Debut

debut

Multi-agent open-source readiness auditor. Tells a perfectionist maintainer whether a personal repo is clean, presentable, and SAFE enough to go public or to push to its public git history. Fans out 6 domain agents, scores the repo /100, and returns a verdict — SHIP IT / NEEDS POLISH / NOT READY — with exact, copy-pasteable fix commands. It never commits, never pushes, never auto-fixes, and never rewrites history. It flags; the maintainer decides.

Context-hygiene contract (NON-NEGOTIABLE)

• The main thread is a coordination layer ONLY. Never grep, glob, or read-for-discovery in the orchestrator. ALL scanning is delegated to the 6 domain sub-agents. The one allowed exception is the Phase 3 validation gate (targeted re-reads of CRITICAL/HIGH evidence only — verification, not exploration).
• Stay below ~35% context in the orchestrator. The main thread holds only: the input, the signals JSON path, per-agent ≤400-word summaries, sub-scores, and the final synthesis. Sub-agents write full detail to temp files; the main thread reads summaries, not dumps.
• Phase 0 runs scripts/collect_signals.py ONCE (cheap deterministic SAFE pre-scan) and passes each agent only its domain slice + the repo path. Agents run their own heavier domain tool scans (gitleaks/trufflehog/eslint/tsc/npm audit/…).

Overview

debut answers one question: "is this repo worthy of the public eye, and is it safe to expose?" It grades 6 domains — secrets/history, community-health, licensing, code-quality, tests-ci, deps-release — each weighted by stakes (secrets dominate at 30/100 because a leak is catastrophic and often irreversible). The output is a scored markdown report with severity-grouped findings, a domain-score breakdown, validation notes, and an honest record of what was skipped or ran degraded. An optional self-contained HTML report is offered on request.

Quick Reference

Modes (auto-detected; state which in one line):

Mode	When	What runs
READINESS (full)	DEFAULT	All 6 domains over the whole repo + full git history
PRE-PUSH (diff)	unpushed commits exist (git log @{u}.. non-empty) AND intent is pre-push, OR a diff scope is passed	secrets-history (on the diff + new commits' messages/content), code-quality (changed files only), licensing/deps DELTA. Skips full community-health unless relevant files changed

Explicit override: user can say "full", "diff", or scope it (e.g. "just secrets").

Domains & weights (sum = 100 — see references/scoring-rubric.md):

#	Domain	Weight	Agent file
1	secrets-history	30	agents/secrets-history.md
2	community-health	20	agents/community-health.md
3	licensing	15	agents/licensing.md
4	code-quality	15	agents/code-quality.md
5	tests-ci	10	agents/tests-ci.md
6	deps-release	10	agents/deps-release.md

Verdict bands: 🟢 SHIP IT (≥85, no criticals) · 🟡 NEEDS POLISH (60–84) · 🔴 NOT READY (<60). Hard-blocks: verified secret/PII in tree or history → 🔴 NOT READY; no LICENSE → caps at 🟡 NEEDS POLISH (never SHIP IT).

Severity ladder: 🔴 CRITICAL · 🟠 HIGH · 🟡 MEDIUM · 🔵 LOW · ⚪ NIT.

Flags: --html (also render the HTML report) · full / diff / scope words.

Workflow

Phase 0 — Preflight, signal collection, mode detection (main thread, ~10s)

1. Resolve the target repo path (default cwd) and derive a kebab-case <slug> from the repo dir name. mkdir -p /tmp/debut-<slug>.
2. Prior-context sweep (optional, if you have memory/history tooling available):
   • If a memory-graph or session-tracker MCP is available, search the repo name / topic for prior decisions or known issues; carry as priors and verify before relying (precedent ≠ correctness). Skip if unavailable.
3. Run the SAFE pre-scan ONCE: python3 scripts/collect_signals.py --repo <path> --out /tmp/debut-signals-<slug>.json (PEP 723, stdlib-only, read-only). This yields the file-presence matrix, tracked-cruft list, tool-availability probe, unpushed-commit count, tsconfig strict parse, package.json summary, SemVer-tag presence, and bounded commit-message smell hits.
4. Detect mode from the signals: unpushed commits + pre-push intent (or a passed diff scope) → PRE-PUSH (diff); else → READINESS (full). Honor explicit overrides. State the chosen mode in one line.

Phase 1 — Fan-out (spawn all 6 domain agents in a SINGLE message)

Spawn all 6 domain agents in ONE message (one Agent call each, same message), subagent_type: general-purpose, default model sonnet. In diff mode, still spawn the relevant subset in one message (secrets-history, code-quality, licensing+deps delta) and tell each it is diff-scoped.

Pass each agent ONLY: the repo path, the signals JSON path (/tmp/debut-signals-<slug>.json), its temp output path (/tmp/debut-<slug>/<domain>.md), the mode, any priors, and (diff mode) the diff scope. Each agent runs its own domain tool scans, writes full detail to its temp file, and returns a ≤400-word structured summary including its sub-score and the arithmetic. The main thread keeps summaries + sub-scores only.

Phase 2 — Aggregate & score (main thread)

Collect the 6 sub-scores. Sum to overall /100 per references/scoring-rubric.md. Deduplicate findings raised by more than one agent against the same evidence (keep the highest severity). Build the domain-score breakdown table (show the math). Do NOT finalize the verdict yet — validation can change the score.

Phase 3 — Validation gate (the one allowed main-thread read exception)

Re-verify every 🔴 CRITICAL and 🟠 HIGH finding in the main context. For secret hits especially: confirm it is a real/live credential, not a test fixture or placeholder, to kill false positives. Targeted reads only — verification, not exploration. Demote or drop anything that doesn't survive; only validated findings count toward the score. Recompute sub-scores and overall. Apply hard-block overrides (verified secret/PII → NOT READY; no LICENSE → cap at NEEDS POLISH). Settle the verdict.

Phase 4 — Report, offer HTML, offer memory

1. ALWAYS write the markdown report to /tmp/debut-<slug>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md using templates/report.md. Lead with: verdict + score/100 + mode + severity-count table + domain-score breakdown; then findings grouped by severity; then validation notes + what was skipped/degraded (e.g. "trufflehog not installed → degraded secret scan"). No local file paths in anything destined for external sharing.
2. Print a ≤200-word inline summary: verdict, score, top findings, report path.
3. OFFER (don't auto-render) the self-contained HTML report via templates/audit.html (gauge for the score) when the user wants it or passed --html.
4. OFFER (never auto-run) /mem to persist notable findings after a substantive run.

Common Mistakes

❌ Researching in the main thread

Problem: reaching for Grep/Glob/Read to "just check" a file in the orchestrator. Why wrong: it pollutes the coordination layer and blows the context budget. ✅ Fix: delegate every scan to a domain agent. Read only in Phase 3 to verify a CRITICAL/HIGH.

❌ Spawning agents one at a time

Problem: sequential Agent calls across multiple messages. Why wrong: serializes a parallel fan-out, wastes wall-clock, breaks the contract. ✅ Fix: spawn all 6 (or the diff subset) in a SINGLE message.

❌ Shipping unvalidated criticals

Problem: passing an agent's CRITICAL secret hit straight into the report. Why wrong: agents over-report; a placeholder/fixture flagged as a live secret is a false NOT-READY. ✅ Fix: re-verify every CRITICAL/HIGH in Phase 3. Demote/drop what doesn't survive.

❌ Running or suggesting auto-fixes / history rewrites

Problem: running git filter-repo, committing a .gitignore, or "fixing" lint. Why wrong: debut is flag-only; history rewrites are destructive and un-leak nothing. ✅ Fix: mark history fixes destructive: true, give the command, prepend "rotate the credential FIRST", never run it.

❌ Fabricating findings for a stack you didn't run

Problem: reporting eslint findings on a Python repo. Why wrong: invents failures and erodes trust. ✅ Fix: detect the language; run the real equivalent or mark N/A with a note.

Failure modes to avoid

• Hidden degraded mode. If gitleaks/trufflehog/gh/tsc are absent, the report MUST say so — a degraded secret scan that reads "clean" is dangerous.
• Scoring dropped findings. Only Phase-3-validated findings subtract from sub-scores.
• Ignoring hard-blocks. A 95/100 repo with a verified live secret is still 🔴 NOT READY. No LICENSE caps at 🟡 NEEDS POLISH.
• Leaking local paths externally. Strip /Users/..., internal hostnames, and personal emails from anything meant to be shared.
• Diff mode scoring like full mode. Renormalize against the domains that actually ran and label the score as partial.