The Reading Oath
Make an AI prove it read your whole codebase instead of confidently skimming it.
The ingredients 5 gifts
The idea
The failure you know: paste a repo at an LLM, ask 'any security issues,' get an authoritative answer from a model that actually looked at 3 files. This composition makes that structurally hard — coverage becomes a checkable property, and every model claim has to point at a byte-derived fact before it's allowed into the answer.
The parts + how they wire
excavation enumerates your site/corpus as typed nodes and shards it by budget, then tracks coverage against that enumerated oracle until the set-difference is empty. cruise walks the code and emits only byte-derived facts, each carrying what it proves and what it does not. verify keeps a content-hash certificate so re-checking 'did I read this' is a one-second FRESH/STALE/DEAD. ward badges the reading green only when the coverage witness agrees. markdown renders the oath as HTML + verbatim plaintext from one AST so the human and machine views can't drift.
The one piece you build
The prompt harness — the loop that feeds excavation's shards to your model, collects claims, and checks each claim against cruise's fact ledger before letting it into the answer. That's the actual prompt engineering here, and it's small.
The technical breakdown
excavation makes coverage a checkable property, not a vibe: it builds a manifest (every page/file as a typed node — the coverage oracle), shards (context-sized chunks), and a coverage tracker that does set-difference against the manifest until nothing remains. Your harness loops pull-shard → feed-model → mark-covered until the difference is empty; 'I read all of it' is a set operation, not a claim. cruise gives the anti-hallucination oracle: each fact is a route (a server path literal in a handler), an affordance (a user-visible control label), or a claim (a test-file assertion), and every fact ships its own proves and does_not_prove — a route fact proves a path literal exists, not that the route works or is tested. Your harness rejects any model claim that can't point at a matching cruise fact. verify's FRESH/STALE/DEAD is the incremental layer: on a re-read you don't re-feed shards whose certificate still hashes FRESH, which makes the oath cheap to re-take after a small change.
The honest edge
cruise is a pattern scan, not a language parser — a framework idiom it wasn't taught is a fact it won't see. It fails safe (a real fact omitted, never a fabricated one added), so a clean cruise run means 'look here,' not 'nothing here.' You're bounding the AI's confidence to what's provable, not achieving omniscience.
These are ingredients, not instructions you have to follow. If you cook something from them — or something stranger — we want to see it.