Explanation: claims, tiers, and the evidence bar

mimus is built on one observation: documentation is full of claims — statements that are either still true or quietly false. A critic's job is to enumerate them and prove each one, or stay silent.

Claim taxonomy

Extraction classifies backticked spans, code blocks and prose patterns into:

kind	example claim	verified by
path	`src/lib.rs`	filesystem
command	`cargo test -p foo`	binary on PATH (no exec)
symbol	`IndexStore`	kuda index (symbol checker)
count	"357 suites / 4,298 tests"	recomputation
link	[docs](https://…)	link checker
behavior	prose asserting code does X	rules + semantic tier

Command claims are conservative by design: only spans whose first token is a known binary (cargo, git, npm, dagger, kuda, mimus, …) classify as commands — otherwise pub fn and data Eq get read as shell.

Verification tiers

• Mechanical — deterministic and offline: paths, commands, rules. This is the mimus check gate; if it flags something, the evidence is reproducible by anyone.
• Semantic — advisory: the acp checker spawns an ACP agent (acp_cmd, e.g. env CLINE_PROVIDER=cline-pass CLINE_MODEL=cline-free/mimo-v2.6-flash cline --acp — provider/model are env vars; -P/-m flags are ignored in ACP mode) to verify behavior claims — including kuda card prose. Runs with --all or [check].semantic; every finding is warn + evidence. Can never gate — that is load-bearing, not a limitation. Claims fold into one prompt per batch, and each prompt is debounced — polite to the provider.

Style opinions are never emitted at all.

The evidence bar

Every violation is claim + evidence + fix(optional). If a checker cannot cite its proof, it emits nothing — false positives kill a critic faster than false negatives ever could. This is why command has an allowlist, why a bad rule regex is silence + a doctor complaint, and why the semantic tier exists separately from the gate.

Sources

[sources] in mimus.toml: docs (glob list), comments (code comments — TODOs, claims in ///), and cards — the kuda artifacts get audited as claims too, closing the loop: kuda remembers, mimus doubts, even about the memory itself.