audit-coupled-constant
/audit-coupled-constant
Before declaring an edit to a coupled constant complete, grep the constant's value globally to verify every site moved together. The author-maintained SEE ALSO trail is a maintenance contract, not enforcement — when one site is missed, the trail silently lies in the other sites.
Origin. This skill emerged in Lyt v1.C.4.2 cold-review (2026-06-01). A 60s retry budget was raised to 180s across 3 of 4 call sites; the 4th (
packages/lyt-vault/src/flows/rename.ts:297) was missed because the SEE ALSO comments in the 3 known sites never mentioned it. Two independent cold reviewers caught it via global grep; the original diagnosis trusted the SEE ALSO trail. The lesson generalizes far beyond retry budgets.
Boundary
Use audit-coupled-constant when you are about to declare done on an edit that touches a constant whose value is duplicated across multiple files, OR whose comments name other files via "SEE ALSO" / "keep in sync" / "matches" / "mirrors" cross-references. Common shapes:
- Retry / timeout budgets (
240 × 250ms,60_000,60s) - Pagination page sizes / query limits (
PAGE_SIZE = 25) - Feature-flag strings or keys
- Magic numbers reflecting external invariants (max upload size, max URL length, schema version)
- Shared regex patterns or validation thresholds
Do NOT use for constants that are truly local to one file, for purely-imported constants where only the import site moved (the named symbol is the single source), or for constants enforced by the type system (e.g., a TypeScript as const literal imported everywhere — the compiler is your audit).