Making it usable
Triage rules
The rules that decide what counts as an example rather than a credential, on a page, with a test box.
Two kinds of rule
A value rule matches the credential itself; a path rule matches the file it is in. Twenty rules ship, covering the obvious placeholder forms, documentation paths, vendored directories and lock files.
Editable, and accountable
An administrator can add a rule, and can turn off any rule that ships without editing anything. The shipped rules are not in the database: a row exists only where somebody made a decision, which is what makes "restore the defaults" a matter of deleting rows rather than remembering what they were.
A test box
Paste a value or a path and see which rules would catch it, before saving. For value rules this is the only preview possible: the cleartext never leaves the scan, so there is nothing stored to run a new pattern against.
Checked by the engine that reads it
A pattern is validated by asking jq, which is what actually reads it at scan time, rather than by a second regular expression engine that disagrees at the edges. A pattern the scanner cannot read is refused on the page rather than breaking a scan at two in the morning.
Judged by meaning where there is meaning
A finding raised because the variable holding the value is called password is not judged on length or entropy any more. Those measure what a value looks like, and that question was already answered by the name it sits in: a password a person chose is short and low entropy, and a placeholder is wordy because it is trying to explain itself. The word list and the path still apply, because both are evidence about what a value is for. Where the shape is the only evidence there is, the floors are exactly as they were.
What it does not do
A rule here hides findings estate wide with no expiry. It carries a reason and an author and it is in the audit log, and it is still the sharpest instrument in the product.
Every feature page carries one of those. The comparison page scores the same ground against five products people pay for, including the rows that go against us.