[kylebegeman]

Summary

ledger stale reported drift that records did not have, which surfaced while triaging Kore's stale report for its handoff. Kore showed 169 signals, 156 of them stale symbols. Every one of the sampled symbols exists in the tree, in the directories its receipt names.

Two causes, one receipt each.

• 0193, coverage patterns were dropped. A record that lists src/** alongside a couple of exact files had its symbols and anchors checked against only those exact files, so anything living under the pattern looked missing. Patterns now become :(glob) pathspecs searched with git grep for whatever the exact files did not account for. When the search cannot run, because Git is missing or a pathspec is unusable, the pattern reports nothing rather than guessing.
• 0194, directory headings and path anchors. A Changed Files heading that names a directory path now matches the record's files under it, and an anchor that names a path the tree still holds is treated as a reference to that file rather than as content to find inside another. A heading candidate without a separator stays prose, so a block titled "Tests, skill, and docs" does not claim every file under docs/.

Effect

Repository	Before	After
Kore, 12,004 tracked files	169	14
This repository	0	0

Of Kore's remaining 14, six are capture artifacts in its own Anchor lines and eight are candidates for real drift.

Cost

The search runs once per record and block file list, and only for records that name patterns. ledger stale and ledger doctor take about 15 seconds on Kore's tree against 0.4 seconds here. A single pass over the union of every record's patterns would cut that further; memoizing and batching a record's blocks only saved about a tenth, because each record's pattern set is its own.

Verification

• npm run ci exit 0: 61 test files, 494 tests, Ledger CI passed.
• New cases: a receipt listing src/** reports nothing without Git and only the absent symbol and anchor with Git; a block headed internal/composer, CHANGELOG.md keeps the directory's test name and a real doc path clean while a missing doc path still reports.
• Measured against Kore read-only at fe1e66e8; nothing was written there.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[kylebegeman]

Release preparation added: version 0.9.4, the release record over receipts 0192 through 0195, and a handoff update. npm run ci is green at 494 tests, and ledger unreleased is empty. Publishing waits on Kyle: merge, then git tag v0.9.4 && git push origin v0.9.4.