Files
deepseek-harness/.agents/notes/implemented/process/2026-06-18-markdown-cross-link-lint.md
Tianyi Cui 25dcd7293c docs: purge chain-of-thought leakage from prose
Delete design-session citations (decision/audit/plan ordinals, stack
positions), change narration, review choreography, and reviewer-addressed
justification from comments, JSDoc, docs, READMEs, Agent Notes, tests, and
generator templates; restate every affected fact as current-state contract
prose. Fix generated docs at their sources and regenerate the catalogs and
cordis-surface regions; re-paste type-equiv blocks; update every bilingual
counterpart and re-record the pairs. Record the citation rule in the
committed-artifact-citations Agent Note.
2026-08-09 21:10:59 +08:00

3.6 KiB

Agent Note: Markdown cross-link validity linting

Status: implemented

English | 中文

Problem

Docs in this repo link to each other by relative path — [topic](../implemented/2026-…-….md), [the cookbook](adding-a-tool.md), [architecture.md](../../architecture.md). Nothing verified those targets exist. A rename or a move silently breaks every inbound link, and the break is invisible until a reader clicks it. Doc-sync enforcement already mechanized two classes of doc drift (uncompilable code blocks, a stale event-taxonomy table) and verify-md-wrap a third (hard-wrapped prose) — but a dead cross-link is a fourth, equally mechanical class that was still verified by eyeball.

The motivating case is the Agent Note tree reorganization that introduced this gate: unifying docs/adr/ + .agents/notes/ into one .agents/notes/ with proposed//implemented//rejected/ subfolders renamed roughly forty inter-doc links by hand. A single fat-fingered path would have shipped a broken link with nothing to catch it.

Decision

A fourth doc-sync gate, verify-md-links (scripts/verify-md-links.ts), mirroring the verify-md-wrap style (tsx ESM, AST-based, verify-don't-generate):

  • Parse each in-scope Markdown file with mdast-util-from-markdown + GFM and walk every link, image, and definition node.
  • Check a target only when it is a relative path. Skip scheme-qualified URLs (https:, mailto:, …), protocol-relative (//host), root-absolute (/path — no stable base in a checkout), and pure in-page anchors (#section). Strip any #fragment/?query, resolve the path against the linking file's directory, and assert it exists on disk.
  • Report and never rewrite; exit non-zero on the first broken link found.

Scope matches the other gates plus the AGENTS.md pair and the repo-authored agent-skill Markdown under .agents/skills/ (those skill files cross-link into the docs tree, so this reorg rewrote links in them too): README.md, docs/**/*.md, packages/*/README.md, AGENTS.md, packages/AGENTS.md, .agents/skills/**/*.md, deduped by real path (the CLAUDE.md symlinks resolve onto the AGENTS.md files). It is wired into doc-sync, so relevant documentation changes and CI exercise the same broken-link check.

The gate now also checks #fragment anchors on Markdown targets — same-file anchors included — against heading slugs and explicit <a id>; the fragment-anchor decision owns that mechanism and the slug rules.

Alternatives considered

Anchor-level validity checking — deferred here as heavier and lower-value (file-level dead links were the failure that had actually bit), leaving authors to verify #fragment anchors themselves. That manual rule did not hold; the fragment-anchor decision later added the check.

Consequences

  • Renames and moves that orphan a cross-link fail doc-sync and CI instead of waiting for a reader to click a dead link. This made the Agent Note reorganization that introduced the gate self-verifying: the check proves none of its own rewritten links dangle.
  • One more fast tsx script in the doc-sync chain; no new dependency (the mdast/GFM stack is already in devDependencies for verify-md-wrap).
  • The convention this enforces — cross-reference docs by machine-checkable relative link, never by bare prose or a number — is documented in docs/AGENTS.md so authors know the gate exists and why.