YAML Comment Parsing Bug Silently Truncated AI Coding Success Criteria in spec-lane
A developer maintaining the open-source tool spec-lane discovered that an unquoted YAML plain scalar caused text following a '#' symbol to be silently stripped as a comment during parsing, truncating a success criterion before it reached the verification gate. Because both the intent.yaml and verification.yaml files contained the same already-truncated string, the gate comparison found a match and passed without error. The bug was not in the gate logic itself, but at the earlier YAML parse boundary, where the JavaScript value returned by yaml@2.9.0 simply never included the commented-out portion. The issue, documented as Issue #45 in the spec-lane repository, was reproducible by running the CLI built before the PR #48 fix, which allowed a project to advance from the implementation phase to the verification phase despite incomplete criteria. The fix involved wrapping the success criterion in explicit YAML quotes, ensuring the full string including the '#' character was preserved through parsing.
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