2026-09-23 — `abcd lint` becomes a merge-blocking gate on a narrow, high-precision subset of its findings, and every other finding stays advisory in the same run (product thinker, ruling on iss-2608231000561060; the example given is a real personal home-folder path). The facilitator proposes the blocking set, judged against the current privacy-hygiene errors, and the product thinker confirms it. Until the gate runs, the record's claim that the lint gates CI is not a fact.

Frontmatter

.abcd/work/decisions/dcn-2609230000000005-abcd-lint-becomes-a-merge-blocking-gate.md
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mentions1

• iss-2608231000561060The repo-conformance lint runs in no gate while the record says it gates CI, and it is not currently gate-ready, which are two problems needing separate decisions. Verified 2026-08-23 on origin/main. brief/04-surfaces/README.md row 16 describes /abcd:lint as checking the three-tier layout, AGENTS.md router, durable decisions, docs currency, privacy hygiene and identity positioning, and states it 'backs prepare-this-repo and gates CI (itd-85)'. It does not gate CI. The Makefile's preflight target is lint-reviews record-lint docs-lint plus build, vet, test and race, with no abcd lint, and the Makefile has no abcd lint or repolint target at all. Searching .github/workflows for an invocation of the repo-conformance lint, excluding the unrelated 'abcd docs lint', returns nothing in ci.yml or release.yml, whose only lint steps are go run ./cmd/record-lint and go run ./cmd/abcd docs lint. The surface runs only when a human types it. The second problem is why simply wiring it up does not work. On current main the lint emits 19 privacy-hygiene findings, 17 at blocker severity, and the sampled ones are not leaks. Nine of the 19 are in the scanner's own source or in ledger entries about the scanner, where the patterns appear as subject matter. Three sampled outside that set are documentation examples: a Linuxbrew prefix in a spec table and again in [dcn-2608200000000006](../../decisions/dcn-2608200000000006-homebrew-distribution-recorded-and.md), and a CHANGELOG entry recording that certain path shapes stopped being read as usernames. So gating it today would fail every build on content that is correct. iss-305, resolved, records the mechanism -- hasAbsHomePath lacks the leading-boundary predicate its scanner twin has -- and iss-307, iss-308 and iss-324 are adjacent boundary defects in the same family. A waiver marker exists, abcd-lint:allow with the legacy spelling abcd-audit:allow, and the rule's own source uses it on two lines, so the mechanism is available but is not applied across the corpus. What makes this worth deciding rather than filing and forgetting: the rule is right about the case that actually bit. An absolute home path written into a ledger issue body is exactly what its pattern catches, and on 2026-08-23 two sessions independently wrote one. Neither was caught by an instrument. record-lint did not see them because its roots are ['.abcd/development'] and the ledger is in .abcd/work; the lint that would have seen them does not run. Note the two are not interchangeable, since record-lint is scoped to the durable record while privacy-hygiene scans every tracked file, so widening record-lint's roots is a different fix from running the lint. Decide in order: whether the record's gates-CI claim is corrected or made true, and if made true, whether the false-positive rate is addressed by waivers, by the iss-305 boundary fix, or by narrowing what blocks. Leaving the claim standing while the surface runs nowhere is the shape enforcement-claims-are-facts names, and iss-2608230847432286 records the class.