Code Reachability Audit

Deciding a file is dead is a deletion, and deletions are irreversible. The claim "nothing calls this" is an absence claim, so it needs an exhaustive search plus a control proving the search can detect presence. A grep miss is not proof.

The search set — every surface, not just the obvious ones

A repo-only git grep is not exhaustive. Check all of these:

The launchd surface is the one that bites. On 2026-08-06 an audit classified bin/squad-monitor.sh as dead on correct in-repo evidence — its only references were two tests. It runs every 120 seconds via com.chrono.squad-monitor, registered in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, where no git grep reaches. Six repo scripts are bound that way. bin/doctor.sh now reports the mapping on every health run; read it before calling anything dead.

Matching, without fooling yourself

Both failure directions are real and both happened in one session:

• Too loose. A bare basename search reported capture.py as having six callers. Every hit was inside autocapture.py.
• Too strict. Anchoring with [^A-Za-z0-9_/-] then excluded /, hiding path-qualified references, so a file with a live caller looked orphaned.

Use (^|[^A-Za-z0-9_-])<basename> — allow a path separator before the name, forbid word characters.

Two controls, every time

1. Positive — search for a file you know is live and confirm the census returns its callers. If it cannot find a known caller, its silence is meaningless.
2. Negative — search for an invented filename and confirm zero rows. This is what makes empty output evidence rather than an artifact.

Read the hit before believing it

A reference is not always a call:

• vs-dashboard-loop.sh mentions watch-lane.sh in a comment — "Replaces the old 4-lane watch-lane.sh render." A mention of what something replaced is not a call.
• Prose documenting a removal necessarily names the thing removed. A regex counting "stale terminology" will score those as drift; they are the record of the change.
• A parser may consume a literal string that looks like prose. Seven references to Expected Model Lane Tool Surface were to a block name still emitted at runtime; renaming them would have broken the parser.

Buckets

entry-point (humans or CI invoke it; zero callers is correct) · live · reachable-dynamically (runtime-constructed path; evidence required) · legacy-live (reachable but built for a retired architecture — say what must change before retiring it) · dead.

Before deleting

• Prove equivalence where you can. Truncating a file after an unconditional exit should produce byte-identical output — restore the original inside its own directory so path resolution matches, and diff the two runs. A control run from a temp directory measures the environment, not the change.
• Deleting code deletes its dedicated tests too; a test for removed code is also dead. A test that covers the removed thing among others is not — edit it or leave the code alone.
• Sweep for stranded references afterwards: file headers describing what is "below", docs pointing at output directories nothing writes any more, and glob-based config where case matters (action-log.md will not match ACTION-LOG.md).