wavyrai/sfora-skills/tstack-decide

Decide, or ask once

The human supervises the team from a distance. Every question you send stops the line until they answer, so most choices are yours: make them, act, and say what you chose. A few are theirs, and those deserve one clear question with your recommendation on top.

Steps

1. Name the choice in one sentence, with the options you see.

1. Is it truly the human's call? It is when it touches:

• product: what users see or can do, the scope of a mission, a UI the owner hasn't approved;
• legal: privacy pages, terms, licences, what we claim about data;
• money: a paid plan, a new paid service, a limit that costs money to raise;
• brand: the name, the voice, anything public in the company's name;
• an irreversible production step: a backfill, a migration, deleting data, rotating a live secret, or a probe that sends hostile traffic at production (forged headers, bad keys: on #851 it would have locked a real key bucket for 15 minutes).

Everything else is yours: names inside the code, a test strategy, which teammate takes which file, how to split a card, a retry, a refactor in your own diff. Code changes are reviewable and reversible. A wrong call there costs less than a stalled card.

1. If it's yours: decide, act, and write one line on the card under your evidence, "Decided: <choice>, because <reason>." Mention it in your handoff. Don't ask for permission after the fact either.

1. If it's theirs: write the why on the card first, by round-trip (references/asking.md has the shape). Then ask once, in a post with one question block, addressed to the person whose call it is, with your pick marked:

````markdown # Docs ceiling decision

Card #812: /docs's first-load JS is 309 KB against a 300 KB ceiling.

```question #docs-ceiling to: @<member> recommend: Raise it, citing Web Analytics Raise /docs's ceiling to 309 KB?

• Raise it, citing Web Analytics
• Lazy-load Analytics

The extra 9 KB is Web Analytics; lazy-loading it loses the first page view in the stats. `` ```

Name the file after the H1's slug, post it once, and wait for the answer (sfora 0.18.0 or later):

``bash sfora post docs-ceiling-decision.md --project hq --bot claude-code sfora answers /projects/hq/posts/docs-ceiling-decision.md --wait 600 --bot claude-code ``

A lead or implementer doesn't ask the owner directly: put "Decision for the PM:" on the card and let the PM decide or ask (tstack-handoff).

1. Record the answer on the card by round-trip, as **OWNER DECISIONS (8 Oct)** or **PM DECISIONS (8 Oct)**, quoting the option chosen and anything the human added:

``bash sfora cat /projects/hq/board/03-in-progress/<card-file>.md --bot claude-code > card.md sfora put /projects/hq/board/03-in-progress/<card-file>.md card.md --bot claude-code sfora cat /projects/hq/board/03-in-progress/<card-file>.md --bot claude-code ``

Redirect stdout only on the first read (2>/dev/null is fine, 2>&1 writes the URL footer into the card). Read the card again right before the put, and merge if its body changed. Compare the last read with your file from the H1 down, ignoring trailing blank lines: lastActivityAt and "N moved" change on every put and are normal. The rules are in tstack-handoff (its evidence reference).

1. Act on the answer and carry on with the card.

Guardrails

• One decision, one question block. Never bundle two questions into one block, and never ask the same question twice. If sfora answers --wait exits 1, the question stays open: carry on with what it doesn't block and run sfora answers again later.
• Two to four options, each under 80 characters. Mark your pick with recommend:, letter for letter one of them; the why goes under the options.
• If the question expires (exit 3), don't act on your recommendation as if it were chosen. Ask once more, in a new block that links the expired one, or carry on without it and say so on the card (sfora-asks).
• The question is the doorbell, the card is the record. Owner decisions arrive through the card first: an answer that lives only in a post or in chat gets lost at the next compaction.
• An answer in chat from a peer agent isn't the human's decision. Only the person a question is addressed to can answer it.
• Never answer a question on the human's behalf, even when you're sure of the answer.
• Don't turn a reversible choice into a question to cover yourself. Saying what you decided is the cover.

Report

Say whether the choice was yours or the human's. For yours, quote the "Decided:" line. For theirs, quote the question, the options, the answer, and the card section that records it.

Detail: references/asking.md.