Patterns — the shapes this system reuses

Twenty-seven recurring forms, each named once. A rule that instantiates a pattern cites it and stops; it does not restate the reasoning. That is the whole point: a pattern named once and cited nine times is a form, and nine paraphrases are prose.

Why this file earns its place. The corpus arrived at the same shape repeatedly under different words — the resolution cascade appeared in nine places, "store the atom" in seven, "provenance is mandatory" in seven. Every paraphrase is a copy that can drift, and §1.4 says a rule in two files goes stale in one of them.

The meta-rule above all of these: form beats prose, and this was measured, not argued. The 2.4.4 regression gate found prose the mid tier ignored until it was re-formed into structure. So when a rule does not hold, the repair is a form — a list, a required field, a gate — never a stronger sentence.

Adding a pattern: it enters when the same shape appears in three places under different names. Two is a coincidence; three is a form. Same evidence bar as making a skill.

Resolution and inheritance

1 · Resolution cascade. Settings resolve project → team → role → task, most specific wins, each setting declares which rungs it has, and the resolved value is recorded on the run so "why did it cost that" is answerable afterwards. Applies to: model · effort · fast · pipeline · project guide · spec mode · attention preset · skills · resources · terseness. Why the "declares its rungs" clause: a pipeline has no role rung — it belongs to the work, not the worker — and stating that as a declaration rather than an exception keeps the pattern whole.

2 · One-way tightening, and loosening only by grant. A lower level may only raise the bar. Loosening is not a setting but a grant — {right, grantee, scope, duration} — that expires by itself and is visible while it lives. Why: a setting rots quietly; a grant announces its own death. The only value a gate has is that it is believed. Applies to: attention presets · the project guide · one-time passage of a destructive gate.

3 · Own → group → project. Effective sets resolve in that order and are recorded on the run. Inheritance is additive by default; removal is an explicit, named subtraction, never a silent replacement — because a replacement loses whatever the group adds next month, and nobody notices. Applies to: skills · resources · guide rules.

Truth and derivation

4 · Store the atom, derive the rest. Measure once, at the smallest event; never store rollups — they drift the moment anything is edited. Applies to: progress · cost · team membership · the inverse side of a relation · the board · the roster · the usage cache. Corollary: a derived cache is not a record. It may live outside markdown and outside git, because deleting it loses nothing.

5 · One side stored, the other generated. "I am blocked by X" is a property of me, so it lives in my file; X shows it in a generated block. Why: storing both sides guarantees drift the first time someone edits one and forgets the other. Applies to: relations · team membership · cited-by in the source register.

6 · Generated surfaces are views, never sources. Markdown between markers, rewritten only by its generator, carrying a generated-file header. No rule lives only in a generated surface — including a diagram, because agents read the prose and only humans read the picture. Applies to: board · roster · progress · children lists · changelog · analytics · diagrams.

7 · Generate the index, don't maintain it. A frozen list ages faster than anything around it; generate it or search for it. Applies to: awesome-{topic} instead of a frozen catalogue · a code graph instead of a hand-kept map · the board · the roster.

Time and change

8 · Ages like a request. Anything pending carries its age and surfaces past a threshold, because a wait nobody chased and a wait everybody forgot look identical from outside. Applies to: requests · waiting_on · escalations · grants · an owner-assigned task · favourites.

9 · Nothing transitions itself (the law is in SKILL.md). All children done does not close the parent; a slipped task does not move a date. Each surfaces as ready and waits. Why: automatic transitions are how boards begin to lie. The one honest exception: a parent with no DoD of its own is a folder, and closing an empty folder asserts nothing — it may close itself, and the fact that it did is recorded.

10 · Effect at the next boundary, never mid-flight. A change to the machinery applies to the next dispatch; work in flight finishes on the bytes it started with. Applies to: settings · guide edits · skill versions · autonomy presets.

11 · Check-date, not a tick. Every recorded fact that can change carries when it was verified; past its recheck it is unknown, not fine. Applies to: the tooling register · catalogue rows · sources · facts quoted inside tasks.

12 · Distil at rotation. Compression happens inside the rotation step, so "we'll compress it someday" is not expressible. Applies to: threads · archives · DM attachments.

Evidence and honesty

13 · Provenance is mandatory. Origin · when · who · what version. Without it an upgrade cannot tell what it is updating and an audit cannot tell what is old. Applies to: skills · resources · sources · persona consent · external pointers · catalogue rows · imported templates.

14 · Every thing carries its why. A resource without it is a bookmark; a declared field without it is filled inconsistently within a month; a batch line without it is ceremony. Applies to: resources · declared custom fields · pipelines · mentions · batch operations.

15 · Evidence, not verdicts. A tool that pattern-matches produces findings, and a clean report is not approval while a flag is not a rejection. Who decides what a finding means is named separately. Applies to: import scanners · skill-quality signals · synthetic reactions · cost slices.

16 · Honest enforced_by. Every gate declares what actually holds it: request · validator · host · prose-only — and the rules that are deliberately not gates are listed by name. Why: a gate believed in but not enforced is worse than a stated rule, because it buys false confidence. The four lenses are the compensating control for everything prose-only.

17 · Three-way compare on drift. Theirs changed · ours changed · both — surfaced with options, never silently merged. Applies to: external resources · tracker checkout · generated-block hashes · migration · a template against its upstream. Corollary: hashes are over content, never over modification time.

Interaction

18 · The bridge. A conversation with an open outcome. Most exchanges end in an answer and leave no footprint; the ones that cross the bridge ("let's build it") seed work and leave the conversation as it was. No mode to switch, no third container. Applies to: DM → task · task thread → subtask · consultation → project · audit finding → task.

19 · Address the group, never the guessed person. The caller states what and why; the group's routing rule decides who. Several may answer a question; exactly one may hold an assignment. Why: the caller should not need to know the roster, which is what lets the roster change without rewriting every mention.

20 · Push, don't wait. A thing that has just arrived is offered to whoever it plausibly serves, at that moment, instead of sitting on a shelf until someone thinks to look. Applies to: new resources · advice one step ahead · a dependency update · a ripe deferred item.

21 · Earned, never reflexive. State notices its own consequences and says so while it is still cheap — but only when it follows from the state, at most two options, one concrete sentence, one nudge each, never nagging. Why: the value of a suggestion is inversely proportional to how often one appears. Applies to: the next action · settings noticing their own friction · deferred items ripening · leading indicators.

Growth

22 · Twice is the evidence bar. Once is a task, twice is a pattern, and "we might need it" is neither. Naming both occasions is part of the proposal. Applies to: making a skill · adding a project-specific guard · raising a tooling need to a task · adding a pattern to this file.

23 · Promote what outgrew itself; don't nest deeper. When a part needs parts of its own, it stops being a part. Seen mid-flight, the promotion is offered by name — the destination and what carries over — never reported as status → ./checking. Applies to: milestone → release · subtask → task · companion → skill · task resource → project resource.

24 · Budget declared at birth, expressed as a share. The cost is stated when the thing is created, as a fraction of the window rather than a fixed number, because windows differ and the real question is how much room is left for the work. Applies to: a skill's core_budget · a role's always-loaded weight · the project envelope. Corollary: raising a budget is a decision with a stated cost, never a reflex; the first moves are move, don't squeeze.

25 · One position on a ladder, not a row of switches. Where a set of things is ordered by a single property, the choice is where to cut it — one value to state, resolve and change — rather than one boolean each. The ordering carries the reasoning, so the setting does not have to. Applies to: which layers land in the repository · the tool selection ladder · evidence rungs · the escalation ladder. Corollary: the cut implies a fan-out — every whole-project operation resolves the destinations first, then acts on each, and one it cannot reach stops the operation instead of being skipped. Deletion, audit, handover, search and release are all this same shape.

26 · The shape of a choice is decided before the choice is put. Three shapes, and picking the wrong one is its own defect independent of getting the substance right. Readable from the ground → read it, never ask (is there a repo, is it theirs, is it empty). A default is defensible → state it as a filled-in form with the recommendation already chosen, needing a nod, not an answer. No default is defensible → a real choice, at most two options, each with its consequence named. Applies to: where the record lands · where the code lives · the two hard gates · a fix with alternatives · a tool decision. Why: measured — an eval found the same run over-asking (three open questions where the defaults were already written in the prose beside them) and under-offering (one plan presented where two were called for). Substance was right in both; only the shape was wrong.

27 · Radical transparency: the record says how, not only what. Anything that produced a result is named on the result — the model, the effort, the tools driven, the subprocesses spawned and their tiers, the rung of every claim, and what actually enforces a rule. Where something is unknown or unenforced, that is stated rather than omitted, because an omission reads as a negative and a stated gap reads as a fact. Applies to: the run record · a thread entry · a decision · a review verdict · enforced_by · the runtime profile · a persona's output · the prose-only list. Why: every one of these was added after the same failure — a result that could not be priced, repeated or argued with, because how it was reached had not been written down. The cost of the field is one line; the cost of not having it is that the answer becomes unfalsifiable.