Development record
Question guard's 24-row limit counts the option lines, but the asking rule reads as a limit on the question text
Question guard's 24-row limit counts the option lines, but the asking rule reads as a limit on the question text
The GRILL rule says one question, or one tab, fits twenty-four rows at eighty columns, and the refusal names "tab 1, question text (rows)". Asking a four-option role question, the guard refused 31 rows, then 25, then 25, while the question text itself was about 8 to 12 lines. The rows evidently include the option labels and descriptions, so the budget for material is far below 24, but neither the rule nor the refusal says so. Each refusal costs a rewrite by guesswork.
To see it: ask a question whose text is about 10 lines with four options whose descriptions are two sentences each; it is refused as over 24 rows of question text.
Remedy the reporter proposes: State the budget the check applies: either say the 24 rows include header, options and descriptions, or report the material rows left after the options in the refusal.
Reported by a managed repository (root commit c372ff6b8fc387ffdf1acf7c51bffe469b70b2e0) through the abcd inbox as rpt-2610071228211794, a defect against abcd v0.13.1, surface abcd guard hook (question tool), GRILL asking rules.
Evidence:
- rpt-2610071228211794 (the report, kept in the inbox)
- lab-261002171217-c372ff6
Frontmatter
| id | iss-2610071538055431 |
|---|---|
| type | issue |
| lifecycle | resolved |
| severity | minor |
.abcd/work/issues/resolved/iss-2610071538055431-question-guard-s-24-row-limit-counts-the.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗
mentions2
- iss-2610230745597968Questions still break abcd's asking limits after several rounds of fixes, on two accounts on 2026-10-23. (1) In a repository abcd manages, on another account, an agent bundled four separate issues into one question without going through the abcd:question-drafter agent, and the question check refused 21 parts at once: headers that were not role chips, no Decide later option, no Now: or Change later: lines, and question text that did not quote the thing being decided; the status line meanwhile read 'waiting on the product thinker'. (2) In abcd's own checkout, a question was refused because its text did not end with the question, and it also ran 25 rows against the 24-row limit (header and frame 8, question text 7, options 10), which the check reports but does not refuse, so it would have been shown and a narrow window might cut it; at the same time an abcd:question-drafter run spent 9 minutes 32 seconds and 174.2k tokens recounting over-limit tabs with a hand-written rows script. Earlier rounds include iss-2610071538055431, iss-2610100626327722, iss-2610161734179773 and the open iss-2610090816296964.
- itd-2610230756259215Every question abcd asks passes its check before the person sees it