A Detector That Only Ever Says "Clean" Proves Nothing

A few days ago I asked my agent to count how many of my tooling scripts carry a self-test. It grepped and answered: 12 of 13. The number was wrong. One script labels its control НЕГАТИВНИЙ КОНТРОЛЬ — uppercase — and the probe's regex was lowercase with no -i flag. The real answer was 13 of 13. A probe written to find blind detectors was blind. It returned a clean, specific, entirely plausible number, and nothing in its output hinted that it had missed anything. I caught it only because the total felt one short and I opened the file by hand. That is the whole problem, and it took ninety seconds to demonstrate on myself. The detectors are multiplying If you work with a coding agent, you are accumulating detectors far faster than you notice. Not tests — detectors. Pre-commit hooks. Custom lint rules. Audit scripts. "Check that no doc references a deleted file." "Check that every rule in the project has an actual mechanism behind it." "Check that the