The rules text

The rules live in one file, rules/manifest.json. Each bullet in it has a full text, usually a short text, and a vale list naming the Vale rules that check it. The build renders two documents from that file and the JustSaySo Vale style from the same bullets, and a test fails when any of the three drifts from the manifest. A bullet about banned buzzwords and the Vale rule that flags them cannot disagree, because they are one record.

The full text is every bullet with its examples and the names of the rules that check it, about 600 words. The condensed reminder is the short texts, about 330 words. Three shipped bullets have no short text, so they exist in the full text only.

The full text goes out at every context start, which is a new session, a resume, /clear, and the rebuild after compaction, and into every subagent when it spawns. That is the moment that matters most, and the cost is a few hundred tokens, so the full text is the default there. The condensed reminder goes out on the prompt after a reply broke a rule, with the report of what broke, where brevity helps and the full text was injected not long before.

Before any injection the plugin reads the project’s Vale config for the reply target. A bullet whose Vale rules are all turned off is left out: a project that set JustSaySo.Intensifiers = NO gets a reminder without the intensifiers bullet. Error-level rules in the project’s styles that no bullet describes are named at the end, twelve at most, so the model at least knows their names. A style that sits in the styles directory but is selected nowhere says nothing either way. The doctor prints this reading next to the raw config so the two can be checked against each other.