PROP-013: Periodic health audit — vibevm's instance

1. Why vibevm runs it — the M1.19 proof

• 03vibevm's per-commit gate is tools/self-check.sh (cargo fmt --check, cargo test --workspace, cargo clippy -D warnings, vibe check).
• It is a regression detector, blind by construction to uncovered code, out-of-gate trees, drift, and slow debt (the four blind spots: spec://org.vibevm.world/health-audit/flows/health-audit/HEALTH-AUDIT-PROTOCOL#blind-spots).

04This is not hypothetical for vibevm.

• 05The M1.19 session shipped a milestone — eight phases, ~800 hermetic tests green, the gate passing on every commit — in which vibe init scaffolded broken projects: it wrote naming = "kind-name", so a freshly-initialised project could not install any package at all.
• The defect survived the entire milestone; a cli_init test even asserted the broken value as correct, staying green the whole time.
• It was caught only by a live smoke run during the registry migration.
• Earlier, the vibe-index crate — then a separate Cargo workspace, outside cargo test --workspace — rotted unnoticed until a state review found its suite red.
• These are the concrete failures that made the audit non-optional here.

2. vibevm's checklist — the known instances

06vibevm walks the flow's category checklist (spec://org.vibevm.world/health-audit/flows/health-audit/HEALTH-AUDIT-PROTOCOL#categories) breadth-first. The categories below carry vibevm's known instances — the findings that made each line permanent (a discovered defect class becomes a standing row, spec://org.vibevm.world/health-audit/flows/health-audit/HEALTH-AUDIT-PROTOCOL#living):

07A — Test integrity.

• 08A1 · Coverage gaps. Known: install e2e tests overwhelmingly drive LocalRegistry, shadowing the real GitPackageRegistry + NamingConvention path; the vibe init default-config path had no e2e at all.
• A2 · Quarantined tests. #[ignore]d tests — red? stale? (grep -rn '#\[ignore\]'.) Known: cli_live_e2e.rs — ignored and red.
• A3 · Tests that encode the wrong behavior. Detectable only by reading the assertion against the spec. Known: cli_init asserted naming == kind-name.

09B — Rot outside the gate.

• 10B1 · Unreached trees. Separate workspaces, scripts, fixtures/** and manual-tests/** no test parses. Known: fixtures/manual-test-packages/ carries retired schema across two milestones.
• B2 · Gate completeness. A new crate, a [lib] test = false, or a moved file can quietly carve a hole in what the gate covers.

11C — Drift.

• 12C1 · Doc drift. docs/** versus VIBEVM-SPEC.md versus the code's actual behavior.
• C2 · Spec drift. A PROP self-contradicting or contradicting another; dead spec:// references. Known: PROP-008 §3 said lockfile v4 while §7 said v5; PROP-005 references a crates/vibe-index/schemas/ directory that does not exist.
• C3 · WAL / CONTINUE drift. Does the checkpoint match the tree, the branch, the commit chain?
• C4 · Outward drift. Live registry orgs and other external state versus what the tool now expects.

13D — Debt.

• 14D1 · Deferred & parked items — walk every "deferred" / "parked" / "Known issues" entry in the WAL and the PROPs.
• D2 · Aging markers — <!-- REVIEW … -->, TODO, FIXME, HACK (grep -rn; vibe check ages REVIEW markers).
• D3 · Escape hatches — #[allow(dead_code)], #[allow(clippy::…)] (grep -rn '#\[allow').
• D4 · Dependency staleness — cargo update --dry-run; cargo audit / cargo outdated.

15E — Discipline depth (AI-Native). vibevm's own category, added 2026-06-12: it measures how deep the Discipline v0.2 adoption actually goes (the flow's corollary — audit depth of adoption, not merely that it exists), against vibevm's specific machinery:

• 16E1 · Spec granularity & typing. Units at REQ grain with kind/revision/status lines, not merely heading-anchored — an untyped unit cannot carry revision discipline. Aid: specmap.json. Known: at the category's birth, 347 of 352 units were untyped.
• E2 · Edge coverage. Which crates and specs carry implements/verifies edges, which are bare; implemented features whose PROP has zero inbound edges (PROP-012 at birth); suites with no #[verifies]. Aid: specmap.json counts; a #[verifies] census.
• E3 · Cell & seam structure. Seam traits without #[cell] manifests; god-files; single-impl speculative seams; hardcoded dispatch where a seam belongs; test monoliths. Aid: grep '#\[cell(', the pub trait inventory, a file-length census.
• E4 · Checker-vs-card gaps. Conform rules implemented weaker than the card they cite; guide-mandated checkers that do not exist (a rule with no checker is a WISH); committed gate artifacts that have silently rotted. Aid: read each rule's check() against its card's ops block; probe gates empirically on a clean tree.

3. vibevm's inventory and cadence

• 17Findings live in AUDIT.md at the repo root — the append-only chronicle whose history is vibevm's health trend (the flow's spec://org.vibevm.world/health-audit/flows/health-audit/HEALTH-AUDIT-PROTOCOL#audit-md; the five-field record …#finding; disposition and carry-forward …#disposition).
• Cadence is owner-triggered, floor once per milestone (…#cadence) — a vibevm milestone is never declared done on an un-audited base.
• Each run reconciles the WAL "Known issues" against AUDIT.md before it closes.

4. Open questions

1. 18Trigger phrase. Add АУДИТ / RUN AUDIT to CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md as a recognised command (mirroring the ЗАВЕРШИ СЕССИЮ session-end command), or keep the audit purely owner-narrated?
2. vibe audit aggregator. Once enough §2 categories are mechanical, a vibe audit subcommand could run them and pre-fill the AUDIT.md skeleton — a FEAT worth opening when that threshold is reached.
3. Health metric. Should a run compute one coarse number — open P1 / P2 counts, the trend versus the previous run — so the project's direction is visible at a glance?

5. Version history

• 192026-05-23 — draft 1, in force. Owner-requested after the M1.19 session surfaced a milestone-grade defect — vibe init scaffolding broken projects — that the per-commit gate and ~800 hermetic tests missed. The process, the category checklist, the AUDIT.md inventory, the severity / disposition model, and the per-milestone cadence floor were defined here. The first (seed) run is recorded in AUDIT.md.
• 2026-06-12 — category E (discipline depth) added by that day's owner-requested full sweep — the first post-adoption depth audit. Permanent per the living-checklist law: the same gap (surface adoption mistaken for depth) is never re-missed. The run also demonstrated E4's empirical-probe clause — a merge-panel gate believed green was red on a clean tree.
• 2026-07-14 — general methodology extracted to the health-audit flow. The gate-vs-audit argument, the four blind spots, the category framework, the AUDIT.md model, the finding / severity / disposition machinery, the living-checklist law, and the cadence moved into the installable health-audit package (reaching vibevm through the redbook dependency); this PROP was thinned to vibevm's gate, its known findings, its discipline-depth category E, and its open questions. No process changed.