Track record

Every claim this project made, tested, and kept or withdrew — kept as its own document because it is the argument for trusting the numbers, and that argument is made by what was removed, not by what was added.

Moved out of the README in 2.0.0. It had grown to 52 lines of a 500-line budget on the page a first-time reader scans, and a reader deciding whether to run the tool needs the promises and the limits before they need the history. The history still matters — it is why the promises are believable — so it gets a page rather than a trim.

The road to 1.0

1.0 is not a rewrite. It is the line drawn under a long arc of subtraction — what remained after every claim the project could not stand behind was removed. The arc is the credibility:

0.5.0 — the scoring engine was rebuilt. The old model counted findings absolutely, so it graded repo size, not maintainability: it scored Django, pytest, black, tornado, httpx, lodash, svelte, fastapi all at 0.0 / F while a 53-file toy repo scored 4.6 / A. Scores became rates, normalized per dimension against what real code carries and calibrated so the corpus median earns a B. See standard.md.

0.6.0 — a near-duplication finding that pairs the copies, naming the declaration to reuse (toAtomicAmount at TradeTicket.tsx:862 already does this), so renaming can't hide clone-instead-of-reuse. Useful on its own terms — and explicitly not evidence about who wrote the code.

Retracted: that near-duplication distinguishes AI-written code. 0.6.0 had called it "the first signal that separates AI-written applications from mature human-written OSS." Re-run against a control matched on age, popularity and language, the near-duplication gap is not significant (p = 0.546), and no other metric earns the claim either. The honest summary is this design could not measure a difference, not there is no difference. See studies.md.

0.7.0 — the evidence model. The score is withheld when the evidence cannot support one; a diff is not a repository grade. External analyzers became the primary evidence where they measured a full concept set, with the built-in detectors as the fallback and disagreement widening the range rather than being averaged. The grade is gated and banded from the evidence floor, so withholding evidence can never buy a better letter.

0.8–0.9 — one setup, chat-first. Chat / MCP became the primary surface, the CLI the automation door, and the three transports converged on a single question set. A run of chat-surface wiring defects — and their closing tests — is recorded in defect-register-chat-surface.md.

1.0.0 — acceptance and the complete work order. A real-repo acceptance round on a mixed Python/TypeScript codebase hardened the last edges: the report now carries the entire backlog with a per-item copy-paste prompt, charts were rebuilt for legibility, reconfigure stopped destroying hand-tuned config, and TypeScript semantic coverage learned to find workspace projects and a locally-installed compiler. See the changelog.

The through-line: this repository runs the tool against itself in CI and checks the report in (docs/self-audit.md). An earlier revision of the self-audit table advertised 5.0/A+ after the codebase had drifted to a B; a hostile audit caught the stale claim — precisely the failure mode this tool exists to catch.