:pencil: A markup-aware linter for prose built with speed and extensibility in mind.
This report summarizes scanner evidence for vale-cli/vale, a Go project with 6,313 GitHub stars. SynthScan examined 68,202 lines of code across 518 source files, recording 83 pattern matches distributed across 4 syntactic categories. The legacy adjusted pattern signal is 1.3 (Low pattern signal); it is not an authorship estimate.
Use the findings to ask whether maintainers can explain intent, verify dependencies, simplify unnecessary scaffolding, and focus review effort. Risk Payload v1 adds ownership, supply-chain, over-engineering, and review-effort vectors when available. These are prompts for human verification, not probabilities, security findings, or measured maintenance costs.
Use each vector to guide manual verification of the underlying findings.
Payload schema: 1.0.0 · Engine: 2.0.0 · Scoring: heuristic-density-v1 · Scan date: 2026-10-31.
Can maintainers explain intent, assumptions, and trade-offs? 82 finding(s).
Are imports declared and package/API names verified? 0 finding(s).
Are wrappers, guards, and repeated structures necessary? 1 finding(s).
Which changes need focused human review? 83 finding(s).
This chart tracks the legacy adjusted pattern score across scan runs. Changes can reflect source changes, scan coverage, or detector/scoring versions; they do not measure AI adoption or prove that a team refactored code. Compare runs only when their scoring versions are compatible. The dashed line tracks the raw pattern-hit count.
Groups findings by configured severity weight. Severity is not a confidence estimate, security rating, or proof that a package is missing. Verify imports against the project's manifests and inspect each finding in its local design context.
This horizontal bar chart shows where configured pattern scores accumulate across directories. Treat the bars as locations to inspect, not as evidence of authorship or code quality. Use the file-level findings to decide whether a directory needs a focused ownership, dependency, complexity, or review check.
The scanner identified 83 distinct pattern matches across 4 syntactic categories. Each entry below represents a discrete location in the source code where the engine recorded a detector match to inspect in context. Expand any category row to inspect the individual file paths, line numbers, code snippets, and the lexical context (CODE, COMMENT, or STRING) in which each match was detected.
Reading the findings table: The Severity column indicates the configured finding weight (CRITICAL / HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW). The Context column identifies whether the match occurred inside executable code, an inline comment, or a string literal — legacy comment-context matches receive a ×1.5 score weight. The ⚡ bolt icon marks clustered matches: three or more patterns within a 10-line window, each receiving an additional ×1.5 density multiplier under the legacy scoring model.
| Severity | File | Line | Snippet | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LOW | .goreleaser.yml | 161 | # Defaults to empty, which includes all artifacts. | COMMENT |
| LOW | .goreleaser.yml | 201 | # Your apps's require license acceptance: | COMMENT |
| LOW | .goreleaser.yml | 241 | # | COMMENT |
| LOW | cmd/vale/pkgver.go | 21 | // when the release it fetched needs a newer Vale than this one, the newest | COMMENT |
| LOW | testdata/comments/in/1.rs | 1 | // This module defines the set of command line arguments that ripgrep supports, | COMMENT |
| LOW | testdata/comments/in/1.rs | 21 | impl Person { | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/adoc.go | 61 | "listing-caption!", | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/adoc.go | 81 | // Asciidoctor processes the pool keeps warm. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/proc_pool.go | 21 | // These processes stay up for the run and convert documents as they arrive. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/html.go | 41 | // | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/lint_test.go | 201 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 241 | // Found before `update` masks it out of the context. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 261 | // block entirely. The whole paragraph is linted at once (on the | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 281 | padComment = "" | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 301 | if strings.HasPrefix(txt, " ") && endsWithUnicodeSpace(buf) { | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 421 | // existing for paragraphs alone, so any rule scoped to a sentence -- | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/ast.go | 481 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/qdoc.go | 241 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/walk.go | 61 | // linear in the document rather than linear per block. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/walk.go | 81 | // idsHistory holds the selections marked on the tags in tagHistory, and | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/walk.go | 101 | COMMENT | |
| LOW | internal/lint/walk.go | 121 | // itself: an autolink's `href` and its text are the same source bytes, so | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/lint.go | 61 | // | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/lint.go | 481 | // | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/lint.go | 581 | // files are already linted in parallel, and a pool per block would multiply by | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/rst.go | 41 | // Python's text layer, which on Windows decodes with the console's code page, | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/rst.go | 281 | // interpreter, or nil when that could not be established. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/myst.go | 21 | // targets, comments, and block breaks -- that a Markdown parser reads as | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/selection.go | 21 | const markAttr = "data-vale-doc" | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/lang.go | 21 | // Prefix matches a block comment's per-line decoration -- the ` *` that | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/lang.go | 41 | // Doc masks what the language's documentation convention marks as code: | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/comments.go | 21 | // front of the matching Source line: the opener, the dedent, and a line | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/comments.go | 61 | return false | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/ex.go | 1 | package code | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/lint/code/ex.go | 21 | // a different standard than an implementation note, or excluded on its own. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/markup.go | 1 | // The MIT License (MIT) | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/util.go | 201 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/file.go | 581 | if old, ok := f.ChkToCtx[a.Check]; ok { | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/file.go | 601 | case strings.HasPrefix(blk.Scope, "raw") && a.Match != "" && | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/file.go | 681 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/file.go | 741 | f.Alerts = kept | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/view.go | 41 | // structured content. It is defined by a set of queries that can be | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/location.go | 21 | return s != "" | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/location.go | 201 | // search runs once per alert over the whole context, and spelling reports | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/source.go | 181 | var sources []string | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/ini.go | 21 | COMMENT | |
| LOW | internal/core/ini.go | 181 | // so `Vale.Spelling = warning` for Markdown quietly downgraded HTML too. See | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/core/ini.go | 661 | // Nothing reads a key we don't recognize here, so leaving it be | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/spell/gospell.go | 41 | segments map[string]segmentUse | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/spell/gospell.go | 981 | } | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/testsuite/suite.go | 41 | // View names a View, found under a search path's `config/views`, to | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/testsuite/run.go | 41 | // paths is the configuration's StylesPath search list, read once and only | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/regex/prefilter.go | 1 | package regex | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/regex/prefilter.go | 21 | // Correctness rests on only ever returning literals that are genuinely | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/regex/regex.go | 1 | // Package regex adapts github.com/dlclark/regexp2 to the API Vale uses. | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/system/file.go | 21 | // | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/nlp/provider.go | 21 | Scope string // section selector | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/nlp/provider.go | 41 | // finds the first occurrence rather than the one that matched. A sentence | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/nlp/prose.go | 121 | // | COMMENT |
| LOW | internal/nlp/tokenize.go | 81 | // begins, as a byte index into `text`. | COMMENT |
| 20 more matches not shown… | ||||
| Severity | File | Line | Snippet | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEDIUM | .goreleaser.yml | 145 | # Create the GitHub release as a draft and upload assets to it *before* it's | COMMENT |
| Severity | File | Line | Snippet | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MEDIUM | internal/nlp/provider.go | 282 | // allow (fairly) seamless integration with non-Go libraries too (such as | COMMENT |
| Severity | File | Line | Snippet | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LOW | internal/lint/rst.go | 180 | except Exception as e: | CODE |