Motir

Type · code · Repo motir-meta · One PR. Parent · MOTIR-1465, the planner-bug home. Found in · motir run MOTIR-3557, 2026-08-26, at the point of writing the fixture for that card's AC 3.

What the plan got wrong

MOTIR-3557's third acceptance criterion, as authored, read:

No ghost anchor reachable from either path renders with the '—' / defaultTitle fallback: a fixture asserts every anchor node the two levels emit carries a resolved identifier and title.

tests/components/workItemLevel.test.tsx:193 in motir-core is a deliberate, shipped test that guarantees the opposite — "an off-level blocker with NO stub still anchors, named by its bare id" — and states the intent in its own comment: "The stub list is best-effort: a blocker the read could not resolve still gets an anchor, so the edge never dangles — it just has nothing but an id to say."

So the criterion forbade shipped behaviour, and the only way to discharge it literally was to delete a guarantee. It was caught while writing the fixture, amended on MOTIR-3557 with the evidence (rung 2 — shipped code outranks a card's prose), and the card shipped with the invariant it was actually reaching for. Cost: one re-write. It could have cost a deleted guarantee.

Root cause — the gate that should have caught it, and why it did not

Per-card gate 2's ABSENCE limb is exactly this rule: "a card whose own deliverable is an EDIT asserts that its target text is NOT THERE — grep the target before asserting the gap." It fires on a card that says "add X to Y", because Y is a name to grep from.

This criterion had no target to grep from. It asserted a negative about RENDERED OUTPUT — no anchor renders with the fallback — and named no file, no symbol and no test. The thing a grep would have had to find is a test that ASSERTS THE OPPOSITE, which is not a target the criterion mentions and not a shape the limb describes. So the gate read clean on a criterion that a two-minute grep falsifies.

The near-miss shape is worth naming precisely, because it is the general one: a criterion phrased as "the product never does X" is a claim about shipped code wearing the costume of a requirement. It is checkable — but only by grepping for a guarantee of X, i.e. by searching for the contradiction rather than for the target, which is a different move from the one the limb currently prescribes.

What to change

Extend gate 2's ABSENCE limb in prompts/plan-rules/core.md with the OUTPUT-NEGATIVE case: a criterion asserting that a surface NEVER renders / NEVER emits / NEVER shows something owes a grep of the guarantees, not of a target it does not name — the suite that covers that surface, read for a test that establishes the behaviour deliberately. A shipped test whose comment says why it wants the behaviour is a rung-2 fact, and it outranks the criterion.

And it has a SECOND home (the two-homes rule): motir-ai SHARED_PLANNING_RULES carries gate 2's mirror for the productized planner. This card ships the motir-meta half only — ONE SUBTASK = ONE REPO = ONE PR. The motir-ai mirror is a sibling this card does not create and does not assume; name it in the PR body so the pair is visible rather than implied.

Acceptance criteria

1. prompts/plan-rules/core.md gate 2's ABSENCE limb states the OUTPUT-NEGATIVE case: a criterion of the form "nothing renders / emits / shows X" is discharged by grepping the covering suite for a test that GUARANTEES X, and a shipped guarantee outranks the criterion.
2. The rule names the discriminator — the criterion mentions no file or symbol to grep, so the grep is for the contradiction — since that is what made the existing limb read clean here.
3. It cites MOTIR-3557 as the incident in prose, and states that the remedy there was to AMEND the criterion on the record, never to delete the guarantee.
4. The PR body names the motir-ai SHARED_PLANNING_RULES mirror as the owed sibling and states that this PR does not carry it.
5. The diff touches prompts/plan-rules/core.md only, and prettier --check is clean over it.

Context refs

• prompts/plan-rules/core.md — gate 2, the ABSENCE limb this card extends.
• motir-core tests/components/workItemLevel.test.tsx:193 — the shipped guarantee the criterion contradicted.
• MOTIR-3557 — the card, its amended AC 3, and The amendment section carrying the evidence.

Resolution

Open.