Skip to content

Step 2 - Review the draft ​

Goal: read what the agent proposed before you judge it. The draft lives under .alloy-output/survey/your-repo/draft/ - gitignored, uncommitted. Open it, or ask the agent to walk you through it file by file.

Each file has one job:

FileWhat it decides
source-entry.yamlThe heart of the draft: the scanners, the units definitions that group candidates into documentable units, and the coverage: block. Decides what gets documented and how it is grouped.
rulepacks/<kind>.yaml + templates/<kind>.mdOnly for new kinds: which files feed each kind's doc, and the doc's sections.
manifest-categories.yamlWhere each kind's docs live in the corpus tree.
units.yamlInventory tier only - repos where paths do not predict units, so units are listed explicitly.
follow-ups.mdRead this first. The agent's open questions and judgment calls. A genuine ambiguity lands here rather than being guessed past.

A unit definition reads roughly like:

yaml
units:
  - kind: service          # the unit type - fixes doc shape and rule pack
    match: services/{name} # how raw candidates map to units
    groupBy: name

Read the survey report too ​

The agent's report carries what the YAML cannot:

  • Decompositions considered - the unit grain it chose, the alternative it rejected, and the coverage delta between them. The grain is the decision you most want to get right; the report is where you get to veto it.
  • The coverage triage - every exclusion and its rationale, plus any UNKNOWN it could not resolve.
  • The ontology triage - each kind's definition and the members it tested against it.

Don't fix anything yet. Step 3 is how to judge it; step 4 is where it changes.

E11 Alloy - knowledge as a build artifact.