cejel

Cejel ("SEH-jel") — a trust certificate for your codebase.

Free, offline, no-signup CLI that scores the engineering signals that tell you whether to trust a repo — tests, secrets, isolation, claim-vs-reality, CI/audit discipline — and prints a trust certificate + badge. Especially valuable when AI wrote a lot of the code: that's exactly when you can't eyeball trust. Built on a deterministic, no-LLM scoring core — the free path makes zero network calls and requires no account.

Claim boundary: Cejel scores engineering-trust signals; it does not claim to detect software defects or prove that code is safe. Defect and vulnerability scanners remain evidence producers that Cejel can aggregate into a trust certificate.

Cejel is not another point scanner competing with the one you already run — it's the open, portable, offline trust certificate that aggregates them. Pipe in SARIF-compatible output (MunaTrust, Snyk, Semgrep, CodeQL, Codex) plus OpenSSF Scorecard, and get one shareable certificate + badge over all of them. See "Aggregate your scanners" below.

Cejel is used on Barg Labs’ own code. The public board labels publisher-owned snapshots separately from the ranked public repositories.

Rubric calibration policy

The public CLI default is witan-rubric-v17-2026-07-24, the last rubric to clear Cejel's preregistered 200-repository untouched holdout. Published calibration figures apply only to that exact rubric and frozen evaluation population. Later rubrics—including the current v18 through v23 prospective series—are available only to explicit evaluation harnesses. Prospective rubrics inherit none of v17's calibration figures; a bounded paired repair or corpus-delta result can validate its stated construction without transferring precision, recall, or false-positive-rate claims. Promoting a prospective rubric to the public default requires a fresh authenticated untouched holdout, every preregistered gate to pass, and a separately recorded promotion decision.

Measured recall (bounded)

Measured recall (bounded). Cejel publishes one cohort-level in-scope detection-recall figure, for the prospective v22 rubric, in docs/calibration/v22-detection-recall/; no general figure exists, and the three quantities called recall are set side by side on cejel.dev/methodology. On a frozen, preregistered, in-scope held-out fixture set of 30 named defects, the released public default (v17, tree a857f0b3) cited 16/30, two-sided 95% Wilson interval [36.1%, 69.8%]; the prospective v22 detector (commit 8a289ea, tree 10960a03) cited 24/30, two-sided 95% Wilson interval [62.7%, 90.5%]. Same fixtures, same partition, same controls in both runs. v22 is prospective and not the shipped default. Full preregistrations and results: docs/experiments/in-scope-detection-recall-v3-result-2026-08-09.md and docs/experiments/in-scope-detection-recall-v4-result-2026-08-11.md.

The defect-class census publishes the coverage-breadth boundary—which defect classes any shipped rule targets—and is explicitly not a recall claim.

Install

No account, no key, no signup.

Single-file binary. One file. No Node, no npm, no node_modules, nothing installed.

set -eu
asset="cejel-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)"
curl -fsSL "https://github.com/BargLabs/cejel/releases/latest/download/$asset" -o "$asset"
curl -fsSL https://github.com/BargLabs/cejel/releases/latest/download/SHA256SUMS -o SHA256SUMS
checksum_entry_count="$(awk -v asset="$asset" '$2 == asset { count++ } END { print count + 0 }' SHA256SUMS)"
if [ "$checksum_entry_count" -ne 1 ]; then
  echo "Expected exactly one SHA256SUMS entry for $asset; found $checksum_entry_count" >&2
  exit 1
fi
if command -v sha256sum >/dev/null; then
  grep "  $asset$" SHA256SUMS | sha256sum -c -
else
  grep "  $asset$" SHA256SUMS | shasum -a 256 -c -
fi
mv "$asset" cejel
chmod +x cejel
./cejel .

Windows x86_64 (PowerShell).

$asset = "cejel-Windows-x86_64.exe"
Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/BargLabs/cejel/releases/latest/download/$asset" -OutFile $asset
Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/BargLabs/cejel/releases/latest/download/SHA256SUMS" -OutFile SHA256SUMS
$expected = ((Select-String -Path SHA256SUMS -Pattern "  $([regex]::Escape($asset))$").Line -split "\s+")[0]
$actual = (Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 $asset).Hash.ToLowerInvariant()
if (-not $expected -or $actual -ne $expected.ToLowerInvariant()) {
  throw "SHA-256 verification failed for $asset"
}
.\cejel-Windows-x86_64.exe .

Windows signing status: cejel-Windows-x86_64.exe is intentionally unsigned in 0.5.0 and may trigger Microsoft SmartScreen. The release build removes Node's inherited signature before SEA injection and fails unless Windows reports the result as NotSigned; it does not ship an invalid signature. Before running it, verify SHA256SUMS and the GitHub build-provenance attestation. Each binary also has an attached SPDX SBOM and an own-platform verification receipt covering --version, --help, a real scan, source/binary parity, and a network-denied scan. If your policy requires Authenticode, use the npm package or the OCI image until a human-approved signing path is available.

Don't take the offline claim on trust — check it. Turn your network off, then run the binary. It will score your repository and write you a certificate anyway. That is the whole product, and you can falsify it in ten seconds:

# with Wi-Fi off, or:
docker run --rm --network=none -v "$PWD:/w" -w /w -v "$PWD/cejel:/cejel:ro" debian:stable-slim /cejel .

npm.

npx @cejel/cejel@latest .

Distribution note: Cejel 0.5.0 is the coordinated release version for npm, standalone binaries, Docker/OCI, GitHub Action, Homebrew, and MCP Registry.

npx can reuse a stale cached package. Force the current npm release with the @latest specifier above, and check the version that will run before comparing certificates:

npx @cejel/cejel@latest --version

If a root package.json still carries a template name, override only the certificate display name while keeping the repository-derived stable slug:

npx @cejel/cejel@latest . --name "Customer Portal"

From 0.4.5, use --product-name when two checkout directories must emit the same identity fields. The supplied value sets both the display name and its slugified stable ID:

npx @cejel/cejel@latest . --product-name "Customer Portal"

Product identity is caller context, not scored repository evidence, and is excluded from certificate byte-comparison claims.

The npm package is scoped as @cejel/cejel; its executable remains the short command cejel.

GitHub Action — score every PR and publish the badge:

- uses: BargLabs/cejel/action@v1
  with:
    min-score: "2.5"   # optional: fail the build below this

For an executed public example that binds a release artifact to the same commit named by its Cejel certificate, see Certified releases with GitHub build provenance.

From source — it is AGPL and it runs offline, so reading it is rather the point:

git clone https://github.com/BargLabs/cejel && cd cejel
pnpm install && pnpm build
node dist/index.js .

Released binaries: cejel-Darwin-arm64, cejel-Darwin-x86_64, cejel-Linux-aarch64, cejel-Linux-x86_64, and cejel-Windows-x86_64.exe. The release also carries SHA256SUMS, a per-binary SPDX SBOM, and an own-platform verification receipt. Each binary is executed against the source build and with networking denied before attachment. Releases from v0.1.6 also carry a Sigstore bundle containing GitHub's signed build-provenance attestation for the release set. Verify a downloaded binary with:

gh attestation verify ./cejel-Windows-x86_64.exe -R BargLabs/cejel

This is cryptographically signed provenance. It is distinct from Apple Developer ID or Microsoft Authenticode code-signing.

Docker / OCI. The current container release is 0.5.0:

docker run --rm -i -v "$PWD:/workspace:ro" ghcr.io/barglabs/cejel:0.5.0

The image defaults to cejel-mcp over stdio. To use the CLI instead:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/workspace:ro" --entrypoint cejel ghcr.io/barglabs/cejel:0.5.0 .

The OCI image carries an SBOM, maximum-mode build provenance, and a signed registry attestation.

Leaderboard

The Cejel OSS trust leaderboard is hosted on cejel.dev, which is the single current board. This repository no longer distributes a second copy of its scores or certificates. The board records its producing package version, rubric, run date, pinned public revisions, and reproduction instructions for that particular run. The private Alfred transparency snapshot is not independently reproducible.

The site's History section preserves the 2026-08-18 withdrawal: the earlier sealed-public-scorer reproducibility claim was false. The stale prospective-rubric copy previously linked here has been removed; it must not be treated as current evidence.

Redaction policy

A path is published exactly when the reader can check it. Every public repository on the board cites full evidence paths and line numbers, everywhere, in every artifact — a certificate whose evidence you cannot open is not evidence. The private-repository entry (the studio monorepo's transparency snapshot) never cites a source path, anywhere, in any field or format — but the finding itself, its dimension, status, score, and content hash always survive; only the location is withheld, marked uniformly as "path withheld — private repository". Redaction removes a location, never a fact: a private repository failing its own check still shows up on its certificate, by name. The v3 repository scanner marks B1 and B5 not applicable for every repository, including ours; it does not accept structured substrate evidence for them. They remain defined for other rubric inputs, while the repository ranking excludes them fail-closed. Nobody is scored on evidence the public scanner cannot collect.

Known false positives (fixed before publishing)

Calibrating a rubric against real, elite repositories surfaces mistakes; the record is part of the trust claim, not something to bury. Two dimensions produced a punitive score for the absence of a ratable surface rather than a real weakness, and both are fixed: Django was flagged critical on dependency hygiene for using version ranges instead of exact pins — normal, deliberate practice for a library, not an app; the rubric now scores dependency hygiene against archetype-appropriate norms. OSSF Scorecard — Google's own supply-chain security auditing tool — was flagged critical on audit-trail completeness for publishing release notes via GitHub Releases instead of a committed CHANGELOG.md; a repository with no ratable audit surface now returns "insufficient data" (excluded from the composite) instead of a punitive score. The board also publishes a measured-coverage indicator per row: a score reflects only its measured dimensions, and a row scored on fewer than half of its applicable dimensions is shown as unranked rather than ordered against better-evidenced rows.

Usage

./cejel scan .

scan scores the current directory with sensible defaults: no signup, fully offline. The original ./cejel . form remains supported as a compatibility shorthand. Prints a concise terminal certificate and writes to .cejel/:

• report.json — the full structured report; scored runs carry numeric headline scores and a score-band verdict, while abstained runs carry null scores and verdict: "insufficient_source"
• attestation.json — an unsigned in-toto statement binding the report digest, repository revision, rubric, and scored-or-abstained outcome; ready for an external signer
• certificate.html — a self-contained HTML certificate (no external assets)
• badge.json — a shields.io endpoint payload
• badge.svg — a static, self-contained trust-score badge
• summary.json — a compact digest (score, verdict, top findings)

The attestation is deliberately explicit about its assurance level: Cejel creates the statement, but it does not pretend to be an independent signer. Until a customer, reviewer, or provenance system signs it, assurance.status is unsigned and issuer is self-generated. An abstained scan carries only the refusal reason, never a numeric score.

Verify that an emitted report still matches its attestation:

./cejel verify .cejel/report.json .cejel/attestation.json

This verifies the report schema and the report-to-attestation digest, repository, rubric, timestamp, and outcome binding. It does not verify a signature or signer identity; the command prints that boundary on every successful verification.

Flags

• <path> — repo to score (default: current directory)
• --out <dir> — where to write report/certificate/badge files (default: .cejel; --out-dir remains available as a compatibility alias)
• --min-score <n> — exit non-zero if the overall score is below n (0–4), if Cejel abstains, or if fewer than half of the applicable dimensions behind any score were measured; used by the GitHub Action's optional threshold gate
• --product-name <name> — Set both the caller-context display name and slugified product ID so differently named checkouts can emit identical certificates.
• --name <display> — override only the displayed project name while leaving the derived slug unchanged; retained for compatibility
• --ingest <file|glob> — fold another scanner's output into the score (repeatable). Accepts SARIF, OpenSSF Scorecard JSON, or the generic Cejel external-signal shape — format is auto-detected. See "Aggregate your scanners" below.
• --rubric-pin <version> — Explicit opt-in only: pin an alternate rubric instead of the calibrated public default. It accepts the calibrated version or any published prospective rubric (witan-rubric-v18-prospective-* through v23) and fails closed, naming what was accepted, on anything else. v23 is prospective and uncalibrated, like every rubric after v17: the public default (WITAN_LAST_CALIBRATED_RUBRIC_VERSION) is still witan-rubric-v17-2026-07-24, and v23 inherits none of v17's precision, recall, or false-positive-rate figures. It inherits v22 detector/scoring behavior and adds bounded A1 coverage-flag recognition (#276) plus per-signal (rather than per-criterion) abstention for A1's coverage_percent/non_hollow_test_share metrics (#278); every other criterion still abstains criterion-wide under v23, same as v17/v22. Omit this flag for the calibrated result every default scan produces — a prospective pin carries no precision/recall claim, and the terminal certificate, HTML certificate, and Markdown report all state that plainly whenever one is used.
• --run-attempt <n> — record which CI run attempt produced this certificate, surfaced on the human-readable certificate and as an additive-optional predicate.githubRunAttempt field on attestation.json. The GitHub Action sets this automatically from GITHUB_RUN_ATTEMPT; omit it for a local scan or any other CI — Cejel never fabricates or defaults a run attempt.
• --quiet — suppress the terminal certificate (files are still written)
• -h, --help — print usage and exit successfully
• -v, --version — print the version derived from the package manifest and exit successfully

Supported languages

Cejel reads a repository's file tree, not its bytecode — it needs to recognise a file's source extension to say anything about it. It does not support every language, and it says so honestly rather than guessing:

• Deeply modelled — JS/TS, Python: test detection, coverage, and claim-vs-reality checks are tuned specifically for these ecosystems.
• Partially modelled — Go, Rust, Java, Ruby, PHP, C#, C/C++, Swift, Kotlin, Dart, Elixir, Scala: recognised as source and scored on the language-agnostic dimensions (CI discipline, dependency hygiene, audit trail, secrets), but without ecosystem-specific test-framework tuning.
• Recognised but unmodelled — shell, R, Lua, Julia, Haskell, Terraform, SQL, Perl, OCaml, Clojure, Erlang, Nim, Zig, F#, Groovy, Fortran, CUDA/HIP, Web templates/styles: counted as source so a repo isn't misread as empty, but with the least ecosystem-specific tuning of the three tiers.
• Not yet recognised — other ecosystems, including COBOL and MATLAB. Cejel does not score these as "source" at all: a repository with zero recognised-extension files gets the unrecognised_ecosystem archetype, an explicit insufficient_data criterion status, null headline scores, and an explicit machine verdict of insufficient_source — never a numeric score-band verdict, and never the word "Unverified" for the sole reason that cejel cannot read the language. The certificate states plainly which of the 11 dimensions were and were not measured.

This list will grow. It will never be "any codebase" — that claim is a promise the parser cannot keep, and an honest support matrix is worth more than a marketing line the code contradicts on the first unsupported repository someone runs it against.

Aggregate your scanners

Cejel doesn't compete with your AI-code scanner (MunaTrust, Snyk, Semgrep, CodeQL, Codex, whatever runs in CI) — it sits on top of it. Feed a scanner's output in with --ingest and Cejel folds those findings into the same rubric-scored, offline trust certificate, with the contributing tools shown in the certificate and report as provenance:

./cejel . --ingest munatrust.sarif --ingest scorecard.json

Or drop files in .cejel/inputs/ and they're picked up automatically, no flag needed:

mkdir -p .cejel/inputs
cp munatrust-results.sarif .cejel/inputs/
./cejel .

External findings only ever adjust a dimension score downward, and by a bounded amount — they augment the native repo scan, they never replace it. Every ingested file is attributed by name in certificate.html, report.json (consumedSignals), and the terminal output ("Incorporates findings from: ..."), so the certificate reads as a visible aggregation, not a black box.

Three ways a scanner's output gets ingested:

1. SARIF — any SARIF 2.1.0-emitting tool (Semgrep, CodeQL, most commercial SAST/AI-code scanners) works with zero configuration; --ingest auto-detects the runs array.

2. OpenSSF Scorecard — scorecard --repo=... --format=json > scorecard.json, then --ingest scorecard.json; auto-detected by its checks array.

3. Generic JSON — for a tool that emits neither, map its output into the minimal shape below (or write a small adapter mirroring scorecard-adapter.ts if the format needs real parsing):

   json

   {
     "version": "1.0",
     "tool": "my-scanner",
     "signals": [
       {
         "dimension": "A2",
         "weight": 0.7,
         "findings": [
           {
             "ruleId": "hardcoded-secret",
             "severity": "critical",
             "message": "Hardcoded API key detected.",
             "location": "src/config.ts:10"
           }
         ]
       }
     ]
   }
   

   dimension is one of the Witan rubric criterion ids (A1-A5, B1-B6); weight (0–1, default 0.5) bounds how much this signal can move that dimension; severity is critical | warning | info; location is optional.

   The version field is required. Cejel rejects unversioned generic documents and unknown major versions rather than guessing. See the generic ingest contract, its published JSON Schema, and the synthetic CI heal-log mapping. Output-field stability and version routing are documented in format stability.

Displaying the trust badge

Endpoint JSON (host badge.json anywhere static — a repo file, a gist, GitHub Pages — and point shields.io at it):

![Cejel trust score](https://img.shields.io/endpoint?url=<url-to-your-hosted-badge.json>)

Or commit/link the static SVG directly:

![Cejel trust score](./.cejel/badge.svg)

GitHub Action

See action/action.yml — runs Cejel on push/pull_request, posts the score + top findings to the job summary, and can optionally fail the check below a configurable min-score threshold. The scoring step makes no network calls and needs no secrets.

- uses: BargLabs/cejel/action@v1
  with:
    min-score: '2.5' # optional; omit to never fail the check

MCP server (for agents)

The same package ships a second bin, cejel-mcp — a thin MCP (Model Context Protocol) server over stdio, so any MCP client (Claude Code, Cowork, Cursor, Codex) can request a trust certificate as a tool call. It wraps the exact same scan the CLI runs — same scores, same verdict — and is listed on Smithery via the repo's smithery.yaml.

Add it to an MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cejel": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "--package=@cejel/cejel@latest", "cejel-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

The server exposes one tool and two resources:

• scan — input { path, format? }; scores the repository at path and returns the trust cert as JSON (format: "summary", the default, is the compact digest; format: "json" is the full report, identical to the CLI's report.json).
• cejel://last-scan/certificate.html and cejel://last-scan/badge.svg — the HTML certificate and SVG badge for the most recent scan (the URI scheme derives from the npm package name).

Like the CLI, scoring over MCP is fully offline: no network calls, no telemetry, no signup, and the server writes no files.

Install via Smithery

Cejel is listed on the Smithery MCP registry via the repo's smithery.yaml. Discovery needs no account:

npx -y @smithery/cli@latest mcp search cejel

Connecting through Smithery's own CLI is a separate step and requires a Smithery account: smithery mcp add prompts to smithery login before it will create a connection, for every caller, not just first-time ones.

npx -y @smithery/cli@latest mcp add cejel

If you'd rather not create a Smithery account, the generic MCP client config above needs no login and no third-party CLI at all — it talks to the same cejel-mcp bin directly.

Install on OpenClaw

OpenClaw stores outbound MCP servers under mcp.servers. Add Cejel with the npm package's shipped cejel-mcp bin:

{
  "mcp": {
    "servers": {
      "cejel": {
        "command": "npx",
        "args": ["-y", "--package=@cejel/cejel@latest", "cejel-mcp"]
      }
    }
  }
}

The equivalent OpenClaw command is:

npx -y openclaw@latest mcp add cejel --command npx --arg -y --arg --package=@cejel/cejel@latest --arg cejel-mcp
npx -y openclaw@latest mcp doctor cejel --probe

Pin openclaw@latest explicitly rather than running bare openclaw. The mcp add/mcp doctor subcommands need OpenClaw ≥2026.7.1-2, which itself needs Node ≥22.22.3 (also ≥24.15 or ≥25.9) — on an older-but-still-supported Node 22 patch, npm's own engines-aware resolution silently serves an older OpenClaw release lacking these subcommands, and the command above fails with error: unknown option '--command' instead of a version message.

The OCI image is an alternative when Docker is the preferred execution boundary. Replace the host path with the repository OpenClaw should allow Cejel to read:

npx -y openclaw@latest mcp set cejel-oci '{"command":"docker","args":["run","--rm","-i","-v","/absolute/path/to/repo:/workspace:ro","ghcr.io/barglabs/cejel:0.5.0"]}'
npx -y openclaw@latest mcp doctor cejel-oci --probe

Cejel is active in the Official MCP Registry as io.github.BargLabs/cejel. The explicit OpenClaw configuration above works independently of catalog indexing.

Cejel scans code you point it at. This free adoption surface does not watch, intercept, or govern an agent's runtime actions. Runtime-action governance is a separate boundary for the future paid Agent Pack.

What "offline" means here

Scoring a repo — cejel scan . itself, and the Action's scoring step — makes zero network calls: no telemetry, no signup, no model call. The scanner does invoke your local git binary through one hardened subprocess chokepoint: fixed argv only (never a shell), an explicit timeout and output bound, prompts and network transports disabled, proxy variables removed, and repository-controlled filesystem monitoring neutralized. A static CI guard allows node:child_process in that one module only and rejects direct network primitives everywhere, while each release binary is also scanned with outbound networking denied.

Fetching the @cejel/cejel package the first time (like any npm-distributed CLI, including this Action's own dependency install) does need network; that's a one-time install cost, not part of the scoring guarantee. If the tracked-file inventory fails unexpectedly, the JSON, HTML, and markdown certificates declare that the scanner used its bounded directory fallback instead of silently presenting the two inventories as equivalent.

What a certificate's scope means

A certificate scores the repository tree at one pinned revision, and only that tree. That boundary is deliberate: a certificate that reached outside the pinned tree could not be reproduced by whoever receives it, and reproducibility is the entire product. Scoring only the pinned tree is correct — the gap was that nothing on the certificate itself told a reader which kind of statement they were holding. A repository whose regression suite lives in a separate repository, checked out and run by its own CI, is correctly reported as having zero test files against its source files. That statement is true about the tree and false about the system, and a reader with no other context cannot tell the difference.

Every certificate now carries a standing scope line, in the "How to read this certificate" section on every surface (HTML, Markdown, terminal), regardless of verdict: the certificate is a statement about the repository tree at the pinned revision, not about the system that tree belongs to, and evidence outside that tree is neither seen nor claimed to be absent. This is additive, not a hedge — a finding that says evidence was not found in this tree stays exactly as stated.

Four specific situations can make the tree's own conclusion misleading about the system it belongs to:

• A test suite kept in a separate repository. Not detectable from inside the pinned tree — there is no reliable signal that a sibling repository exists. Covered by the standing scope line above, not a conditional disclosure.
• CI configuration that changes into a different working directory before running its checks. Also not detectable without executing the CI job itself, which the offline scanner does not do. Covered by the standing scope line above.
• A large implementation file that exceeds the read limit. This one is detectable, and disclosed conditionally when it happens: when a file above the size ceiling is the reason a specific signal has nothing to measure, the certificate's scan-limitations section names it — "declined a large implementation file that exceeded the repository content size limit" — rather than folding it into the generic coverage-limit sentence used for an extension exclusion or a non-regular file. Today this fires for two A3 signals (health/readiness route detection and observability-marker counting); it extends to more signals as they adopt the same per-signal attribution.
• A recognized-but-nonfunctional package script, such as npm's auto-generated "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1" placeholder being credited the same as a real test runner. This was a detector defect, not a scope-disclosure gap — Cejel now checks the test script's content against known test-runner invocations rather than crediting it by key presence alone, so no separate disclosure line is needed for it.

Help validate Cejel

Cejel does not collect telemetry. External validation is therefore opt-in and inspectable:

• Report a calibration result when a score, finding, evidence pointer, or refusal is wrong. The form asks permission before a correction is added to the public error ledger.
• Join a pack design-partner pilot for the Quant or Healthcare Pack. Both remain pilot surfaces until their domain-specific calibration gates pass.

Submit only public or redacted evidence. Never put credentials, proprietary strategy code, patient data, or protected health information in a GitHub issue.

The public leaderboard: what we redact, what we exclude, and where we were wrong

We publish a trust board scoring a corpus of well-known open-source repositories alongside our own. Running a leaderboard on other people's code obliges us to be exact about how it works, so here is all of it.

What we redact, and on what basis. One rule: a path is published exactly when you can check it. For a public repository, every evidence path and line number is cited in full — a certificate whose evidence you cannot open is not evidence. For a private repository (ours), no source path is cited anywhere, in any field or format; an unverifiable path tells you nothing you can check while disclosing our file tree for free. Redaction removes a location, never a fact: the finding, its dimension, its status, its score, and its content hash all survive. Where a path is withheld you will see it said plainly. This is enforced structurally — the public artifacts are built from filtered data rather than rendered and then scrubbed — and a build that would emit a private path fails rather than publishes.

What we exclude from ranking. The v5 repository scanner does not evaluate B1 (dispatch trace completeness) or B5 (verified learning trace) for repository inputs, including ours: both are always not applicable in a repository certificate. They remain defined in the rubric for structured substrate evidence, but that evidence is not accepted by this scanner. The ranking excludes both dimensions fail-closed, including when it reads a legacy or separately produced structured report. We neither score you on evidence the public scanner cannot collect nor award ourselves points for evidence you cannot contest.

Where we were wrong. Calibrating this rubric against real repositories — and running the board itself like a stranger would — surfaced the errors below in our own tool, every one found by us and every one fixed. The list is its own count; we do not keep a tally in this sentence, because a number typed by hand beside a list that grows is exactly the kind of unchecked claim this tool exists to catch. We publish them because a scoring tool that has never been wrong is a scoring tool that has not been checked:

• Django, scored a false critical on dependency hygiene. We applied application-shaped expectations to a library. Archetype now gates the dimension.
• OpenSSF Scorecard, scored a false critical on audit trail. We flagged Google's own auditing tool for insufficient auditing. The dimension lacked a "is there anything here to rate?" gate before "how good is it?"; it has one now.
• Twelve of seventeen repositories were silently dropped from an early build of the board, which nonetheless reported success. The generator could always lose rows without saying so. It now asserts that every repository in the corpus is accounted for — ranked, unranked, or errored — and fails loudly otherwise.
• Low-coverage repositories were ranked as though fully measured. A confidence floor now publishes them without ranking them, rather than implying a precision we did not have.
• A1's scheduled-workflow check hardcoded our own internal QA agent's filename as its definition, instead of the concept it actually measures. It was inert for every external repository by construction — a home-field rule dressed up as a general one. It now detects the shape (a cron-scheduled workflow that runs the verification suite, and whether its results are durably published or only handed to an ephemeral CI artifact); our own internal nightly QA workflow is one recognized instance of that shape, not its definition.
• Our board and our own certificates disagreed on four repositories' headline scores by 0.1 — two coherent bases (the board's fair cross-repo ranking basis, and each certificate's own-dimension basis), one word, "Overall", printed on both. We found it on launch day and fixed it: "Overall" is now byte-identical everywhere it appears — board, certificate, badge, report, and JSON — and the ranking basis, where it genuinely differs, has its own separate, explicitly labeled column instead of borrowing the same name.
• Our own row used a scoring path nobody else could run. The board generator could add internal collectors after the public scan, so its reassuring collector blacklist was not the invariant it claimed to be. Rubric v3 removes that second path: every corpus row now passes through the same sealed public scorer, every external source is pinned to a commit, and a required guard re-scores every row and compares score, verdict, coverage, and evidence. The honest correction moved Alfred's Code score from 2.5 to 2.4 and A5 from 2.9 to 2.4. It is less flattering and more trustworthy.
• A tracked symlink could make evidence depend on files outside the checkout. Repository discovery used a regular-file check that followed symlinks, so a tracked link could escape the immutable source snapshot. Rubric v4 accepts only tracked regular files. On the pinned corpus this removes a duplicate claim source from Zod: A5 moves from 2.2 to 2.0 while its rounded Code score, Overall, verdict, and rank stay unchanged. The full 24-row delta is in the rubric changelog.
• A pinned commit could score differently depending on unrelated Git refs in the clone. History evidence traversed every local and remote-tracking ref, including branches that were not ancestors of the revision being certified. The required clean-clone reproduction job caught the mismatch. Rubric v5 scans only HEAD ancestry, so ambient branch state can no longer add evidence or change coverage. The complete v4-to-v5 delta is published in the rubric changelog.
• Version 0.1.1 rejected --help and --version as unknown flags, and read -h as a directory path. Version 0.1.2 handles both aliases before positional-path parsing and derives its printed version from the package manifest.
• We reported a timing side-channel in our own test fixtures. Pointed at its own repository, Cejel's secret-handling dimension flagged a "non-constant-time secret comparison" — in string literals inside a test file, the deliberately-insecure example code that exists to prove the detector fires. It read a file, not a comparison, and reported a vulnerability in the test written to catch that vulnerability. Two sub-rules of the same dimension held two different private notions of what "production code" meant, and the one that had none was the louder. Version 0.1.3 gives every rule one shared, derived answer to that question, and reports the real line of a real match or nothing at all.
• We fixed the COBOL false-verdict, shipped it, and it was still broken. An earlier release corrected a repository written in a language we cannot read being scored anyway. The fixture that proved the fix contained COBOL and nothing else. The first real COBOL repository we pointed it at — AWS's mainframe credit-card demo — carried nine incidental shell scripts among 329 files, and those nine were enough to short-circuit the abstention path entirely: a 99%-COBOL codebase was scored on its deploy scripts and drew a confident 0.0, "Unverified". Every real legacy repository has a deploy script, so the fix that passed every test was unreachable for essentially all of them. Recognised source must now be dominant, not merely present. A fixture cleaner than reality proves nothing.
• Version 0.1.7 missed AVA's root-level test.js convention. A smoke test against sindresorhus/slugify reported that a runner was configured but no concrete test files were detected even though test.js was present at the repository root. That was a detection gap in Cejel, not evidence about the repository. Rubric v6 recognizes AVA's test.js and test-*.js conventions; a regression fixture preserves the correction.
• Version 0.1.9 claimed Express had no coverage configuration while its package scripts used nyc. The detector looked only for standalone coverage files and framework configuration. Version 0.1.10 also recognizes actual nyc, c8, and Istanbul commands or configuration in package.json. An unused dependency is not treated as coverage evidence. This removes a false finding without changing the measured coverage score.
• Metric-only dimension bands told users that “combined metric weighting” was responsible, then stopped. The underlying metrics were present in the full certificate but absent from the terminal finding, and info finding severity could appear beside a critical dimension band without naming the two different concepts. Version 0.1.10 prints the two lowest contributing measurements, concrete next actions, finding severity, and dimension band explicitly. It also explains when a requested scan target is gitignored instead of presenting the target as a generic empty repository.

Every one was a trust failure produced by us — false alarms about other people's code, silent omissions, inconsistent presentation, or a home-only scoring path — and we would rather you knew that than discovered it. If you believe the board scores your repository wrongly, open an issue — a rubric that cannot be corrected in public has no business being published in public.

No rubric change re-scores you silently. Every change to scoring behavior requires a WITAN_RUBRIC_VERSION bump and a corpus-wide before/after delta published in leaderboard/RUBRIC_CHANGELOG.md — score, verdict, and rank for every repository, "no repository moved" stated explicitly when that is the result. A build that changes scoring without both fails; see that file's v2 entry for the home-field fix above as the first rubric change recorded this way.

License

cejel is free and licensed under AGPL-3.0-only, copyleft: any modified version you distribute or run as a network service must also make its source available under the same terms. A commercial license is available for teams that need to use or modify cejel without those copyleft obligations.