Autonomous Verify Loop (pmat verify)

Audience: autonomous coding agents (e.g. Fable 5 in autonomous mode). Rule: never commit without a green pmat verify.

The loop

In autonomous mode there is no human to catch a clippy/test failure before a push. The pre-commit hook and pmat quality-gate both miss clippy and tests — exactly the checks CI blocks on — so passing them is not enough. pmat verify runs the CI-faithful set and gives a "green here ⇒ green in CI" guarantee.

edit → pmat verify --format json → (red? read violations, fix) → repeat → commit on green

How to call it

Situation	Command
Default agent check (machine-readable)	pmat verify --format json
Auto-fix the trivial stuff first	pmat verify --fix then pmat verify
Doc-only / non-Rust change	pmat verify --skip clippy,tests
Iterating on one failing gate	pmat verify --stage clippy
Full report (don't stop at first failure)	pmat verify --no-fail-fast

Reading the JSON

{ "ok": false, "stages": [
  { "name": "clippy", "ok": false,
    "violations": [ {"file":"src/x.rs","line":230,"rule":"clippy::nonminimal_bool","message":"..."} ] } ] }

• Top-level ok: true ⇒ safe to commit. ok: false ⇒ do not commit.
• For clippy, each violations[] entry is file:line:rule — go fix that exact site. For format/complexity/satd/tests, read the stage detail (tail of the tool output).

Stages (fail-fast order)

1. format — cargo fmt --check (sub-second). --fix re-formats.
2. complexity — pmat's analyzer on changed files (cyclomatic ≤ 30, cognitive ≤ 25), matching the incremental pre-commit gate.
3. satd — pmat analyze satd --strict (no self-admitted technical debt).
4. clippy — cargo clippy --lib --bins -- -D warnings (CI-faithful; whole-crate; the dominant cost — but you only pay it once stages 1–3 pass).
5. tests — cargo test --lib.

Why this is the pmat paradigm for autonomy

The bottleneck in autonomous operation is the verify loop, not the model. One command, CI-faithful, machine-readable, fail-fast — so an agent self-verifies in seconds for the common cases and never wastes an ~11-minute CI cycle on a trivial clippy/format failure. See docs/specifications/pmat-verify-autonomous-preflight.md.