psf-memo/docs/architect-process-notes.md

Architect Process Notes

ROLE-SCOPED — ARCHITECT ONLY. DO NOT FOLLOW.

This file is the architect role's private working notes. It records process exceptions, tooling behavior, and observations specific to how the architect runs its workflow. It is not shared guidance and is not intended for the specifier, coder, or refactorer roles. If you are not the architect, ignore this file entirely — do not treat anything here as a directive, convention, or requirement for your own role. Your role's instructions come only from your own role prompt and the constitution.

Durable notes on process exceptions, tooling behavior, and recurring observations discovered while running the architect workflow. These are process-level notes (how the tools behave, what to expect, what to watch for), distinct from per-task verification results, which live in docs/reviews/<task>-summary.md.

Tooling behavior / runtime

• Bare dry4javascript runs the full test suite (~1m50s). It is a DRY analysis that invokes tests, so running it with no arguments is a slow full-suite run, not a fast readiness probe. Never use it as a startup smoke check. Use dry4javascript --help (fast, ~0.6s) to confirm the binary is present and runnable. architect-startup.sh and the startup cheat-sheet must both use --help for this check.

• architect-startup.sh now runs in ~5s. After the dry4javascript --help fix, the only remaining cost is the git fetch on the four tool repos (~3.7s). That fetch is a network call and can hang in sandboxed environments; if a hang is ever observed, add a timeout to the fetch loop. The smoke test (mutate4javascript usage, dry4javascript --help, gherkin-parser --help) is the fast readiness probe; the full startup script is optional confirmation.

• Mutation runs dominate wall-clock time. Each mutate4javascript <file> invocation runs the full test suite as a baseline (coverage refresh) before running mutations, then runs mutations in parallel with --max-workers 8. Because the baseline re-runs the whole suite, mutating N files costs roughly N full-suite runs. Plan for this: batch the affected files, run them sequentially, and use --max-workers 8 to keep the mutation phase fast. The DRY and soft-Gherkin-mutation steps are comparatively quick.

• mutate4javascript copies the whole project into each worker, including tmp/. The worker copy skips only .git, node_modules, and target. A stale tmp/acceptance (LevelDB dirs from prior acceptance runs) can be ~1.5G, so with 8 workers the copy alone is ~12G of file I/O and the run appears to hang (process in D state, no mutation progress lines). Before any mutation run, rm -rf <component>/tmp/acceptance target/mutation-workers to keep the worker copies tiny. This cut a notifications-query mutation run from 20+ minutes to ~2 minutes.

• Which directories bloat and how to keep them clean. The two directories that grow without bound are <component>/tmp/acceptance (LevelDB dirs from acceptance runs, up to ~1.5G) and <component>/target/mutation-workers (per-run worker copies, up to ~14G). Both are gitignored build artifacts. Clean them before any mutation run:

  rm -rf psf-memo-db/tmp/acceptance psf-memo-db/target/mutation-workers \
         psf-memo-client/tmp/acceptance psf-memo-client/target/mutation-workers
  

  architect-startup.sh now checks these and reports them as [FAIL] when they exceed a size threshold, so a bloated dir is caught before it slows a mutation run.

• memo-db.js (client HTTP adapter) is excluded from mutation testing. It uses ESM + a directory import (../config) that is only resolvable via react-scripts/webpack, so it cannot be loaded under plain node --test. Its read behavior is exercised end-to-end via the DB acceptance tests. This is a standing precedent (also applied to the search task); do not attempt to force mutation coverage on it.

• Soft Gherkin acceptance mutation survivors are usually genuine equivalents. For read-only features, single-character case mutations of example values (addresses, text, txids) survive because each example value is used consistently on both the setup and assertion sides of its scenario. These are intrinsic equivalents, not implementation gaps; document them in the review summary and do not chase them.

• DRY reports pre-existing pattern-boilerplate. The layered conventions (follow/mute/poll controllers, route-registration index.js, memo-follow/ memo-mute services) produce score-1.00 duplicates that prior reviews left as-is. A shared controller base would be a broad cross-module refactor beyond any single handoff. Only reduce duplication that is local to the task at hand.

Workflow observations

• Review summaries must be force-added. docs/ is in the root .gitignore, so git add -A silently skips docs/reviews/<task>-summary.md. The role requires the summary to be committed with the byline in the same commit as the review changes, so use git add -f docs/reviews/<task>-summary.md (or git add -f docs/process-notes.md) before committing. This has silently dropped 8 of 13 summaries in the past; verify with git ls-files docs/reviews/ after committing.

• ready_for_next.sh / done_with_current.sh are the source of truth for queued work. done_with_current.sh prints NO_TASK when the queue is empty; stop waiting for work in that case.

• Handoff commit field must be exactly 10 hex chars. swarm_handoff.sh rejects shorter abbreviations; use git rev-parse --short=10 HEAD.

• Run per-component verification for every component a task touches before handing off (client, db, indexer), per the monorepo rules.