[nwparker]

ELI5

main has failed the static analysis check for every PR since 07:39Z today. #18126 added seven English strings to en.json that no code reads, and a CI check that decides which English strings must ship in the app's boot bundle treats "no code reads it" as "might be built dynamically, so it must ship." It then noticed those seven were not in the shipped catalog and failed. This PR deletes the seven unused strings — the actual problem — rather than the catalog that correctly flagged them.

Relationship to #19544 / #19337 (read this first)

Two open PRs currently carry a regenerated en-runtime-required.json that adds these 7 orphans to the shipped catalog. If either merges first, main goes green — and this PR becomes the follow-up cleanup, not the fix. Stated plainly and without blame (those PRs were fixing their own red, not making a policy choice): the regenerate variant makes the check pass by adding the dead keys to the list of things that must ship. That is the tool built to prevent boot-bundle dead weight being used to authorise it.

This PR is safe to land in either order:

• Before theirs: the failing step exits 0 (proven below); their later regeneration then re-adds nothing, because the keys are gone from en.json.
• After theirs: the two changes touch different files and do not conflict. Deleting the keys from en.json leaves their 7 shipped entries classified by the generator as superfluous — explicitly "harmless; sync to drop them" — not missing or contradicting, so the check stays green. No second break.

Root cause

#18126 (53852c9, "make the contrast floor user-configurable") added two minimumContrast blocks to en.json:

• auto.components.settings.terminal.search.minimumContrast.* — referenced by terminal-typography-search.ts. Kept.
• auto.components.settings.TerminalPane.minimumContrast.* (7 entries) — referenced by nothing. The shipped TerminalContrastSetting.tsx reads auto.components.settings.contrast.* instead. These are the orphans this PR removes.

generate-runtime-required-english-catalog.mjs keeps an entry as runtime-required when no call site with a literal default references it (its own doc comment: a dynamic key could still resolve it). So an unreferenced entry is by construction runtime-required — literalFallbacksByKey.get(key) is undefined and it lands in required. The seven orphans therefore became required, en-runtime-required.json was never regenerated in #18126, and verify:localization-runtime-catalog has failed on every merge-ref since.

This failure mode recurs on any rename that leaves leftovers behind — every unreferenced key is silently promoted to runtime-required. Whether that deserves a lint is a separate call; it is worth naming.

Why delete rather than regenerate

Regenerating would also turn the check green — by shipping seven strings nothing will ever read, which is precisely the "dead weight in the boot bundle" the generator's comment says it exists to prevent. Deleting is the root cause.

Before deleting, I established there is no dynamic path that can produce auto.components.settings.TerminalPane.minimumContrast.* (the exact hazard the check guards against):

• Literal references: zero across src/, mobile/, tests/ (.ts/.tsx/.json/.snap), excluding en.json itself.
• Template-literal key builders under auto.components.settings.: exactly one in the whole tree — plugin-chrome-allowlist.test.ts:43, a consumer (path.startsWith(...) over paths read from the catalog), not a producer.
• String-concat key builders under that namespace: zero.
• minimumContrast token near any translate/t(/key usage: only the kept terminal.search.minimumContrast.* literals and the unrelated terminalMinimumContrastRatio setting-value reads.
• Other locales (es/fr/ja/ko/zh) and mobile catalogs: none carry the block; no translation is stranded.
• The check's own scanner (ts.isStringLiteralLike in verify-localization-catalog.mjs) classifies keys the same way, so what it can't see, neither can i18next via a literal.

git blame attributes the block solely to 53852c9; the sibling TerminalPane.scrollSpeed.* follows the normal pattern (literal refs in TerminalInteractionSection.tsx), which is what the orphans were evidently meant to be before the component was pointed at settings.contrast.*.

The "10 insertions vs 7 orphans" question, closed

A regenerate dry-run reports 10 insertions / 1 deletion. Key-level diff over the flattened JSON: ADDED 7 (exactly the orphans), REMOVED 0, CHANGED 0. The line count is 7 leaves + 2 brace lines + the predecessor line rewritten to add a trailing comma (−1/+1). There are no "other 3." Decisive control: on main + this delete, --fix regenerates a byte-identical en-runtime-required.json (cmp exit 0). Nothing remains to add.

Evidence this is a main break, not a PR-side one

• Clean worktree of main@53852c9 with no other changes → verify:localization-runtime-catalog exits 1 with exactly these 7 keys.
• PR runs since feat(terminal): make the contrast floor user-configurable (#10754) #18126 merged (07:39Z): 6 failed, 1 succeeded. The single success (fix(agents): keep the global Windows runtime for local detection inside SSH workspaces #19356) merged against 96c6aa2 — the commit before 53852c9. Every run merged against 53852c9 or later fails the identical step with the identical 7 keys.
• main HEAD (d346d6f) still has zero minimumContrast entries in en-runtime-required.json.

Systemic: three gaps that compound

#18126's own static analysis job was cancelled at 05:48Z and it was merged at 07:39Z anyway. On its head SHA: cancelled:17, failure:1, skipped:4 — zero required checks reached success, and no later run was created for that head. Had the job run, this step would have failed and the break would never have reached main. Twenty-four minutes later a second, independent break landed (#19542 + #19551, 16 seconds apart; fixed in the companion orchestration PR). The full cause:

1. cancelled ≠ failed — a cancelled required check reads as "not failing."
2. No up-to-date-base requirement — "green alone" treated as "green together."
3. No post-merge signal on main — pr.yml is pull_request-only; main gets no CI on push, so neither break was ever red on main itself.

The first two are fixed by branch protection with strict status checks, which main cannot have because it has no branch protection and no rulesets at all. The third needs a push trigger on main.

Verification

On the fixed tree (origin/main d346d6f + this commit), locally and confirmed identically in this PR's own CI (static analysis → success):

Check	Result
verify:localization-runtime-catalog (the failing step)	exit 0 — "covers en.json: 1680 of 14189"
verify:localization-catalog	exit 0 — 14383 references verified
verify:localization-extraction	exit 0 — orphan count 1557 → 1550 (exactly the 7)
verify:localization-coverage	exit 0
all 9 i18n unit tests that load en.json	123 passed
oxfmt --check en.json	clean

Diff is exactly the 9 lines of the orphan block and the trailing comma on its predecessor; en-runtime-required.json is untouched; the referenced terminal.search.minimumContrast block is intact.

This PR's verify is red only because of the second, unrelated main break (shard 3/8), fixed in the companion PR.

[coderabbitai]

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• src/renderer/src/i18n/locales/en.json

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The English locale removes all translation entries for the minimumContrast setting. Removed entries include the title, description, automatic, disabled, pinned, placeholder, and suffix strings. No public declarations change.

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to 2292c

This change removes unused English localization entries and has no identified merge-readiness risk.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title is concise, specific, and accurately identifies the removal of orphaned i18n entries that caused static analysis failures.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description clearly explains the scope, root cause, rationale, affected keys, evidence, and verification results. It omits some template sections, including an explicit Fixes #... line, visual-p…
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

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[pullfrog]

✅ No new issues found.

Reviewed changes

• Delete orphan TerminalPane.minimumContrast block — removes the 7 unused entries (plus their enclosing braces and the predecessor's trailing comma) from en.json, leaving the file valid JSON.

Confirmed the root-cause claim: the shipped TerminalContrastSetting.tsx reads auto.components.settings.contrast.*, not TerminalPane.minimumContrast.*, so the deleted block had no reader. The sibling terminal.search.minimumContrast.* block (used by terminal-typography-search.ts) and TerminalPane.scrollSpeed.* (used by TerminalInteractionSection.tsx) are untouched, and a repo-wide search turns up no literal or dynamic reference to the deleted keys. Deleting rather than regenerating the runtime catalog is the right call — regenerating would have shipped dead data.

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