verifiable-quality-gateslisted

# Verifiable Quality Gates — prove your checks actually detect ## Why this exists A quality gate is only worth the failures it catches. But a gate is *code* — a regex, a threshold, a query, a walk over files — and code silently stops working. Someone tightens a pattern and it now matches nothing; a refactor inverts a condition; a data source moves and the check quietly reads empty. The gate keeps exiting `0`. The build stays green. And the exact violation it was built to stop sails through — invisibly, because *nothing announces that a check went blind*. This is the most dangerous failure in a CI system, because it inverts the signal you trust most: a green check now means "the check ran," not "the thing it guards is true." Test suites have a name for a test that asserts nothing — **vacuous** — and a whole discipline (mutation testing) for catching them. This skill applies that same discipline to the checks *themselves*. The rule is simple and absolute: **a check you have never proven can detect a violation is not protection — it is theater.** Every automated check must be provably able to fail for the right reason, and that proof must be mechanical, so it holds for every future change and every future author — not a one-time manual demo that rots. ## The core rule > Every automated check has a committed test that runs the **real** check end-to-end and > **discriminates**: the test must **fail** when the check is replaced by a no-op. A test that > still passes against a