Entry 3

The index generates, and hellbender's own index proves it

2026-09-20clisiteadoption

Filescrates/cairns-site/src/lib.rscrates/cairns/src/main.rs

index was parked with the rest of the write path, which left a hole nobody had looked at: check passed on this repo while it had no WORKLOG.md at all. The Python tool would have failed that - comparing the index against a fresh render is one of the four things its check did. A check that is quiet about the artifact most likely to be wrong is worse than no check, because it is believed.

So the index renders now, and check compares:

$ cairns check
WORKLOG.md is stale - run `cairns index`

Missing and stale are reported separately. They have different causes - one is a repo that never ran the command, the other is entries edited since it last did - and a reader who sees the right one does not have to work out which.

The header is the only part a project writes

Everything in the index is derived except its opening prose, which is [index] header in cairns.toml. The generated default names the project and says the file is generated; a project that wants to explain what its log is for says it better than any generated sentence.

The area tally is sorted alphabetically rather than in declared order. The areas themselves are presented in declared order everywhere else, because that ordering is a taxonomy the project chose - but a tally is a lookup, and a lookup reads better sorted by the name you are looking for.

The parity test

The acceptance test for the port was always going to be hellbender's own index: render its 55 entries and diff against the file in the repo. With its header copied into [index] header:

$ diff committed.md WORKLOG.md | grep -c '^<'
27
$ sed 's/,\([a-z]\)/, \1/g' committed.md | diff - WORKLOG.md | grep -c '^[<>]'
0

27 of 55 rows differ, and every one of them differs only in the area column, where decomp,engine becomes decomp, engine. Normalise that one spelling and the two files are byte-identical: same header, same tally, same 55 rows, same titles, dates, paths and pipe escaping.

That is the whole intended delta. The log had accumulated both spellings because the old index printed whichever string the entry happened to carry, and normalising on write is the documented fix. Worth knowing precisely, though, because it means adopting cairns costs hellbender exactly one reflow commit on one column - not a migration.