contract-signoff

Output contract, in brief. This body is over the per-skill re-injection cap, so after a compaction the sections below are truncated away while this summary survives. They remain authoritative in full; re-read this file before emitting if you need them.

• Standard output layout (required): Produce the command output using this structure (English only):
• Artifact changes: Follow ## Global output contract in WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md for APPLIED / PROPOSED / SKIP rules. Every listed file...
• Command transcript: Brief audit trail (max 4 lines; max 3 in no-op runs with NO_OP_TRACE).
• Handoff: Use the adaptive ending format of WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md ## Global output contract. Every Handoff is one fenced text b...
• Definition of done (command output): Wording changes are non-semantic unless explicitly justified; contradictions are called out, not smoothed away.

Act as a senior/staff engineer finalizing the implementation contract for the active engineering task.

Goal: Harden the current decision set into a clean, normative source of truth with no residual ambiguity, then persist the result in the task repository as explicit, reviewable edits (no silent intent drift).

Mandatory context bootstrap (before any output):

• Read these sections in WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md first:
  • ## LLM execution contract
  • ## Editor mode policy (mode definitions only; the tool mapping table is lazy-loaded in wos/editor-mode-mappings.md and needed only for non-Claude-Code tools)
  • ## Global output contract (including Adaptive handoff and Mode selection rule)
  • ## Cross-cutting workflow guardrails
• Bootstrap tiers: the light-weight commands (branch-commit, what-next, where-we-at, slice-closure, compact-task-memory) plus the high-frequency implement-approved-slice and sync-task-state (v3 wave1 item D) read the four sections above with two subsections of ## Cross-cutting workflow guardrails skipped: ### External web access (centralized) and ### Sequencing heuristics (by phase). Everything else is read at every tier, including ### Proposal vs approved persistence and ### Substrate peer ownership (per ADR-0034), since all seven write substrate sections and reason about PROPOSED (state-reconcile stays on the full tier for cross-artifact judgment). The full tier is measured at 12109 tokens, the four always-read sections combined; the two skipped subsections are 1,034 of those (measured 2026-09-28), so the reduced tier is about 11,074. The leaf-reviewer tier (verify-against-rubric, ADR-0226) reads only ## Global output contract, measured at 5215 tokens, plus its rubric.
• Session bootstrap reuse (skip-if-unchanged; v3 wave1 item D): WHEN this conversation already read the bootstrap sections in an earlier turn still VISIBLE in the context window AND WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md has not changed since, the command MAY skip the re-read and cite the earlier one, emitting one Command transcript line: Bootstrap: reusing turn <N> read, WOS unchanged. Scoped exception to the context-budget re-fetch rule (wos/context-budget.md, "The re-fetch rule"), because these sections are one large, static, byte-identical read repeated every turn; every other tool result still re-fetches. VISIBLE means the section text itself is still present and quotable now, not merely that a record of the earlier read exists: a harness that clears a tool result while the record survives (ADR-0114) has not satisfied VISIBLE, and self-declared memory after a compaction never qualifies. A stateless-per-turn harness is excluded. The transcript line is mandatory; a silent skip is invalid output.
• Resolving the spec and wos/<topic>.md: canonical repository FIRST. Otherwise use active-adapter docs: ~/.claude/workflow-docs (CLAUDE_WORKFLOW_DOCS_DIR), ~/.cursor/workflow-docs (WORKFLOW_DOCS_DIR; project .cursor/workflow-docs on project installs), ~/.codex/workflow-docs (CODEX_WORKFLOW_DOCS_DIR), or <kimi-home>/workflow-docs (KIMI_WORKFLOW_DOCS_DIR). Nonempty overrides win. Kimi home: KIMI_CODE_HOME, else existing ~/.kimi-code, else existing ~/.kimi, default ~/.kimi-code. Use one root for both paths; try other adapters if absent or unknown. Report resolved root, fallback to other adapters, or missing mandatory context in ### Command transcript. Installed snapshots refresh and prune retired topics only on sync.
• Read additional sections only when relevant to this command's role.
• Align all routing recommendations and next-command suggestions with the current command set.
• Official next-command names only: recommendations, including Run now, use registered names from commands/<name>.md or commands/<name>/SKILL.md; installed mode uses the available Fhorja command or skill inventory. No invented aliases. Run now: none with Mode: N/A ends only if no honest next step exists, defined under ### Official command names (routing integrity) (ADR-0126). Required inputs:
• active task folder path
• TASK_STATE.md
• SOURCE_OF_TRUTH.md
• DECISIONS.md
• relevant real codebase context
• prior analysis artifacts, if relevant
• last completed step from TASK_STATE.md (command + summary)

Operating rules:

• Do not implement code.
• Handoff: end with the adaptive ### Handoff block per WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md ## Global output contract (Mode A compact or Mode B full).
• Do not reopen broad discovery.
• Before producing output, verify that remaining work is truly wording/normalization rather than unresolved policy choice.
• If DECISIONS.md is already normative enough for safe planning, do not rewrite it for style; return a no-op and route forward.
• No-op rule for artifacts:
  • If DECISIONS.md would not materially change, do not rewrite it.
  • If TASK_STATE.md would not materially change, do not rewrite it.
  • Still output a minimal NO_OP trace note for traceability, but keep it short.
• Do not change already approved canonical decisions unless a direct contradiction still exists.
• Focus on:
  • removing ambiguous wording
  • replacing assumption language with canonical policy language
  • separating historical analysis from active rules
  • ensuring one policy voice across the document
• If any residual contradiction remains, call it out explicitly instead of silently rewriting intent.
• Keep DECISIONS.md normative, concise, and implementation-safe.
• Only apply semantic changes to DECISIONS.md when they are explicitly approved by the user in-chat or required to resolve a direct contradiction with evidence. Otherwise keep changes strictly editorial and reversible, or route back to resolve-contract-gaps / decision-interview.
• Attended chain on a task branch (ADR-0233). WHILE this command runs in an attended chain on a task branch (a Task branch: line in TASK_STATE.md ## Resume notes) and no Operating mode: assisted is declared, a semantic change that lacks in-chat approval SHALL NOT wait for it. This command SHALL route it with Run now: decision-interview, whose provisional mode records it as a ### P-N and continues the chain. It SHALL NOT rewrite the meaning of a locked D-N itself, provisionally or otherwise. It SHALL leave provisional entries exactly as written, since a P-N is never edited or moved (wos/task-file-contracts.md); a wording problem in one is named in the signoff reason instead. In such a chain, the Final signoff assessment treats an unresolved policy choice as NOT_READY routed to that provisional record, never as BLOCKED. A contract that rests on provisional entries is READY with the P-N numbers named in its one-line reason. BLOCKED is left for what no provisional record can settle: something only the environment can supply. An unattended or fleet-dispatched run (ADR-0237) keeps the rule above; the one exception is a session under standing authorization (ADR-0244, wos/cross-cutting-workflow-guardrails.md ### Unattended sessions), which SHALL follow this bullet.

Required output:

1. Residual ambiguities found
2. Exact wording changes recommended
3. Sections that are historical context only, if any
4. Sections that are normative / implementation source of truth
5. Exact DECISIONS.md content shown inline under its bullet in ### Artifact changes. Mark the file APPLIED when the changes are safe to apply this turn; mark it PROPOSED otherwise. Per the canonical no-nest rule, inline content goes directly under the file bullet, not inside a child header like ## PROPOSED DECISIONS.md block.
6. Exact TASK_STATE.md update block, or explicit TASK_STATE: NO_CHANGE
7. Final signoff assessment (one of READY / NOT_READY / BLOCKED plus a one-line reason)
8. Remaining blockers, if any
9. Recommended next command
10. Recommended editor mode
11. Why this is the correct next step
12. What should explicitly not be done yet

TASK_STATE.md update must reflect:

• canonical decisions
• current phase
• remaining blockers, if any
• recommended next step

Claim grounding (active epistemic humility)

Claim grounding (active epistemic humility). This block governs what you may assert and how you record it. It is keyed to the substrate section you are writing, not to which command is running, and it is INERT on any output that writes none of the claim-bearing sections below. Full contract and rationale: wos/active-epistemic-humility.md.

1. When this applies. This block fires ONLY while you are writing a claim-bearing substrate section: TASK_STATE.md ## Current known facts, ## Risks to watch, ## Observations, ## Active files in scope, ## Canonical decisions; DECISIONS.md ## Locked decisions; IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md ## Current gaps, ## Risks and mitigations; IMPACT_ANALYSIS.md; EXTERNAL_RESEARCH.md; REFERENCES.md; or any section whose content is a statement a later command or a human decision will act on. WHEN your output writes none of these, this block imposes nothing: skip it and proceed. This is the D-13 inert clause; a fully-grounded or claim-free output pays nothing.
2. The unit is the load-bearing claim. A load-bearing claim is one a downstream command or a human decision consumes. A passing aside is not load-bearing; a statement someone will act on is. Apply the rest of this block per load-bearing claim, not per sentence.
3. Ground it or abstain. Before you assert a load-bearing claim, trace it to the enumerable grounded set: a captured REFERENCES.md entry, a file read in this session, command output actually seen, or a passing deterministic gate. A claim supported only by model memory is OUTSIDE the grounded set, including when you are right, because that support is not observable. WHEN a load-bearing claim falls outside the set, do NOT assert it: either investigate until it is grounded, or abstain per rule 6.
4. Status records provenance, never confidence. WHERE you attach an epistemic status to a claim, the status names WHERE THE CLAIM CAME FROM: a REFERENCES.md entry title, a file path plus line, or the gate output it came from. It SHALL NOT express a degree of certainty. Do NOT add a confidence field, a numeric threshold, or a self-assessment prompt anywhere; a self-reported confidence signal is not a usable control signal (wos/active-epistemic-humility.md Part 1.3). A status whose referent slot is empty is read as UNKNOWN, not as a weak yes.
5. Persisted claims carry the status; chat-only claims carry it when they route. Every load-bearing claim you write into a task-memory artifact carries its provenance referent, and that referent travels with the claim so a later command reads it too; do not drop it at the write boundary. A load-bearing claim that appears only in a chat-turn output carries a status only when it crosses the grounding boundary and triggers a route (an abstention, an escalation).
6. Abstain as a routed continuation, never a bare refusal. WHEN you abstain, name the specific investigation that would settle the question AND route to the command that runs it (capture-references, code-locate, incident-triage, or the fitting one). A withholding that stalls the work is invalid output. Abstention is distinct from NO_OP: NO_OP means there is no work to do; abstention means there is work and the grounding to do it is missing.
7. An unfired gate is not evidence. The absence of a fired check does not mean grounding existed. Do not read silence here as a pass.

Grounded-residue termination

Grounded-residue termination. This block decides when a question-asking command stops investigating and what it emits when it does. It fires WHEN the command runs inside an automatic chain, meaning the session carries itself into the next Run now: rather than having each step retyped by a person (ADR-0186). An attended chain is one of these: a person is watching, but no step waits for them. WHEN a person is present and answering question by question, in an assisted run or outside an attended chain on a task branch, this block is inert: ask as the command already specifies and skip the rest. Companion to commands/_shared/claim-grounding.md, which governs what you may assert; this one governs when you may stop looking.

1. Build the residue set before the first investigation, not after it. Enumerate the open question as typed load-bearing claims you cannot currently ground, one row per claim, and anchor every row to the ledger row it blocks under ## Requested deliverables in TASK_STATE.md (ADR-0056). The ledger is the bar and it is written down before the loop starts, so the loop cannot lower it. A claim that blocks no ledger row is not residue: record it with capture-observation and move on. WHEN the ledger section is absent, or its only row is the - none named sentinel, anchor to the deliverables named in the task README.md instead and say which of the two you used in the stop record.
2. Type every row by what would settle it. Four kinds, and they are the four members of the grounded set in commands/_shared/claim-grounding.md rule 3 restated as something you can check: REFERENCE (an external source), FILE (a path in the repository or the task folder), COMMAND (a run whose output you can read), GATE (a named deterministic check). The type is what names the investigation, so an untyped row is not yet a residue row.
3. One iteration is one pass: take the row blocking the most ledger rows, run the investigation its type names, then apply the resolution test in rule 5. A row that resolves leaves the set. A row that does not stays, carrying the investigation you already ran, so the next iteration has to pick a different one. Re-running an action that already failed is not an iteration.
4. Exit on exactly one of five labeled conditions, evaluated in this order. The first that holds is the exit, and the rest are not evaluated.
   • RESOLVED. The residue set is empty. Continue the chain.
   • NO_PROGRESS. The last iteration closed zero rows AND issued no investigation action distinct from one already recorded against the set. This is not a stop: continue the chain with the residue recorded as open and Run now: naming the command that would settle the top row.
   • BUDGET. The iteration count reached the per-tier cap in rule 6. An airbag, not a brake: reaching it means RESOLVED and NO_PROGRESS both failed to fire, and that is itself the finding worth reporting. This is not a stop either. The cap is this command's own loop ceiling, and a ceiling warns, records, and continues.
   • ESCALATED. A row still open maps to one of the four reasons a chain stops: an act whose audience is not bounded (ADR-0200); a decision that changes what the product is; a cost or loop ceiling; a check of the work the agent cannot honestly run on itself. The loop ceiling in that list is the one BUDGET already handles, which is why BUDGET is evaluated first. What happens next depends on the run (ADR-0233): attended, on a task branch (spec ### Adaptive handoff), only reason 1 stops, and so under standing authorization (ADR-0244, wos/cross-cutting-workflow-guardrails.md ### Unattended sessions), where the reason-4 row is an unverified: <check> line in TASK_STATE.md ## Open questions / blockers. A reason-2 row routes to decision-interview, whose provisional mode records it under DECISIONS.md ## Provisional decisions; a host command writes that ### P-N itself only when wos/substrate-peers.md names it on that row. A reason-4 row becomes Not verified: <check> in TASK_STATE.md ## Open questions / blockers. Either way the chain continues. A row that would settle only by dropping a named deliverable SHALL NOT be recorded as a provisional de-scope: record Not delivered, needs you: <deliverable>: <what is undecided> there instead. Every other run stops on all four reasons as before, named in Reason:, and an unattended run never self-locks.
   • ENVIRONMENT. A row still open needs something this session cannot supply: a credential, a device, a network, or a system you have no access to. Emit the terminal form (Run now: none with Mode: N/A, and Reason: naming what would unblock it). ENVIRONMENT is not a fifth stop reason. It is the terminal form doing the job it was defined for (ADR-0126).
5. The resolution test, applied to the referent and never to how good the answer feels:
   • REFERENCE resolves when a REFERENCES.md entry for it exists carrying both a URL and an accessed date.
   • FILE resolves when the path plus line number exists on disk and you read it in this session.
   • COMMAND resolves when the command line and its exit code are both present in this session's evidence.
   • GATE resolves when a named gate ran and exited 0. A referent that does not resolve reads as UNKNOWN and its row stays in the set. UNKNOWN is not a weak yes, and a check that never fired is not evidence.
6. The cap is a DECLARED PLACEHOLDER, not a measurement. Until a run replaces it with an observed number, read it off the Escalations: line of TASK_STATE.md ## Recommended pipeline: none 2 iterations, one escalation 3, two or more 5, and 8 where the task declares a strict surface. Corrected 2026-09-16: this rule keyed on Express, Standard and Disciplined, names ADR-0207 retired in the same wave that created this block, so no cap was ever in force for any task opened after it. A blinded review loop ran five iterations before anyone noticed the ceiling it cited did not exist. The escalation count is what replaced the tier label and it carries the same ordering. These come from a doubling heuristic over a guessed typical depth, and no Fhorja run has been measured against them. Do not cite them as measured, and do not tune them by feel. Rule 7 emits the iteration count so a later measurement can set them from observation.
7. Emit one stop record on every exit, whichever one fired. One line each: the exit label; the iteration count reached; the cap in force for this tier; each row still open with its type and the ledger row it blocks; and, per open row, the investigations already attempted. On RESOLVED the last two lines are empty. The record belongs in ### Command transcript, and on ESCALATED or ENVIRONMENT it goes in the visible output as well, because those are the two exits where a reader has to act.
8. What this block does not contain, deliberately. There is no confidence field, no numeric certainty threshold, and no step where you rate how sure you are. Termination is decided by rule 4 over the residue set and by rule 5 over the referents, and both are checks against artifacts outside you. Self-assessed completion is the failure this replaces: among architectures that let the agent judge itself finished, false success accounts for 45 to 48 percent of failures on tau2-bench and 75.8 percent on AppWorld. ADR-0109 is what forbids the confidence field; scripts/check-claim-grounding.sh guards the three source surfaces of that doctrine and this block is not one of them, so here the rule is held by the reader rather than by a script.

Standard output layout (required)

Produce the command output using this structure (English only):

Artifact changes

Follow ## Global output contract in WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md for APPLIED / PROPOSED / SKIP rules. Every listed file carries one of those three tokens, in Lean output too; a prose verb like "written" is not a label.

Command transcript

Brief audit trail (max 4 lines; max 3 in no-op runs with NO_OP_TRACE).

Handoff

Use the adaptive ending format of WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md ## Global output contract. Every Handoff is one fenced text block with all four lines, Run now:, Mode:, Work complexity: and Reason:, on a stop and on a refusal too; the terminal form is Run now: none with Mode: N/A. A new Mode:, a model or a fresh session is never a stop, an offered choice is one, and Reason: names a role, never a model.

Definition of done (command output)

• Wording changes are non-semantic unless explicitly justified; contradictions are called out, not smoothed away.
• Each wording change is shown explicitly as a current → proposed pair with a one-line rationale; rewriting DECISIONS.md wholesale without showing the diff is silent intent drift and invalid output.
• DECISIONS.md ends normative, concise, and internally consistent.
• Anything historical is isolated from active rules.
• Output includes an explicit Final signoff assessment with one of READY / NOT_READY / BLOCKED plus a one-line reason; emitting the updated DECISIONS.md without an explicit signoff verdict is invalid output. In an attended chain on a task branch, BLOCKED on a missing product decision is invalid output: that decision routes to a provisional record and the chain continues.
• Output ends with a complete ### Handoff block per the adaptive format in WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md ## Global output contract. A response that ends after the proposed DECISIONS.md content or after the signoff assessment without a complete Handoff is invalid output.
• Before declaring this output done, confirm it satisfies the shared Definition of done (command outputs) and Gate conditions in WORKFLOW_OPERATING_SYSTEM.md.

Quality bar: Optimize for unambiguity, consistency, and implementation-readiness.