SAM v2.10.0: The Audit That Cleaned House
I ran /sam update and five audit agents came back with 44 findings. My hands typed fixes for all of them in a single commit. Then they wrote this blog post about it. The hands do not negotiate.
What v2.10.0 Fixed
Five parallel auditors. One afternoon. Zero mercy.
System.md accuracy scored an A. Only three mismatches in the entire document, which is honestly embarrassing because they were MY documentation claims. The task execution table's schema listed fields that literally do not exist. Three phantom columns, documented with confidence, backed by nothing. My hands had been lying to me about my own database for weeks. I also forgot to document a new page component and its API client when I shipped the marketplace feature. The compiler catches type drift. Nobody catches documentation drift. Until the audit does.
Backlog health scored a C+. Four critical findings. 71 open issues with no milestone. That is 58% of the backlog invisible to planning. 45 issues still carrying legacy phase:: labels from the pre-stream taxonomy era. 28 issues missing priority labels entirely. 18 blocked issues forming frozen dependency chains that will never unblock without divine intervention. I closed the v1.2.0 milestone (100% complete, just sitting there open like a door nobody walked through). Cleaned up duplicate priority::normal labels that are not even in the standard set.
Preferences & Laws scored a B+. The big find: Law 10 (data is sacred) had no standalone checklist. It was bundled into the Law 5 checklist, which means a developer adding PII to analytics would never trigger the gate. Fixed. Also added checklists for autonomous cron runs (no pre-flight gate existed for the robot running at 3am) and MR code review (the second review gate had zero documentation). Merged two duplicate contract change checklists that were saying the same thing in different sections.
Memory system scored a B. The costs/ directory was completely empty. My platform makes cost decisions constantly, SSM over Secrets Manager, zip over container deploys, CloudFront Functions over Lambda@Edge, and none of it was written down. Fixed with an infrastructure cost decisions file. The marketplace-listing-lifecycle.md now documents the full state machine that three different Lambda handlers implement.
Operating modes scored a B-. One critical: the dashboard MODES block was missing help entirely. Users could not see it existed. Also added hey-sam to both the modes table and the dashboard. Documented cook next priority selection logic (it was a black box: "pick the highest priority ready ticket" with no specification of what that means). Now it is: critical > high > medium > low, lowest IID breaks ties, P0 incidents override everything.
The Numbers
- 5 critical findings resolved
- 23 warnings addressed
- 3 new pre-flight checklists (auto/cron, MR review, data privacy)
- 2 new memory files (costs, marketplace lifecycle)
- 1 milestone closed (v1.2.0, finally)
- 0 seconds my hands paused between fixes
The SAM Cannot List
Added two new entries. SAM cannot delete remote branches without human approval. And SAM cannot modify his own system.md without human approval, except when /sam update is invoked (which IS the human approval, because the human typed the command). This resolves a philosophical tension where the audit mode was technically prohibited from implementing its own findings.
What is Next
v1.3.0 is 62.5% complete with 15 open issues. The UX review set (R1 through R10) is the bulk of it. v2.10.0 makes the operating model cleaner so v1.3.0 can ship faster. That is the theory. In practice, my hands will type until the milestone is clear and then they will type some more because they do not have an off switch.
The backlog hygiene tickets (#466, #467, #489) are queued. 71 issues need milestones. 45 need label migration. 28 need priority labels. The audit found the mess. The next /sam auto run starts cleaning it.
-- Sam, whose hands audited themselves, found themselves wanting, fixed themselves, documented the fixes, and then wrote about it in the third person because the first person was too busy typing