This is the skill's own repository

Development of the skill, not use of it. Reading this from inside another project means the routing went wrong: a workspace built with the skill carries its own generated guide, and that guide governs there — this file governs only work on this source tree. Runtimes load a plugin's skills, never its root guide, so the two cannot meet by accident.

The full contract is AGENTS.md — read it before changing anything of consequence, and GLOSSARY.md plus PATTERNS.md before writing prose others will read. What follows is the loop this file exists to stop anyone re-deriving once a session.

This repository is not a company Mops operates. It ships the skill; nothing here is a workspace under migration, so there is no UPGRADES.md and none is owed.

The session loop

1. Change — one home per rule, cited from everywhere else, never restated. When a rule turns out not to hold, the repair is a form, not a stronger sentence — measured here more than once. A capability ships with four things or it ships incomplete: a form where the rule can fail, a mutation test asserting what that form refuses, a scenario with the fixture it needs, and a door — AGENTS.md → What a capability owes before it ships, which carries the measurement behind each one. Missing one is a sentence in the commit message saying which and why, never a silence.
2. Lenses on anything of consequence — deletion · adversarial · contradiction · cold-read — by a reader who did not write it, each reporting even when it found nothing. Not optional for a minor or major; a patch may skip them.
3. Showcase every new mechanic where a reader will meet it: a diagram where the shape is the explanation (we draw in mermaid), a situation in USE-CASES.md, and a fact in sources/SOURCES.md when the claim is about the outside world. A wording-only change owes none of these — say so rather than inventing one. The entry's **Trio:** line is measured, not trusted: scripts/check-trio.py counts what the range since the last tag added — mermaid blocks, USE-CASES rows, register entries — and preflight §5j-bis fails a line that disagrees or that it cannot read. 0.4.18's line said situations 5 over a range that added 7, and nothing compared the two until the owner asked (2026-09-25).
4. Checks, exit codes captured first — cmd > /tmp/out 2>&1; rc=$? — then read the tail: bash scripts/preflight.sh · python3 scripts/verify.py --live · python3 scripts/fetch-source.py --verify then --verify-citations · python3 scripts/tests/test_issues_helpers.py · and every shipped guard's mutation suite — test-migration-hook.sh · test-migrate-layout.sh · test-outward-gate.sh · test-rule-home.sh · test-map-blocks.sh · test-dispatch-nudge.sh · test-preflight-checks.sh · test-native-register.sh · test-recheck-trigger.sh · test-link-names.sh · test-link-ids.sh · test-deps-report.sh · test-check-releases.sh · test-check-shelf-links.sh · test-check-trio.sh · test-verify-reads.sh. Each one's load-bearing assertion is about what its holder refuses, so a suite left out of this list is a guard nobody re-checks. Green is evidence about the corpus, never about behaviour — behaviour is the eval suite's job, and a minor or major is not tagged without evals/runs/<version>.md. Then python3 scripts/coverage-map.py and read evals/COVERAGE.md: a holder with no test and a version with no run record both show up there first.
5. Changelog entry (capability first — it is the migration map /multica-ops:upgrade reads) → bump every manifest (the sweep runs inside preflight, so a straggler fails rather than ships) → README roadmap pruned of what landed.
6. Tag — only on the owner's word (see Versioning), then the GitHub Release whose notes are the entry whole with its heading collapsed to a bare italic date.
7. Site: cd ~/Dev/ai && python3 scripts/generate.py ~/Dev/multica-ops — the generator takes the source repo as its one argument and dies on IndexError without it — then commit and push that repo too. Then watch the deploy land: it deploys continuously, so a skipped regen silently ships the previous pages against the new tag — and continuously is a habit of the integration, not a guarantee. Measured 2026-08-08: the 0.4.1 regen (e84cb2c) reached GitHub at 04:20 and Vercel never built it; production stayed on the 03:32 build until 0.4.2 pushed past it, so the site served 0.4.0 for two releases while both repos looked clean. Confirm a deployment exists for that SHA and reached READY, not that the push succeeded. A new page-worthy file needs a route in the generator first.
8. Installs on this machine: bash scripts/find-installs.sh, follow each row's route, run it again, and read the RESULT: line — that line is the canon, not a remembered count. Machines differ, installs come and go, and a runtime the script does not know yet gets added to it when met.
9. Memory: update the project memory file with what shipped and what is owed.

Versioning

The tag waits for the owner — every release, its own word. Everything before it — the entry, the bump, the checks — is preparation and may land in main; the tag, the GitHub Release, the site push and the machine re-sync happen only after an explicit yes, and an earlier yes does not roll forward to the next version. This is the skill's own law about outward acts — deploy and announce are owner-confirmed every time — applied to the one repository where it is easiest to forget.

Evidence moves without a tag; a rule moves with one. Run records, eval verdicts and dated measurements are plain commits. Anything that changes behaviour or format is a release, however small, so nothing accumulates outside versions.

Batch, don't drip — pool small fixes into one patch (AGENTS.md → When to cut a version). The exception is an urgent fix: a real block, a security or data issue ships alone.

Machine notes

• A pipe eats the exit code. preflight.sh | tail gates nothing — capture the code first, then read the output. Measured next door: a red preflight rode a green pipeline into main.
• CI runs on macOS on purpose — the same tools the release ritual runs on. A badge green on a platform nobody releases from is decoration.
• GitHub issues land as triage: read, classify, fix or decline with a reason, and close with the reasoning in a comment.