ACI-018: The Short Way Wins

Thesis

When the correct way to check a result or write a record costs more keystrokes than the wrong way, the wrong way wins, even for the people who wrote the rule against it. Fix it by making the correct form the short one: a command that reads the result properly, and an invocation that cannot damage what it writes.

Story

In August 2026 the Laksa project had a verification subsystem that printed the exact path of its result when a check finished. Once that line scrolled away, what anyone reached for was laksa check all | tail -20, and in a pipe $? is the status of tail, not of the check. Reading the real status took more typing than not knowing about it, "which is the whole defect: the wrong path was shorter than the right one". The author of the rule was caught by it twice on 2026-08-21, both times reading a gate as green through a pipe. The repair shipped the next day was a command, not a reminder: a verdict verb that names the run it read and has five possible states, four of them not a pass, so a result it cannot judge exits non-zero (Laksa@5697e3cab, 2026-08-22). Three weeks later someone building a gate in Intent made the same mistake once, reading intent doctor | tail as a doctor that never fails, and wrote the fix into the gate itself: capture the output without a pipe before reading $? (Intent@6fae2ff6a, 2026-09-12).