warn-then-fail-ratchet.md

maturity	established
utility	0.8

Warn-Then-Fail Ratchet

Pattern

Introduce new quality gates as warn-only checks first, then flip them to blocking only after the metric has enough baseline data and the team has fixed known false positives.

Why It Works

Fresh gates often encode the right principle but the wrong threshold. Warn-only mode lets the project collect evidence, tune the metric, and avoid breaking CI for noise. Once the baseline is stable, the same check becomes a fail gate so the quality bar ratchets upward instead of drifting.

How To Apply

1. Define the metric and the exact command that measures it.
2. Record the current baseline and known false positives.
3. Run warn-only until the corpus or sample size is representative.
4. File tracked beads for every real defect the warning finds.
5. Flip to fail-only after the threshold is stable and documented.

Retrieval Cues

Warn then fail ratchet, warn-only gate, quality ratchet, baseline metric, retrieval quality metric, pre-push ratchet, threshold hardening, CI gate.