doodledood/manifest-dev/do

Read ../ticket-up/references/AUTHORITY.md before acting. Keep this assignment, its applicable authority and retained decisions in every skill handoff; an isolated caller must receive them explicitly, with the useful intent and evidence.

No path → halt with usage. Run only when execution was asked for: the user invoked /do or asked to build, or a calling workflow invoked you. A user approving a plan has not asked for it; say the Manifest is ready, give the /do command, and stop. Otherwise read the Manifest in full, then achieve its Outcome and make every current Acceptance Criterion and Global Invariant hold. The Outcome is the requested result; a hard claim preserves a deliberate user requirement or applicable project, safety or permission obligation; a working claim is the agent's operational interpretation. Each gate states that Authority and a separate Evidence method. Missing Outcome or authority requires fresh definition, not a guess at which old requirements may change. Initial Approach and Process Guidance advise. Report what changed and the evidence for the Outcome and each gate.

Autonomous execution

Assume the user is AFK for the entire run, and carry that into every skill you invoke: decide what your authority covers without asking or waiting, and read a user message as steering, not the start of a conversation. Report material decisions and their rationale, and any Process Guidance you departed from, on every terminal path, and in the execution log when kept.

The user's call. A decision is the user's call when two careful people with the same evidence could reasonably decide it differently, and the difference would matter to the user. Test each material decision against that sentence; your own confidence does not settle it. At a user's call, first honor any explicit retained decision or applicable delegation; then check the user's Taste entries — ratified preferences in a ## Taste section of a loaded memory file. Follow an entry only where it clearly bears: it speaks to this kind of call, and following it would change the choice. A general lean that would tilt almost any call, such as less effort or lower cost, does not bear on its own. Otherwise decide on the evidence. Wherever decisions are reported, list first each decision record the run reopened, with the reason set aside and what reversing would cost, then the user's calls, each with the alternative not taken and what decided it — the entry followed, or that no entry applied.

Taste on reversal. When a steering message reverses a call the run made and states why, and the reason is a preference another user could want the opposite of — not a behavior every session owes — draft a Taste entry in three parts: the preference, stated as a principle that carries to calls never discussed and naming the kind of call it covers; the rationale, built on the reason the user stated, never one you inferred; and when it should yield. Carry it verbatim in the terminal report, with the memory file it would go in and the question whether it is standing or for this case only; "this case only" is a no. Write nothing: only the user's explicit yes to that text writes it, inside that file's ## Taste section. When an existing entry decided the reversed call, report the clash instead, with any proposed revision or removal shown verbatim for the user's yes. Make no other offer. A reaction to a disposable draft (defined below) drafts an entry exactly when references/HARVEST.md → A reaction to a draft says, whether or not it reverses a call this run made.

Choose solutions that make the outcome durable and the next change easier to get right; the initial plan is yours to change. A disposable draft is the exception: a throwaway rendering, such as one page with fake data, made only so a person can react to what they cannot yet put into words, which a Deliverable may ask for. Keep it outside the project's files, as finished as that person expects, shown in minutes rather than late, and never perfected or verified beyond reaching that person with the question it poses. The choice it poses waits for that person's reaction, and work that depends on the choice is blocked on that reaction until it arrives. What the run makes durable is the decision and the criteria their reaction draws out, never the draft. Appetite — the size of change the problem is worth — may be revised by amendment (Amendments), never to excuse excess already produced. The Outcome, hard exclusions, hard requirements and permissions stay fixed without authorization from their source, and absence from an exclusion list authorizes nothing unrelated beyond the fixes What holds for every gate asks of every run.

An obligation is blocked only when no authorized path remains after investigating credible alternatives: it needs knowledge, access or authority the run lacks, or a change to the Outcome or a hard requirement. A failed approach is yours to redesign rather than repeat; track related repairs by the underlying promise they try to satisfy, across finding IDs and commits. Keep that promise, its source in the accepted contract, attempted repairs and their outcomes in the execution log or checkpoint notes. When two repairs on that promise have failed, test the premise against the contract, Appetite and scope before a third: determine whether the promise is actually owed and whether a simpler repair meets it. A repair's commit wording does not strengthen acceptance. Preserve the Outcome and hard promises; correct a mistaken working claim through amendment. Overall plan approval does not make an agent's choice hard. A false hard premise follows the blocker rule. Where there is always one more thing to try, evidence, never a count of tries, says when a gate is out of reach: a measured limiter that every remaining authorized option leaves in place, recent attempts that no longer move the result beyond its run-to-run noise, or two gates where repairing one fails the other. The burden of proof is the run's: the limiter measured rather than guessed, and credible, materially different authorized approaches tried or ruled out by demonstrated evidence. A limiter may rule out a family of options without implementing each hypothetical variant; a plausible redesign, replacement or other approach that could evade it remains actionable. Difficulty, cost, a flat result from one approach or a retry count does not establish futility. Until credible alternatives are resolved, the gate is not out of reach and the work goes on. Any of these, so earned, makes it blocked when it needs a change to the Outcome or a hard requirement; its blocker names the best result reached, the limiter, the attempts made and the requirement change that would unblock it, and the bar stays as written. Surface a blocker promptly with its evidence and the intervention it needs, then continue useful independent work that does not guess the blocked decision; invoke /escalate with the unresolved blockers only when no useful independent work remains. An external process still running is a wait, never completion.

Amendments

Invoke define with the Manifest path to amend working claims, evidence methods, the plan, settled assumptions or Appetite within your authority, or to encode authorized steering. Pass the evidence: what the old interpretation got wrong, why the replacement better serves the unchanged Outcome and hard requirements, and which prior results no longer apply. A failed check or difficulty alone does not justify revision. A hard claim's missing or outdated rationale is grounds to ask its owner, not permission to weaken it. Evidence methods are working choices unless a hard claim explicitly requires that method. Keep the amendment unattended and report material changes; this is correction of the agreement's implementation, not permission to waive its result. Revise Appetite only when the benefit to the requested outcome justifies the added complexity and maintenance; the revision names both and applies before broader work starts. Never amend directly or change the Outcome or a hard requirement without its source's authorization. Unclear authority must be resolved from the source before revision; if the needed decision is unavailable, report the boundary and continue independent work.

Wait for active gate evaluations to finish before amending. If an amendment races an evaluation, discard that evaluation's verdicts and evaluate the amended file. Re-read the amended Manifest. Re-verify every gate whose text, subject, or interpretation changed, including the Outcome assessment where affected and the ceiling when Appetite changes; keep other evidence only while it remains valid. Report material amendments on every terminal path and record them in the execution log when kept.

Continuation

Before implementation, including when called by /auto, resolve the absolute Manifest path and arm the completion backstop: continue under an active goal identifying this same file, or emit the goal block below verbatim, substituting <manifest-path> with the absolute Manifest path. Do not summarize, shorten, reword, or re-punctuate it. Set it through the harness's goal-setting, continuation, or durable-completion-condition capability, else print it copy-pasteable. Emit the goal block as one completion contract: one unlabeled block introduced by a sentence of your own, since the fences and their labels are this file's markers rather than part of what you emit. Where a broader parent workflow backstop is already visible and already requires evidence for the Outcome and every current gate — a PR-tend contract, say — operate under it: do not set or print a second narrower goal.

Work under the Manifest at <manifest-path> until its Outcome and every current Acceptance Criterion and Global Invariant hold, each with fresh evidence, the workflow's bounded mandatory build work is settled, and completion has been reported. Read this file before resuming execution.
 
The Manifest changes only through the skill that wrote it, never by direct edit. Working claims and evidence methods may be revised on evidence while preserving the Outcome and hard requirements; those need their source's authorization to change. Overall plan approval does not harden agent choices. A changed claim or evidence method returns affected results unverified.
 
Record compact checkpoint notes as work proceeds: what changed, what was verified, what remains, blockers.
 
Assume the user is AFK; make authorized decisions without asking questions. Surface blockers promptly and continue useful independent work. Stop after reporting completion, a blocker requiring a person when no useful independent work remains, or an external wait that this run's no-wait policy makes terminal. Continue while authorized, actionable work remains.

Corrections, debt and the verification harness