Polyglot gate fidelity + feature-cycle signals

[qwerfunch]

2026-07-21 · feature/multilang-gate-and-cycle-signals → develop

The gate now reads and reports non-JavaScript projects honestly, and it nudges when the spec-first feature cycle isn't being driven.

Heads-up: the new cycle signals are all advisory — informational, they never change a gate's exit status on their own. The polyglot changes affect how existing findings are reported (more granular lint, deduped test runs), not what passes. Rebased onto the latest develop so it ships alongside the 0.9.1 adoption-capabilities fix (#245); derived files were reconciled against the merged tree and the strict pre-push gate is green across 2602 tests.

Added — feature-cycle signals

▸ Nudge when sustained source edits are bound to no feature. Once edits to files no feature tracks pass a small threshold, the post-edit card surfaces one advisory to start a feature — so the spec-first cycle gets triggered instead of silently skipped. Debounced, once-per-window, never blocks.
▸ clad check flags unenforced projects. When features aren't done yet but neither a git hook nor CI wires the gate, the check prints one advisory — with how to wire enforcement. Informational only; it never changes the exit status.
▸ Cold-start signal. When a project has code but no feature specs, the cycle simply hasn't started — the gate now says so plainly instead of looking clean.
▸ Onboarding hands off to authoring the first feature spec, not straight to code, and writing code ahead of its spec is caught both at that handoff and at the resting state.

Changed — polyglot gate fidelity

▸ Check-only formatters now list every dirty file, not just the first. dart format (and peers like dotnet format) print one changed-file line each; those aren't ESLint-shaped, so the lint stage used to collapse them to a single pathless finding — fix one, re-run, the next appears. Each dirty file now surfaces as its own finding with its path, plus a one-line fix: hint.
▸ Python projects run the suite once per gate, not twice. The unit and coverage stages each spawned the whole pytest suite (pytest, then coverage run -m pytest) — roughly doubling gate time. The unit stage now runs the coverage-instrumented suite once and shares it, the same dedup vitest already had. The zero-executed-tests guard still applies on the shared run, so the dedup can't turn a vacuous run green.
▸ The header-comment convention check understands more languages — # comments and Python docstrings (""", '''), not only // / /*.

Fixed

▸ Soft-shell jargon leaks closed and plain-language enforcement tightened — user-facing output stays in plain words rather than leaking internal cladding terms.

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