from the-loop start, so no checklist was posted and no the-loop execute reply exists. The owner's ticket — which names the defect, the file, the line and the suggested fix — is the authorization, and it is quoted in the table above. The spec chain exists in full rather than being skipped.
• The artifacts are in-review, not approved. Nothing here has been through a human gate yet; the pull request carries the whole chain for review in one place. No phase claims an approval it does not have.
• The loop:<phase> label is applied by this session, not by the harness. A cloud session working the-loop's own repository has no daemon (#73), so set-phase-label never runs; the label on #247 is set through the GitHub API at each transition instead, and this file remains the authoritative phase state.