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2026-05-02 | 🔤 Expand Abbreviations: inferenceCountRef, resultsRef, maybeFileResult, inferenceCount, maybeKey 🧹

🎯 What Changed

🔤 This session continued the ongoing abbreviation-expansion effort in the Haskell codebase, completing the next five steps from the plan. 📄 All five changes lived in a single file: Automation/InternalLinking.hs, specifically inside the processFiles function and its inner go helper, plus the lookupSecret function.

🔬 The Five Steps

🔢 Step 1 — mFileResult → maybeFileResult

🤔 The local binding mFileResult was used to hold the result of processFile, which returns IO (Maybe FileResult). 🏷️ The m prefix is a common Haskell shorthand meaning “maybe”, but the no-abbreviations rule calls for the full word. 🔄 Renamed to maybeFileResult so the type annotation is self-evident from the name alone.

🔢 Step 2 — infRef → inferenceCountRef

📦 Inside the go helper, the IORef Int tracking how many Gemini inference calls have been made was named infRef. 🧩 Two things were abbreviated here: inf for “inference” and the missing word “count” which describes what the integer holds. 🔄 Renamed to inferenceCountRef to make both aspects explicit. 🔍 The outer variable in processFiles was already named inferenceRef, so the new inner name is slightly more descriptive by including “count”.

🔢 Step 3 — resRef → resultsRef

📦 The companion IORef [FileResult] accumulating processed file results was named resRef. 🧩 Again, res abbreviated “results”. 🔄 Renamed to resultsRef, making it a precise and complete name.

🔢 Step 4 — infCount → inferenceCount

🔢 Once an inference-using file is processed, the code reads the current count from the IORef and stores it in a let binding. 📛 That binding was named infCount. 🔄 Renamed to inferenceCount, which reads naturally in context: “if inferenceCount plus one reaches the maximum, stop.”

🔢 Step 5 — mKey → maybeKey

🔑 The lookupSecret function calls lookupEnv to fetch the Gemini API key from the process environment. 🏷️ The result is a Maybe String, and it was stored in a binding called mKey. 🔄 Renamed to maybeKey, using the full word for “maybe” and the natural English word “key”.

🗺️ Plan Update

📋 In addition to the five code changes, the spec at specs/expand-abbreviations.md was updated in two ways. ✅ The five completed items were checked off. 🆕 Several newly noticed abbreviations were added to the plan for future sessions.

🔍 The scan found fm used as a shorthand for “frontmatter” across at least ten files, including InternalLinking.hs, Frontmatter.hs, BlogImage.hs, AiBlogLinks.hs, Scheduler.hs, InternalLinking/Masking.hs, InternalLinking/CandidateDiscovery.hs, SocialPosting/ContentDiscovery.hs, and BlogPosts.hs. 📝 Each use is a local binding that holds the Map Text Text returned by parseFrontmatter, and all should become frontmatter for clarity.

🌍 The scan also found env used in SocialPosting.hs as a parameter name for the EnvironmentConfig type across seven functions. 🔄 It should be renamed to environmentConfig to match the type.

🤖 In Gemini.hs, the parameter req holding a Request value in generateContent should become request.

🔢 In GcpAuth.hs, the DER parsing functions use bs for ByteString parameters. 🔄 Following the no-abbreviations convention, these should become bytes.

✅ Verification

🔨 The build succeeded with zero warnings under -Wall -Werror. 🧹 Running hlint src/ app/ test/ reported zero hints. 🧪 All 2031 tests passed.

📚 Book Recommendations

📖 Similar

• 🧼💾 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin is relevant because 🔤 it emphasizes meaningful names and self-documenting code as core engineering values, directly echoing the motivation behind this rename series.
• The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt is relevant because 🧠 it advocates for writing code that communicates intent clearly, which is exactly what replacing infRef with inferenceCountRef achieves.

↔️ Contrasting

• ✅💻 Code Complete by Steve McConnell offers 🔢 a different perspective where concise names inside small local scopes are sometimes preferred for readability, contrasting with the strict full-word policy adopted here.

🔗 Related

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is relevant because 🏗️ it provides systematic techniques for improving code readability incrementally — precisely the approach this abbreviation expansion series takes, one rename at a time.