dw-grain

dw-grain — working code is not the same as code worth keeping

Everything else that runs over a finished change asks whether the code is right. Lint, the formatter, the type checker, the tests, the review pass: all of them pass code that never needed to be written. An agent building against a checklist reaches for a new helper faster than for the one already in the tree, because writing is cheaper than searching — and the result compiles, passes and reads fine.

Every category below has exactly one remedy: delete it, or call what is already there. That is structural rather than a stated preference. A category allowed to propose an abstraction would spend the pass inventing the thing the pass exists to find, and anything asked for improvements returns improvements. None of them can, so the table cannot grow the codebase.

What it reads and writes

Reads wide, judges narrow. As input: the whole of every file the change touched, not the hunks; their neighbours in the same directory; the canonical home the project keeps for helpers of that kind; and whatever the repo declares about itself — a root AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md, the topic files its router points at, a CONTEXT.md glossary, a decision record covering this code. As judgeable: only what the change wrote. Every row has to be fixable by changing the new code, which is what keeps a wide read from becoming a tour of the repo's older sins.

Scope comes from git, never from a change doc. Bare takes the merge-base against the default branch — the ref bash "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/base-ref.sh" prints — and reads the files git diff --name-only <base>...HEAD names. The argument narrows or replaces that: a path takes that subtree, a ref range takes that range, a PR number takes that PR's files. It reads no .ai/ artifact at all — no lane, no CHANGE.md, no goal — so it runs in a repo that has never seen this loop, over a directory, or over a branch that merged months ago.

Phase one writes nothing. Phase two writes the deletions you named, as code commits, and no .ai/ artifact — a table you act on in the same session needs no file to rot between runs.