The question that decides whether a system can be depended on is not "does it
work" -- a demo answers that -- but which controls are present, asked before
something goes wrong. verify.sh reports which checks ran just now; backup.sh
proves one dump; the Command Center reports documents and tracker labels. None
of them says whether this project has backups AND has ever restored one AND has
somewhere errors go AND has an environment that is not production.
Four states, because flattening them is how a report starts lying:
measured observed here -- a file with a date, a variable that is set, a
command that answered
declared asserted in configuration, checked for shape and not for truth
n/a the project said the control does not apply. A library has no
uptime; saying so is an answer, not an omission
unknown expected and undeterminable. Never rendered as absent, because
"I could not tell" and "it is not there" send people to different
places
Reads BACKUP_DIR, BACKUP_NAME, HEALTHCHECK_BASE_URL, STATUS_HOST and
STATUS_CONTAINER from the scripts that own them, so the two cannot disagree
about which project this is. Writes nothing: a committed CONTROLS.md saying
"backups: ok" is a description of current state in a document, which is what the
batch ledger was and why it was archived.
Verified: exit 2 when nothing is declared and when a control name is unknown;
exit 0 for a library that declares only what applies, with seven n/a rows; exit
1 with three absent and one unknown; --quiet showing only rows needing
attention.
One bug that testing found and reading would not. GNU date parses relative
English, so `CONTROLS_LAST_RESTORE="last tuesday"` returned a real timestamp and
a plausible age -- a restore date the script invented. The shape is now required
before date sees it, and prose becomes unknown rather than a number.
closes#10
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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