---
id: "0041"
date: 2026-07-14
status: Accepted
supersedes:
superseded-by:
affected-paths: [plugins/os-doc-hygiene/conventions.json, plugins/os-doc-hygiene/lifecycle-spec.md, plugins/os-doc-hygiene/skills/]
affected-components: [os-doc-hygiene]
---

# 0041 — Determinism promotion: hygiene nudges projects toward structurally-obvious completion conventions

## Context

The deletion-autonomy tiers force every classifier-judged served_when signal to confirm (the LLM may propose, never silently destroy). Left there, projects with subjective completion signals would accumulate permanent confirm-fatigue, and the human would rubber-stamp gates. Tickets #43 (item 7) and #47 asked how the tool should respond when a rule's served signal is subjective.

## Decision

When a rule's served signal is classifier-judged, the tool does not merely downgrade it to confirm: it names the subjectivity and recommends a concrete structural convention that would graduate the rule to a scanner-proven served_when_path and make it silent. Conventions live in a global-only, machine-readable catalog at plugins/os-doc-hygiene/conventions.json so the deterministic pipeline emits nudges without an LLM; v1 holds exactly two entries: archive-bucket (done = file moved to a sibling archive/ dir, precedent: openspec changes) and status-frontmatter (done = a status: shipped|done frontmatter key). Surfacing splits by capability: :check names promotion candidates in every report; :calibrate may draft the adoption (graduated rule + file moves) for human approval but never applies it unasked.

## Consequences

Confirm-fatigue is converted into the incentive to fix the convention rather than a cost to endure — adopting a convention directly buys silent automation. The catalog only recommends; adoption lands in the project's own rulebook, so no per-project catalog override is needed. A two-entry catalog that gets adopted beats a taxonomy; successor-artifact checks stay out until a calibration pass demands one. The :check report schema gains a promotion-candidates section.

## Alternatives rejected

(1) Just downgrade subjective rules to confirm and stop — rejected: permanent confirm-fatigue with no exit path. (2) A rich taxonomy of completion conventions — rejected: adoption beats coverage; entries are added when calibration passes demand them. (3) Per-project catalog override — rejected: the catalog only recommends, so there is nothing project-specific to override. (4) :calibrate applies adoptions automatically — rejected: violates the model-proposes/human-disposes constraint from #42.
