The frontmatter half lands first
It is the smaller job by far — a declared field, a resolver, an error path — and it needs no precision tuning, so it makes the item useful while the extraction rule is still being argued about.
---
title: Theme Overview
documents:
- packages/transform/src/merge.ts
- packages/runes/src/config.ts
---
documents joins the declared members of Frontmatter (packages/content/src/frontmatter.ts:3) rather than living in its index signature — WORK-545's correction — which means SPEC-126 generates its reference entry automatically.
Unlike every other class, a declared path that does not resolve is an error (D14). The author stated this edge; a typo in it is a mistake, not a low-precision signal to skip.
Described links (D16)
The only class whose target is another content page. An overview listing its children with one-line summaries is duplicating the target's content, and the duplicate is what rots — the link merely says which target is being summarised.
Two structural shapes, and nothing else counts:
| [validate](/docs/cli/theme-tools#refrakt-validate) | Validate theme config and manifest |
- [xref](/runes/xref) — id-based sibling. Same `preview="drawer"` attribute.
A link in a table cell whose adjacent cell is prose, or a list item whose link is followed by a dash and prose. Not a link in a paragraph, a bare list item, or a nav entry — site/content has 748 internal links and only 169 carry a description.
Measured: 169 edges, 0 unresolved targets, 39% non-zero — the same band as the prose class, with a head to the distribution (4, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2) dominated by index → child edges.
The row above it in the spec's table was a non-goal until D16; the extraction is what changed, not the verdict on bare links.
The prose half is a judgement call, and its acceptance test is human
The spec is blunt about this: "The first run over site/content is the real acceptance test for the prose half: if the top ten are not things a maintainer agrees are worth reading, the rule is wrong and the phase is not done."
Measured base rate at the time of writing: 13 of 35 prose edges non-zero, across 11 pages. Healthy, but a small sample — which is why WORK-594 prints the per-class base rate in the footer, so degradation is visible rather than inferred.
A backticked path that does not resolve to an existing file is skipped, not reported. That is the opposite of the documents rule above, and the asymmetry is the point: one is a declaration, the other is a guess.
Acceptance Criteria
documents is a declared member of the Frontmatter interface, not read through its index signature- Each
documents entry produces an edge that ranks and answers touching identically to an extracted one documents entries resolve through ProjectFiles, rejecting absolute paths and traversal escapes as snippet path= does- A
documents entry that resolves to no existing file is reported as an error, naming the page and the entry - A
documents entry set in a _layout.md does not cascade to pages beneath it - The frontmatter reference documents
documents, generated from the schema - Described-link edges are extracted from internal links carrying an adjacent description — a table cell whose neighbouring cell is prose, or a list item whose link is followed by a dash and prose
- A link with no adjacent description produces no edge, covered by a test over a nav list and an inline paragraph mention
- Described-link targets resolve through both
<path>.md and <path>/index.md, with any #anchor stripped first - A described link whose target does not resolve to a content page is skipped, not reported
{% ref %} / {% xref %} entity links produce no described-link edges — extraction reads Markdoc source, not resolved hrefs- A fixture reproduces the motivating case: an overview row whose description contradicts its target after the target changed
- Prose path mentions are extracted from backticked repo-relative paths that resolve to an existing file
- A backticked path that does not resolve to an existing file is skipped, not reported
- A first run over
site/content is reviewed by a maintainer, and the top ten are agreed to be worth reading before the item is closed - The per-class base rate for both new classes appears in the report footer
Approach
Ship documents and its error path as the first commit, described links second, then iterate on the prose rule with the report in hand.
Described links go second because they are the one class already measured to a conclusion — the shapes are structural, the extraction resolved 169 of 169 targets, and the base rate is known. There is no rule to tune, so they add coverage while the prose rule is still being argued about.
Budget the extraction rule, not the arithmetic. The counting is a map lookup and a subtraction. What decides whether anyone runs this a second time is whether the top ten are worth reading — which is a question about which prose mentions count as claims, and is answered by trying it on a real corpus and throwing away rules that surface noise.
No cascade for documents: a layout declaring what it documents would attribute that claim to every page beneath it, which is precisely the over-broad edge the prose class already risks.
Blocked by
- WORK-594 — the index these classes feed
Notes
Do not add a frontmatter opt-out for the prose class yet. A page that legitimately mentions many paths without documenting them — CLAUDE.md's monorepo map is the obvious one — will rank persistently, and an opt-out is both the easy answer and the easy way to make the feature disappear one page at a time. Fix the extraction rule first; revisit only if a page is genuinely miscategorised.
Bulk application is legitimate here, and that is the whole difference from SPEC-134 D8. A documents: entry claims "this page is about that file", which an author can state honestly for a whole page in one line. A reviewed marker claims "a human read this exact content", which cannot be claimed in bulk without lying.
References
- SPEC-136 — D7 (prose extraction), D13 (
documents), D14 (a declared path that does not resolve is an error), D16 (described links, the measurements, and why bare links stay rejected), D2 (why bulk is legitimate here and not in SPEC-134) site/content/docs/cli/cli-overview.md — the motivating instance: a row summarising a command WORK-578 redefined- WORK-594 — the index and the report
- SPEC-126 — the generator that turns a declared field into its reference entry
packages/content/src/frontmatter.ts — the Frontmatter interface; created / modified are the precedentsite/content/extend/rune-authoring/authoring-overview.md — the instance in the spec's Problem