Accept — The Boundary Ritual

Accept fires after every pipeline step. It is the only step that writes approval records — every other step reads them. It reviews what just happened, records a disposition, writes a journal entry, and advances the phase in project-state.md.

Accept does NO git. No commit, no push, no PR, no branch operations. Git lives entirely in /genesis-closure. This separation is load-bearing: Accept records what landed; Closure moves what landed. If Accept committed, uncommitted work could masquerade as approved.

Inference

Accept infers what it is approving from context — the most recent un-approved artifact — so it usually needs no argument. Always print an inference trace so the decision is explainable:

Approving: {phase} — most recent un-approved action in {file}

If a phase is given as an argument, approve that phase explicitly.

Routing — which file gets written

Two approval layers live under .genesis/features/{feature}/approvals/:

• master.json — spec-level and feature-level phases (brainstorm, design, specify, clarify, northstar, group-accept, final audits, review).
• group-N.json — per-group work (the micro specs for group N, each spec's implementation, and the per-group audits A1–A5).

Rule of thumb: spec-level phases → master.json; per-spec implementation and per-group audits → group-N.json; group-accept closes the group but is itself a spec-level gate, so it writes to master.json.

What Accept checks before approving

1. Clean working tree

Before recording anything, verify the tree is clean:

git diff --quiet            # no unstaged changes
git diff --cached --quiet   # no staged-but-uncommitted changes

If either reports changes, refuse:

Cannot accept — working tree is dirty.
{N} files with unstaged changes, {M} files staged but uncommitted.

Accept records what landed. A dirty tree means uncommitted work is not
captured by the commit you are about to approve. Commit or stash first,
then re-run accept.

Override: --force (records the variance in the approval note).

This is the central guardrail and it is enforced by this skill itself — there is no external daemon. The rationale is the Accept/Closure split: if the tree is dirty, the thing you are approving is not what is actually committed.

2. Quality gates

If the constitution defines quality gates, run them — typically lint and tests (and a type-check or build where applicable) — and record each result. A failing gate does not auto-block: record it as fail in the gates field and let the user decide. With --force, note the failure and proceed. If the constitution defines no gates, gates is null.

3. Group-accept completeness

For a group-level accept, all in-scope audit types (A1–A5) must show clean passes in group-N.json before the group can close.

4. The Standard (rejection-default posture)

Accept does not ask "is this good enough to pass?" It asks "is there any reason NOT to accept?" The default is rejection; approval is earned by actively disproving each reason:

If any reason cannot be disproven, return revise naming the specific unmet criterion. The default holds.

The approval record

Append a record to the flat JSON array in the target file:

{
  "phase": "implement-spec-3",
  "version": "1.0",
  "status": "approved",
  "disposition": "pass",
  "timestamp": "2026-06-18T14:32:00Z",
  "approvedBy": "user",
  "gates": { "lint": "pass", "tests": "pass" },
  "group": null,
  "scope": null,
  "note": "",
  "conviction": null,
  "exclusions": []
}

Disposition → status:

Skipped stage — when a stage is deliberately skipped, carry the justification rather than silently omitting it:

"variance": { "skippedStage": "clarify", "reason": "spec is trivial, no open questions" }

The clean-tree override (--force)

--force proceeds past a dirty tree or a failing gate. There is no enforcement daemon — the override is simply a recorded variance in the note field:

clean-tree override — 2 dirty files at accept time: src/foo.ts, README.md

The legitimate use case is parallel work: a second editing session can make the tree look dirty to the one running Accept. The override closes the loop while the note keeps the trail honest. Without --force, Accept exits before writing anything.

Conviction

Conviction is an integer (0–100) attached to audit-phase approvals only — how confident the review is that the work is genuinely ready, not merely that no findings are open.

• Applies only to audit phases (A1–A5, final audits, feature review). Other phases leave conviction: null.
• Computed as the mean conviction across all findings in scope (each audit finding carries its own score). Zero findings ⇒ conviction 100.
• An optional .genesis/features/{feature}/conviction/policy.yaml defines thresholds. If absent, skip this step entirely (graceful degradation):

When prompting or stopping, show a per-audit breakdown:

Conviction Breakdown:
  A1 (design+master): 3 findings, mean 88   [OK]
  A2 (spec review):   2 findings, mean 72   [REVIEW]
  A3 (polish):        0 findings            [CLEAN]
  A4 (north star):    1 finding,  mean 65   [LOW]
  A5 (web):           0 findings            [CLEAN]
  Aggregate: 76 (below auto-pass threshold of 80)

Journal

After recording, write a plain markdown entry to .genesis/features/{feature}/journal/{date}_{time}.md:

---
feature: "{feature}"
phase: "{phase}"
scope: "{group/spec if applicable}"
date: "{ISO date}"
---

## {Phase}: {Feature}

{2–3 sentence summary of what was done}

### Decisions
- {key decision made during this phase}

### Next
{what comes next in the pipeline}

The journal is the durable record of why. It is written here, never by an automatic hook.

Advance the phase

After journaling, update project-state.md and present the next pipeline action:

• brainstorm → feature doc / specify · specify → clarify · clarify → northstar · northstar → first group's micro specs
• micro group N → next group's micro specs (if more) or implement (when all groups are written)
• implement spec → next spec, or A1 when the group's specs are done
• audit AX clean → next audit type, or group-accept after A5 is clean
• group-accept → if all groups are now accepted, the mandatory next step is F1 (never skip straight to closure); otherwise run group closure (push + PR) and move to the next group
• final audits run F1 → F2 → … in sequence; after the last, feature review, then the final closure PR

Disposition routing: revise re-runs the stage sent back; reject re-runs from an earlier phase; conditional advances like pass but exclusions stay visible.

Finally, scan the accepted artifact for actionable ideas and ingest them into the furnace (see /genesis-brainstorm and docs/concepts.md): update a matching F-NNN entry, or append a new one with status: seed.

Natural language triggers

- "accept"
- "approve this"
- "looks good, advance"
- "lock it in"