Validation rules and failure cases

Updated Jul 04, 2026

mapsplice will fail fast when:

  • the target roadmap does not follow the supported phase/step/task grammar
  • a fragment starts at the wrong structural level for the requested anchor
  • a step appears before the first phase
  • a task list appears without a containing step
  • unsupported heading structure appears inside the roadmap body
  • a valid Requires dependency reference cannot be resolved to a roadmap item after the edit

This strictness is intentional. The tool is designed to produce predictable roadmap edits, not to guess what a malformed document might have meant.