/doctor

description: Diagnose Cladding runtime health — Claude Code hook liveness and version, CI package pinning, lifecycle governance, and sentinel-miss frequency by phase × cause × fallback. Use when hooks may be silent, CI may float across Cladding releases, scan or run results look thinner than expected, or before tuning the host model or transport. Activate only when the connected project contains spec.yaml or the user explicitly names Cladding; ignore ordinary requests in uninitialized projects.

Cladding doctor

Run `clad doctor` from the project root. The verb is observability — it never mutates the working tree.

• `--cwd <path>` — read events from a project directory other than the current one (default cwd).
• `--json` — emit the raw `DoctorReport` shape instead of the formatted text surface; the additive shape (`{cwd, events, sentinelMiss, governance, hooks, ciVersion}`) is the stable wire format for MCP clients and follow-up tooling.

The text surface prints:

1. One pulse line with total events and total sentinel-miss count (`pass` when zero misses, `note` otherwise). 2. An event-type breakdown line (one `<type>=<count>` token per non-zero `EventType`). 3. Claude Code hook health: whether the runtime has actually been observed, whether the observed engine version matches the current CLI, and the last firing time (or `never observed`) for session start, prompt submit, before edit, after edit, and session stop. 4. A non-blocking CI warning naming each GitHub Actions workflow that invokes an unversioned or floating `npx cladding` package. Numeric selectors such as `cladding@0.9` and `cladding@0.9.4` stay quiet. 5. Governance counts for gate runs, done attempts and rejections, stop blocks, known-failing Stop exits, blocked fingerprints reproduced by a later gate, and attestation state. 6. When sentinel-miss events exist:

• `by phase` / `by cause` / `by fallback` aggregates from the v0.3.39 telemetry payload.
• Top-5 missed sentinels (`CONVENTIONS_MD` / `ARCHITECTURE_YAML` / `SCENARIO_FLOWS` / `CAPABILITIES_YAML` / `WHY` / `WHAT` / `PURPOSE`) sorted by count desc, name asc.
• Last 3 unique dispatcher error strings (most recent first; errors are truncated to 200 chars at the emit site).
• A one-line tuning hint.

Exit codes

• `0` — events.log was either missing (greenfield) or readable. A greenfield workspace prints a friendly note and exits 0; a healthy host with zero misses also exits 0 with a `pass` line.
• `1` — `events.log.jsonl` exists but cannot be parsed as JSONL (corrupt telemetry).

When to run

• After `clad init --scan` to confirm the scan refinement ran with full LLM coverage (no `sentinel_miss` events).
• After installing or updating the Claude Code plugin to confirm a new session actually fired the shipped hooks and loaded the current engine.
• After a `clad serve` session to confirm the host returned refined replies through the configured dispatcher.
• Periodically in CI to track miss rate across sampling-policy changes.
• Before reporting "the LLM seems off" to a host (Claude Code / Cursor / Continue) — the breakdown tells you whether the issue is dispatcher transport (`cause: dispatcher_error`) or model output quality (`cause: blank_section`).

clad doctor
clad doctor --cwd /path/to/project
clad doctor --json

Configured-no-LLM runs (no MCP host, no `ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`, or `--no-llm` flag on `clad init`) do not emit `sentinel_miss` — those are deliberate offline runs, not misses. A doctor pass with zero events on a workspace that never reached the LLM path is therefore expected, not a problem.