leak

An advisory by default: it explains, and blocks nothing, on residue of a tool or a template: a citation marker or an unfilled placeholder.

What it catches

Residue of a tool or a template: a citation marker or an unfilled placeholder.

Dimension

evidence: a claim says more or less than what was shown. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

oaicite, [cite: 1] and [insert ...] are unambiguous: no reader is served by them. They show up where text was pasted from a chat, so the rule judges doc comments too. Measured 2026-10-10: 100% precision on its cases (6 of 6), but agent replies' link text naming a file and line ([describe.go:668]) read as a [describe ...] placeholder, and of 71 AIDev pull request candidates many lenticular-bracket hits were CJK punctuation around a label. A placeholder word now ends at a space, a colon or the bracket, and a lenticular pair counts only around a dagger. Firing rates after are measured at merge.

Default decision

The code is PRF4005. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"leak": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"leak": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "leak", "code": "PRF4005", "decision": "advise", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/leak/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

• All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
• Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
• The findings contract - the fields every finding carries