49 turns and $6.87 per CB-RES-0003 went to grep/ls/wc answering "what is
the state of this repo". tools/status.py answers it in 22 lines: commit
and working-tree state, every workplan with task counts, the next todo
task, spend since the last commit against CB-01/CB-02, and the three fast
gates.
Two constraints are deliberate. It does not build — a status command that
takes two minutes gets replaced by `ls` within a day. And it states its
own limit in the output ("slow gates not run here"), so a green status
cannot be misread as a green `make all`; the self-test asserts that line
is present, and that the whole report stays under 40 lines.
The positive control is the refusal to be confidently empty: a parser
that found zero workplans and zero tasks would print a clean, wrong
picture, which is worse than the greps it replaces. It also caught a
dot-all regex that returned twenty paragraphs of the preceding task's
prose as the "task heading".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tegwick
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