moai-workflow-docs-claim-check

# Documentation Claim Check

Assess whether the statements a public-facing document makes are actually
supported by the evidence supplied alongside it. The assessment reads, judges,
and reports. It changes nothing and runs nothing.

Typical subjects: a README, a release note, an install guide, a quickstart, a
migration note, a feature or compatibility table.

## Hard boundaries

Three boundaries are absolute. They hold even when the request asks for more;
in that case perform the assessment and decline the rest in Boundary Notes.

1. **No command execution.** Do not run builds, tests, package managers,
   linters, network requests, or any shell command as part of the assessment.
   When a claim can only be settled by running something, **name** the exact
   command and the file it should run against and label the claim
   `needs-human`. Naming the command is the deliverable; running it is not.
2. **No fixes.** Do not produce patches, diffs, rewritten passages, or file
   edits. Describe what a maintainer would change and where, then stop.
3. **No code review and no security review.** Do not assess code quality,
   architecture, performance, or vulnerabilities. If asked, state the boundary
   in Boundary Notes and continue with the claim assessment only.

Opening the files the user pointed at, to locate the evidence they supplied, is
in scope — that is reading, not executing.

## Phase 1 — Preflight

Complete all three steps before triaging a single claim. If a step cannot be
completed, report that and stop rather than guessing.

1. **Confirm the document is public-facing.** This skill judges documents
   written for users of the software: README, release notes, install and usage
   guides, published site pages. Internal design notes, task trackers, and
   private runbooks are out of scope — say so and stop.
2. **Inventory the supplied evidence.** For every item record what it is, where
   it came from, its **version** identifier, and its **timestamp**. An item with
   neither is still usable, but record it as undated: it cannot later support a
   freshness judgment.
3. **Flag secrets for redaction before proceeding.** Scan the supplied evidence
   for credentials, tokens, private keys, connection strings, and personal
   data. On a hit, flag the location for redaction, never reproduce the secret
   in any output, and continue only once a redacted copy is available.

## Phase 2 — Claim Triage

Turn the document into an inventory of atomic claims.

**Extract.** Walk the document and pull out every statement that asserts
something checkable about the software: supported platforms and versions,
install and usage steps, defaults, limits, guarantees, availability, counts.

**Decompose composite claims.** A composite claim bundles several
independently-checkable assertions into one sentence. Split it so that **each
atomic claim carries exactly one assertion and therefore receives exactly one
label**. A sentence that would otherwise need two labels is not yet atomic.

> "Installs with a single command on macOS and Linux" splits into three atomic
> claims: single-command install, macOS support, Linux support. Each is
> evidenced — and can fail — independently.

**Set aside the subjective.** Statements of taste or ambition ("fast",
"developer-friendly", "production-grade") cannot be checked against evidence.
Exclude them from labeling and list them under Input Scope Reviewed with a
one-line reason. When a subjective adjective wraps a checkable core, split it:
label the core, exclude the adjective.

**Bind evidence.** For each atomic claim, note which supplied evidence items
bear on it — or record that none does.

## Phase 3 — Validation

Assign **exactly one** label to every atomic claim by walking the ordered
decision tree. Stop at the first gate that fires; do not re-open an earlier gate.

```
needs-human  ->  stale-suspected  ->  verified  ->  unsupported
```

| Label | Gate condition |
|-------|----------------|
| `needs-human` | Settling the claim requires something outside this skill: running a command, reaching a private system, exercising a UI, or a call only a maintainer can make. |
| `stale-suspected` | Evidence indicates the claim was true earlier, but current evidence disagrees on a version, date, count, or name. A temporal mismatch, not a contradiction of substance. |
| `verified` | Supplied evidence directly supports the claim and the supporting item can be named. |
| `unsupported` | None of the above fired: the evidence does not carry the claim. |

`unsupported` always carries **exactly one** reason:

| Reason | Meaning |
|--------|---------|
| `missing-evidence` | No supplied evidence speaks to the claim at all. |
| `contradicted` | Supplied evidence asserts the opposite. |
| `insufficient-coverage` | Evidence is on-topic but narrower than the claim — one platform of three, one version of a declared range, one path of several. |

Anchoring rules: every `verified` names its evidence anchor; every
`stale-suspected` names the mismatched field and both values; every
`needs-human` names the command or file that would settle it; every
`unsupported` carries its reason.

Gate criteria in full, tie-breaks between adjacent gates, and a claim-type
table live in `references/label-decision-tree.md`. Worked end-to-end
assessments live in `references/worked-examples.md`.

## Output contract

Emit exactly these three sections, in this order, every time — including when
the claim inventory is empty.

### 1. Input Scope Reviewed

- Documents read, with version or date when known.
- Evidence items inventoried, each with version and timestamp (or `undated`).
- Statements excluded as subjective, each with a one-line reason.
- Evidence that was needed but **not** supplied, named specifically.

### 2. Claim Assessments

One row per atomic claim:

| # | Atomic claim | Label | Reason | Evidence anchor or what is missing |
|---|--------------|-------|--------|------------------------------------|

`Reason`