tagline three-variant drift: the repo runs three different self-descriptions — README strapline (an opinionated, intent-driven development framework for product thinkers), plugin.json description (host-agnostic configuration layer for development ... usable as a plugin in compatible agent harnesses), and AGENTS.md (a host-agnostic configuration layer for development). The drift is itself the finding: one-canonical-primitive wants a single recorded tagline (a DECISIONS.md line, or the brief's product chapter as the home) with per-surface renderings derived from it. Adopting any new wording without that consolidation just mints a fourth variant. Surfaced by the 2026-07-27 tagline assessment. Detector: a positioning-currency check that the three surfaces render from one recorded home.

Frontmatter

.abcd/work/issues/resolved/iss-143-tagline-three-variant-drift.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗

mentions8

• dcn-26072700000000032026-07-27 — ADOPTED the canonical tagline: "A host-agnostic configuration layer for intent-driven development." Canonical identity home is the brief product chapter (01-product README, Identity section: title / tagline / pitch); README strapline, plugin manifest description, and AGENTS.md opening render from it. README's former strapline ("An opinionated, intent-driven development framework for product thinkers") is retired as a surface line; the product-thinker framing lives on in the README body. Rejected wordings: "for agent harnesses" (object shift, host/harness redundancy, plural over-promise), "over any agent harness" (drops the domain). Resolves iss-143; itd-102 generalises the drift check for managed repos.
• dcn-26072800000000072026-07-28 — itd-102: surface comparison is normalised CONTAINMENT of each required block field (markup, dashes, wrapping, case folded; trailing sentence punctuation trimmed from the needle), not line equality. Equality would flag abcd's own three conforming surfaces, each of which carries the tagline in a different rendering (inside `<p>`, concatenated with the pitch in the manifest, bolded mid-sentence and line-wrapped in AGENTS.md); containment catches all three iss-143 variants while accepting all three current ones. Consequence: `identity render` fires only on drift, and its template render is a proposal to adopt by hand, not a byte-exact reproduction of conforming prose.
• dcn-26080500000000052026-08-05 — iss-43 (v0.5.0 item D): the three-claim corpus is closed as OVERTAKEN rather than fixed — the Status section and the surface list were removed by `73428b6` (2026-07-17, "manual: Revise README with new badges and project details"), a manual revision predating the v0.5.0 plan, so the Phase 0 claim and the native review oracle / spec-task engine / autonomous run claims no longer exist to correct, and re-deriving a corpus against a rewritten document would be inventing findings to justify a ticket. That attribution is itself a correction worth recording: the round first credited the iss-143 tagline commit `48a3524`, which touches ONE README line (the strapline), because it read a SHALLOW clone whose truncation window opened well after 2026-07-17 and therefore could not see the real commit — a truncated history answers a `git log` question confidently and wrongly, and the cheap guard is `git log -S` over the file for the exact removed string, unshallowed first. Two corollaries earned the same way: the corpus's third claim was never `73428b6`'s at all (`git log -S "never shipped"` puts that line in the scaffold commit and in this branch alone), so "all three overtaken" was a second wrong attribution riding on the first; and a whole-phrase probe can miss a claim that was line-wrapped in the original, which is why `"spec/task"` reproduces where `"spec/task engine"` returns nothing. One instance survives, and it is half true rather than false, which is why it needed splitting instead of deleting: the Layout line called `.abcd/` "never shipped", which holds for the released binaries alone (release.yml uploads the four of them and `checksums.txt`, nothing else) and fails everywhere else — `.claude-plugin/marketplace.json` declares `source: "./"`, so a marketplace install takes the whole repository, and GitHub attaches auto-generated source archives to each release, which carry the directory too because `.gitattributes` declares no `export-ignore`. The line now divides on the boundary that is real: every repository checkout against the released binaries, rather than a per-channel split that would have been wrong about the release page. Doc-side deliberately: the marketplace manifest schema has no per-path exclusion, so making "never shipped" true everywhere means building a curated publish path — feature work with its own design questions, not doc repair, and writing the doc to describe a packaging mechanism that does not exist is the phantom-claim failure this item belongs to. The proposed detector (README capability and status claims resolve to wired verbs and to the roadmap) is DROPPED here and re-pointed at iss-181 as a candidate extension of the gate cross-check detector's scope, recorded as a candidate rather than a commitment because it shares that detector's two unsettled scoping questions and a second half-specified scanner would answer neither. The same claim survives across the record — CONTEXT.md's sharp-edges list, AGENTS.md, both `.abcd/` READMEs, `02-constraints/01-platform.md`, `05-internals/03-configuration.md` and `phase-1-ahoy.md`, with adr-0028, the dated plans and the planned/shipped intent bodies exempt as decision and historical records — and it is recorded as iss-183 rather than fixed here, since the disposition scoped this item to one README line. That issue also corrects a claim this round made twice: the exclusion is NOT unimplemented. `internal/core/launch/bundle.go` denies the `.abcd` namespace structurally, with tests, reachable from the wired `abcd launch ship`; it is unwired, because `Ship` stops at `WouldPublish` with no network call and `release.yml` uploads the binaries without ever invoking the verb. "No mechanism exists" and "the mechanism never runs" ask for different fixes, and only the second is true.
• iss-43README capability currency. Re-scoped by the 2026-08-05 maintainer disposition to one surviving instance; the original three-claim corpus is closed as filed.
• iss-2609011424113262The brief's surface prose has drifted from the shipped binary in twenty-one
• iss-2610262030567363The mental model says the brief's surface chapters carry an `## Acceptance` block in Given-When-Then format; the identity chapter has no such block and names an issue as its acceptance corpus instead.
• itd-102**Your repo says the same thing about itself everywhere — because abcd asked you once and holds every surface to it.** A project's positioning fragments silently: the README strapline, the package or plugin manifest description, and the agent conventions file are each edited at different moments, and soon three surfaces tell three stories about what the project is. When abcd prepares a repo it interviews the user for the project's identity — title, tagline, and a short elevator pitch — and records the answers in one canonical home in the development record. Every surface rendering derives from that home, and a deterministic positioning check compares the surfaces against it on every audit: a mismatch is highlighted with the exact drifted line, and the fix is either re-render from the record or a deliberate, recorded identity change — never a silent extra variant, and never a silent rewrite by abcd. "I changed my tagline once, in one place, and abcd chased it everywhere else," said Alice, a solo founder. "When a stray edit crept into the README, the next audit pointed at the exact line instead of letting the drift settle in."
• spc-19your-repo-says-the-same-thing-about-itself-everywhere-becaus