place

Placement Audit

A read-only audit of LLM-facing instruction prose that answers one question per clause: where does this belong? Every routing unit receives a destination, whether or not it bears a decision, and a pass that did not reach every unit reports that instead of reading as a finished audit. The audit emits routes; the human author applies them.

Purpose

Instruction surfaces accumulate. The usual review asks whether a file is too long and answers by cutting, which loses the operative clauses buried inside rationale — a threshold, a condition, a named action, sitting in the middle of a paragraph that exists to explain something else. Routing preserves them: content that leaves a surface arrives somewhere, and the clause that has to keep binding behavior is rewritten to stand on its own before the paragraph around it moves.

The audit also takes up two judgments that were previously made separately — whether a mention holds attention on something the instruction is trying to avoid, and whether an example anchors the model to one instance. They enter on different footings. Which kind an example is argues for a destination, so that judgment is a placement question and an example is decided by which surface it belongs on. Whether a prohibition should be restated positively is not: it changes how the clause is written wherever it lands, and the destination steps settle placement without it.

Inputs

Manual invocation only (interactive /place):

• The caller passes target file paths or a glob; with no argument, the audit enumerates the in-scope set under the working tree. The target bounds which routing units receive routes; it does not bound where a pointer at one of them may live.
• The reference-search boundary is the in-scope surface set under the working tree unless the caller supplies a narrower one. It is named in the report, because a result found inside a boundary supports a claim about that boundary and never that nothing exists outside it.
• Files are read at their working-tree state — the post-edit, pre-commit content the author is about to ship.