Lock the AUTOCOUNT regression-test pattern as the design log
canonical record. Previously declined when surface was 1-metric
+ 29 tags; now mature enough (4 metrics + 58 tags + 1 same-day
drift-catch since landing) to formalize.
== Ticket content ==
10 sections covering:
1. Why this exists — the 4-drift-day baseline (6cbbf95 / 14bcb99 /
5c21e83 / 30a9488) that motivated mechanization. Five-step
walk through justifying each choice (Step 5 last).
2. Format — `<!--AUTOCOUNT:metric:path-->N<!--/AUTOCOUNT-->`.
3. Four supported metrics with examples + skip semantics:
`tests`, `fixture-rows`, `db-rows`, `db-where`.
4. Skip-on-absence — operator state (shards, qa.db) absence is a
logged skip, not a fail. Smoke verified 2026-05-10 with
HOME=/tmp/empty.
5. What NOT to tag — closed-ticket point-in-time snapshots,
aggregate floors ("2000+"), historical journey arcs.
6. Install discipline at write time + at refresh time.
7. Future metrics deferred (file-lines, gh-pr-comments-count,
module-loc, commit-hash-exists) with the "add a metric"
recipe.
8. Empirical baseline at landing (3 test functions, 58 active
tagged claims across 8 doc files, harness runtime 2-4s).
9. Scope boundaries — does NOT auto-rewrite, does NOT validate
prose quality, does NOT scan docstrings, does NOT lock
values, does NOT add deps.
10. References — every landing commit + sister doc.
Closed at landing (status quo since fc5ba50 2026-05-10 morning;
this ticket is retroactive design log per the convention "every
ticket flips to `closed · landed in commit <sha>` when the work
ships").
== Code-fence parser fix ==
Adding the ticket itself surfaced an oversight: my AUTOCOUNT
examples in §3.3 + §3.4 used literal tag pairs in ``` fenced
code blocks. The parser was reading them as live claims and
firing on the illustrative `db-rows:002.db:concept_relations`
claim (compared 1234 vs live 72576 — both meaningless because
it's an example).
Fix: `_strip_fenced_code_blocks` substitutes the body of every
triple-backtick block with newlines before regex scanning. Line
numbers stay aligned (newline-preserving substitution); tags
inside fences are skipped because their parent text no longer
matches the regex.
Both helper functions (`_iter_claims` and the well-formed-tags
test) walk through the stripped text, so the strip discipline
is consistent across all three test functions.
== TICKETS.md index ==
Added #000044 row marked closed with the 5-commit landing trail.
Bumped Next ID 000044 → 000045.
== Verification ==
$ pytest tests/test_doc_counts.py
3 passed in 2.80s
$ pytest tests/ -q
2337 passed, 37 skipped in 108.29s
Hygiene: fox's in-flight changes to arborist/qa/runner.py +
arborist/substrate/prometheus.py + tests/test_prometheus*.py
left untouched in working tree.
russell@unturf.com
8da29fde69