The prose scrubber neutralises angle brackets inside code spans, so a documented

The prose scrubber neutralises angle brackets inside code spans, so a documented placeholder ships as a shell redirect. cleanProse (internal/termsafe/prose.go:83) rewrites every HTML opener by inserting a space after the <, which is correct and load-bearing for prose: it stops an injected <script> or <!-- reaching a rendered surface as live markup, and the comment case folds into the same rule. It does not exempt code spans, where CommonMark never parses HTML in the first place, so the neutralisation buys nothing there and corrupts the content instead.

Observed while ingesting the v0.7.0 changelog. The composer emitted a code span holding the invocation with an angle-bracket placeholder:

abcd reading ingest --reading-json <path>

and launch ship --changelog-json wrote a space in after the opener:

abcd reading ingest --reading-json < path>

The payload on disk is correct; the mutation happens inside the ingest. The damage is not cosmetic: <path> is an inert placeholder, while < path> is a valid shell input redirection from a file named path. A reader who copies the documented invocation out of the release record runs something that means something else, and fails in a way that does not point back at the changelog.

--> has the same shape (rewritten to -- > on the next line), so any prose documenting an HTML comment or an arrow token is exposed the same way.

Grounds

• deferred: not fixed at the point of discovery, because the finding surfaced mid-release-cut and the fix touches a primitive that every store-before-commit redactor routes through; the v0.7.0 line was reworded to avoid the placeholder instead, which leaves the defect intact and recorded rather than half-fixed under release pressure

• pursued: the neutralisation buys nothing where CommonMark parses no HTML, so skipping spans by the spec's own boundary rule is faithful and fails closed on a malformed span; refusing at ingest would have kept the corruption reachable from every other redactor on the primitive's path

Candidate remedies

Not decided; the choice wants a maintainer.

• Skip the neutralisation inside backtick spans, parsing the span boundaries first. Most faithful, and the most code: the scrubber gains a tokenizer, and a malformed or unbalanced span has to fail closed rather than open.
• Substitute a lookalike that cannot open a tag, such as the full-width ＜, or an HTML entity where the destination is known to render markdown. Cheap, but it silently alters a string a reader may copy, which is the same class of defect as the one it replaces.
• Leave the primitive alone and refuse at ingest instead: a changelog payload carrying < inside a code span is rejected with a message telling the composer to reword. Fails closed, adds no rendering knowledge to the scrubber, and keeps the correction where the prose is authored.

The third fits the existing shape best. launch ship --changelog-json already re-derives the cut and proves the prose against it, so a payload refusal joins the completeness bijection rather than forming a new gate, and the composer is already the component that owns wording.