Suppressions and baselines

Two ways to silence a finding, and how they differ.

There are two ways to stop a finding being reported, and they solve different problems. Reaching for the wrong one is how a backlog becomes invisible rather than solved.

Suppressing one finding

A suppression is a directive placed at the crossing, carrying a reason:

// antra-disable-next-line
return <AccountCard account={account} />;

This is a statement about this line: the analysis is right that a value crosses here, and a human has decided it is acceptable. The reason is the whole point of it, since it is what the next person reads when they wonder whether the decision still holds.

antra fix inserts these mechanically when you pass a rule and a reason:

antra fix --suppress BG-001 --reason "account is projected before this point"

Baselining a report

A baseline is a statement about a moment in your codebase. It records the current violations, and from then on a scan reports only what has appeared since.

antra baseline

This is the answer to adopting a linter on a repository with years of history: without it, the first report is unusable and the second never happens.

Which one to use

	Suppression	Baseline
Scope	One crossing	Every current violation
Written to	Your source, next to the code	Local state under `.antra/`
Records a reason	Yes, required by `antra fix`	No
Reviewed in a diff	Yes	No
Survives a line move	Via the directive's placement	Via finding fingerprints

Use a suppression when you have looked at a specific crossing and made a judgement you want a reviewer to see. Use a baseline when the volume is the problem and your intent is to work the list down.

The honest caveat

Neither one fixes anything. Both are ways of deciding when to look, and a baseline in particular makes a real backlog stop being reported, which is the trade you are making when you run it.