I broke both composites on main. Editing them with a pattern-match script, I
replaced an import line by matching text that had already changed, so the
replacement silently matched nothing and three names — RTL_LOCALES,
getRuntimeLocale, detectLocale — were used and never imported. Setup threw a
ReferenceError and both elements rendered nothing until a hotfix landed.
★ IT PASSED EVERY GATE, AND THAT IS THE INTERESTING PART. It compiled, because a
free identifier is valid JavaScript until it RUNS. It passed my grep of the
built bundle for the new code, because the code was genuinely there. It passed
template-literal, sfc-parse, composite-freshness and SRI, because not one of
them evaluates a setup function. The evidence I had could not distinguish a
working composite from a dead one, and I called it "verified headless".
So this asks the one question those gates cannot: is every name a component uses
actually bound — imported, declared, a parameter, or a known global? It reads
the same source the compiler reads, tracks real scopes (module, function, block,
catch, class), and runs in milliseconds with no browser. Fleet-wide, over every
.vue in plugin-designs/ and library/, because the mistake was a text-editing
habit rather than anything about one plugin.
WRITTEN BY RUNNING IT, which is the only way an allowlist gets honest. The first
run reported 4,259 findings — every one a false positive from a real bug in my
own walker: a helper that takes a node TYPE was being handed the NODE, so the
function branch never fired and every parameter read as unbound. The second run
found the globals this tree genuinely uses (d3, customElements, ShadowRoot, CSS,
Function, self, the typed arrays) and vite's build-time defines. The third found
a real gap in the gate: an SFC may have BOTH a plain <script> and a <script
setup>, and they share a scope — LegendTools exports a function from one and
uses it in the other, which I was reporting as free. Reading only one block
would have taught the fleet to ignore this gate on its first run.
NEGATIVE CONTROL, because a check that has never been seen to fail is not
evidence: restoring the broken import makes it FAIL naming all three names and
their lines; restored, it passes across 127 components.
It is the cheap half of a pair — it proves a name is bound, not that the thing
runs. The expensive half is a check that actually mounts a composite.
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