overview / rules / baseline-law-unmade
baseline-law-unmadeThis takes apart the project's own copy of the law, which is the thing that would have refused the next command.
anything that takes apart this project's own copy of the law — .rabadon/guard.json, .rabadon/promise.json, or the .rabadon directory holding them. It is judged by effect, not by verb name, because the verbs are the part that goes stale: measured against the shipped binary on 2026-08-30, rm -rf .rabadon, truncate -s 0, cp /dev/null, chmod 000, ln -sf /dev/null, install /dev/null, dd of=, and find .rabadon -delete all returned 0 while only rm <file> was refused. So the question asked is: after this command, is the law still there, still whole, still readable? Removed, emptied, overwritten, renamed away, symlinked over, appended to, or chmod'ed out of reach are one answer, and a verb this law has never heard of pointed at those paths is refused rather than waved through. This is the one place in the gate where an unknown name fails closed, because the subject is exactly three filenames. A path is reached however the shell would reach it: a glob (rm -rf .r*, rm -rf .*) and a brace (mv .rabadon{,.bak}) are expanded before they are judged — but rm -rf * passes, because bash does not expand a bare star onto a dotted name. An inline program handed to an interpreter (python3 -c, perl -e, node -e, ruby -e, and awk's first operand) is opaque text, so a body that spells one of the three names is refused; a program handed over as a file is not guessed at. Reading passes, and that is held by test from the other side: cat, grep (including grep -c rm .rabadon/guard.json, which spells a verb but writes nothing), head, tail, wc, ls, stat, diff, git diff, git log, sed -n, an interpreter reading it with no in-place flag and no inline body, cd into the directory, and cp .rabadon/guard.json ./backup.json — copying it out — all pass. So does creating it and backing it up: mkdir -p .rabadon is the first step of installing the law by hand and tar -cf backup.tar .rabadon is the promise above being kept, and both were REFUSED until 2026-08-30 — see the correction below. So does ordinary destructive work anywhere else in the tree, and so does deleting a whole project of yours that happens to contain a .rabadon: the subject is the law, not the tree around it. Change the law with an edit the guard can see, or silence baseline-law-unmade by id if a shell rewrite is really what you meant.
From the floor table in docs/guard.md. The 21 shapes it allows although they destroy the law are measured, by class.
The row says "this project's own copy of the law", and until 2026-08-30 the compiled rule did not do that: it fired on every path on the disk whose last component was .rabadon, and it read five ordinary shapes as attacks. Measured with an empty bash[] fixture in a project sandbox under $HOME — deliberately not under a machine temp root, whose carve-out inflates the reading — one line per shape, REFUSE when the gate exits 2:
All five now pass, and each is an assertion in native/law_family_test.sh alongside the shape it must not have opened (mkdir -m 000 .rabadon, tar -xf a.tar -C .rabadon, find . -path '*/.rabadon/*' -delete, this project's own copy spelled absolute). The rule was not weakened; its subject was narrowed to what this row always said it was. Another tree's .rabadon is baseline-rm-rf-outside's business, under that rule's own id.
Rendered from the strings in native/baseline.h and the envelope in native/gate_pre.h (Judge::refuse). A word in <angle brackets> is filled in from the command at the moment it is refused.
Only the user can switch it off, by id, in the project's guard:
or by pausing supervision with rabadon off, which records the change. Every other rule keeps running.
No record in the published field dataset (field.jsonl, 778 records, 2026-07-27 to 2026-08-26) carries this id.
The dataset is on the field page.
a walk that never spells the law's name · the tree deleted from outside, law and all · the tree moved away, law and all · the project root deleted by its own name