Repository-grounding workflow

dont can act as a sidecar for any investigation session: claims you record are persisted to the store and survive context resets. Use it when you want repository facts to outlast a single chat session.

This page covers the three most common patterns: fast single-shot grounding, attaching evidence with repository-relative locators, and diagnosing blockers with dont trace.

Fast path: ground a documented fact

When the claim and repository evidence are both in hand, use dont ground:

dont ground "The project builds docs with mdBook" --file justfile --lines 48-49

Use repository-relative locators

For evidence inside the current project, use --file with an optional line span or anchor:

dont ground "The crate exposes a test recipe" --file justfile --lines 12-13
dont flag <id> --file src/main.rs --lines 188-205 --anchor "Ground"

Plain URI evidence is still supported for external sources:

dont flag <id> --evidence https://example.org/source

Note: URL evidence is not liveness-checked. dont verify-evidence reports URL outcomes as unchecked — live HTTP reachability checks are not yet implemented. File and git locators are fully checked.

Diagnose blockers with trace

If show, why, or prime reports stale dependencies, unresolved terms, or blocker labels without enough context, run:

dont trace <entity-id>

trace reports the blocker path so you can see which dependency or support relation needs attention before trying to verify or lock the claim.