style: widen the house-style rules to CLAUDE.md and .conventions

[thecodedrift]

Stack (root → tip):

• Planned Taskless Rules #168
  • ➡️ style: widen the house-style rules to CLAUDE.md and .conventions #176 (you are here)

First slice of the broadening in #169, stacked on #168 because the rules it widens do not exist anywhere else yet.

The three prose rules currently match **/README.md only. That was not a judgement about where the house style applies — it was that landing them repo-wide meant roughly 2300 findings at level: error, which is a remediation decision rather than a technical one. This slice takes the two smallest surfaces and fixes what they catch, so it is green on its own.

What it catches, and what changed

41 findings across CLAUDE.md and .conventions/STYLEGUIDE-CODE.md:

• 39 em dashes, rewritten as a period, comma, colon, or parentheses as each sentence wanted. Not a blanket substitution: the rule's own message names four options, and "the child is not merely behind: its history diverged" wants a different one from "repair it once. Both are local settings".
• Two uses of "simply", both in sentences describing a real distinction rather than hedging, so they became "merely lives further down" and "just out of date".

Nothing else in either file changed.

Scope decisions a reviewer should check

Fenced code blocks are untouched, deliberately. These rules carry Vale's default scope, which does not read them, so the em dashes in the shell comments at CLAUDE.md:155 and STYLEGUIDE-CODE.md:222 are genuinely out of scope. Widening to raw to catch them would also mean the rules could no longer be suppressed per-case (see #167), and code comments in a fenced example are not the prose this rule is about.

no-hedging gains CLAUDE.md, which it did not have. It already covered .conventions/*.md, so this makes the pair consistent rather than adding a surface arbitrarily.

Where the stack goes next

Per #169's ordering, and one PR per surface so each carries its own remediation and stays independently green:

1. This PR — CLAUDE.md + .conventions/ (~47 findings)
2. TypeScript comments — Vale reads .ts in its comments-only tier, so this touches comment prose and never code
3. packages/cli/src/agent/*.txt — the largest surface, and the most product-facing, since it is agent-facing recipe text
4. openspec/changes/archive/ — a permanent exclusion rather than a slice. Rewriting an archived proposal would edit the record of what was proposed at the time, which feat: resolve the CLI invocation as a recipe variable #143's review thread already settled

No changeset, here or anywhere in this stack. Taskless rules live in .taskless/ and are not part of the published package, so none of this ships a release note. changeset.yml will warn; that is expected.

One thing worth knowing

Measuring this slice on a machine with agent worktrees present produced 122 findings, of which 83 came from worktrees/. That is #166, and its fix (#172) is not on this branch. The 41 above are the real in-scope count.

Refs #169

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_017cEN93Acyp4zBwP3oDnyy1

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