Found the commit hooks and the quality gate running different checks while a document promised they were the same, by comparing the two lists in a test — the five that only ever ran by hand were the ones reading the CV prose.

Situation. The project had a commit hook that runs checks before a commit is accepted, and a full quality gate run on demand. A document stated that the hook runs the gate, so nothing could reach history without passing everything. Both lists were maintained by hand, in two different files, and nothing compared them.

Task. The claim had to be turned into an assertion, which meant enumerating both sets programmatically and failing when they diverge.

Action. The test reads the hook configuration and the gate’s task definitions, resolves each to the set of checks it actually invokes, and compares. They did not match. Five checks existed only in the gate and never ran on commit, and the five were not random — they were the ones that read the CV prose itself: the voice check that keeps reviews impersonal, the buzzword check, the figure‑consistency check across languages, the notation check, and the spell check over content. In other words, every check protecting code ran automatically and every check protecting the writing ran only when someone remembered. Given that the writing is the entire product, the exposure was inverted from where anyone would have guessed. The fix was to bring the five into the hook, which required making two of them fast enough to survive a pre‑commit budget, and then to keep the comparison test in place so the two lists cannot drift apart again. The document that had been describing an intention now describes something enforced.

Result. The hook and the gate provably run the same checks, and the prose checks now run on every commit. The trade‑off is the commit hook’s runtime, which grew and will keep growing as content grows, and there is a point at which a slow hook gets bypassed — so this fix has a shelf life measured in how long the checks stay fast.