scar-cli 0.2.0

SCAR — version control for negative knowledge (deadends, fences, landmines)

SCAR — Version Control for Negative Knowledge

Git records what your codebase is. Nothing records what it refused to be.

SCAR is a git-native system for capturing, anchoring, and enforcing the negative knowledge of a codebase — the dead ends, the load-bearing weirdness, the invisible tripwires — and surfacing it at the exact moment someone (human or AI agent) is about to step on it.

The one-liner

Every codebase is a battlefield where the bodies have been removed. SCAR puts the markers back.

The three primitives

Type	Meaning	Example
deadend	We tried X. It failed because Y. Don't retry unless Z changes.	"We tried Redis for session storage in 2024-03. Eviction under memory pressure logged users out mid-checkout. Don't retry unless sessions become re-derivable."
fence	This code looks wrong. It is intentional. Here's why.	"Yes, this retry loop sleeps 7 seconds, not 5. The upstream vendor's rate limiter has a 6-second window they don't document."
landmine	Changing A breaks B in a way nothing in the code tells you.	"The CSV export in reports/ depends on the column order of this SELECT. Reorder it and Finance's reconciliation pipeline silently corrupts."

Why now

AI agents write an increasing share of all code. Agents have zero hallway memory. They see a weird retry loop and "clean it up." They see a missing cache layer and re-add the library that was removed after a data-corruption incident. They retry, across thousands of sessions, the exact approaches that already failed — because the repository only records positive space.

Humans at least had tribal knowledge. Agents have none. And as agents author more of the code, the negative knowledge stops even entering human memory — it evaporates entirely.

The flip side: agents also solve the historically fatal flaw of every knowledge-capture system — authorship cost. Nobody writes documentation after a failure. But an agent that just tried an approach and abandoned it can write a deadend scar in milliseconds, for free, at the moment of maximum context.

Agents created the urgency. Agents remove the adoption barrier. That's the wedge.

How it works

.scars/
├── 0001-redis-sessions.deadend.md
├── 0002-vendor-retry-window.fence.md
└── 0003-csv-column-order.landmine.md

• Scars are small structured Markdown files with YAML frontmatter, tracked in git, reviewed in PRs like code.
• Each scar is anchored to code via paths, symbol names, and content fingerprints — not line numbers — so anchors survive refactors.
• Enforcement happens at the moment of action:
  • scar check <path> — CLI gate for humans and CI
  • Agent hook (Claude Code PreToolUse, etc.) — injects relevant scars into the agent's context before it edits the file
  • MCP server — planned, so any agent can query the scar graph
• scar harvest — mines git history (reverts, add-then-remove dependencies, reopened issues) to propose candidate scars for codebases starting from zero.
• Scars are advisory, never blocking, by default — and stale knowledge has a lifecycle: scar challenge <id> --reason disputes a scar (it still fires, marked as disputed), scar archive <id> --reason retires it (never fires again; scar why keeps the history), and scar lint/scar status surface any scar whose review_after date has passed. Nothing expires automatically — archiving is a human decision, same governance as promotion.

Install

uv tool install scar-cli   # or: pipx install scar-cli

Zero runtime dependencies. Python ≥3.10.

Quickstart

cd your-repo
scar init                  # creates .scars/ with template + README

# write your first scar
cp .scars/template.md .scars/candidates/redis-sessions.md
$EDITOR .scars/candidates/redis-sessions.md

scar lint                  # validate format
scar promote redis-sessions.md   # human review gate: candidate -> active

# from then on
scar check src/auth/       # what's anchored here?
scar why src/auth/         # full history of pain for this path
scar harvest               # mine git history for candidate scars

Wiring the Claude Code hook (auto-injects scars before any agent edit):

scar hook install

Quality discipline

• Candidates vs active: agents and scar harvest only ever write to .scars/candidates/. A human promotes (scar promote) — nothing enters active enforcement without review.
• Expiry conditions: every scar can declare when it stops being true ("valid until sessions are re-derivable"). Stale knowledge is a bug, not a feature.
• Validated in use: in a 14-day agent auto-authorship trial, agents drafted 13 keepable scars across 3 repos with 0% false positives — including one that caught a real parser bug in this repo and fired on the exact edit that fixed it.

Read more

• IDEA.md — the full pitch: problem, solution, why this, why now, why me
• SPEC.md — scar format, anchoring model, CLI surface, agent integration
• STRESS-TEST.md — adversarial analysis: failure modes, loopholes, objections, premortem
• ROADMAP.md — phased plan from prototype to product

Status & expectations

Working software, shared as-is. CLI v0 is shipped: 9 subcommands, 63 tests, zero dependencies, CI-enforced. It runs daily across the author's repos (where it has already caught real bugs — see .scars/ in this very repo for live examples).

This is personal infrastructure published as a gift to the OSS community, not a product. Issues and PRs are welcome and read with interest, but there is no support SLA and no roadmap promise. If it's useful to you, that's the whole point.

License

MIT