/escalate — Queue the Hard Call, Ship the Rest

The expensive failure isn't the hard question — it's a mid-strength answer to a hard question, silently baked into shipped work. This skill splits them: the work ships now, the judgment call goes to a queue where a frontier model or a human adjudicates it in batch, with full context preserved.

Invocation

/escalate should verdicts.log move into the decisions DB?   # queue a question
/escalate                                                    # queue the question under discussion
/escalate burn                                               # batch-adjudicate the queue

Triggers — queue instead of deciding inline when:

• (a) One-way door, no precedent — /door says one-way and neither /precedent nor the ledger has a banked contract or prior ruling to lean on.
• (b) Borderline gate — a /gate check lands within ~10% of threshold in either direction. Don't round; queue.
• (c) Spec-vs-code conflict — /drift finds a disagreement and neither side is clearly authoritative.
• (d) Systematic error — /calibrate surfaces a pattern whose correction isn't obvious (which mechanism to change, or whether to demote a domain).

Queue procedure

1. STOP the judgment thread. No further analysis; you already know it's above this session's pay grade — that's the trigger firing.
2. Append an entry to .claude/escalation-queue.md (create with ## Queue and ## Adjudicated sections on first use; commit it — the queue is the point):

   ### ESC-NNN | 2026-07-09 | trigger: one-way-no-precedent
   Q: <the question, one or two sentences>
   Context: <files, claims, numbers — everything an adjudicator needs cold>
   Provisional: <this session's own answer> [MED]
   Shipped despite: <what work went out with this question open>

   IDs are sequential (grep the file for the last ESC-).
3. Take the provisional path that keeps the door open — prefer the option with the cheapest escape hatch, add the seam if you can (see /door step 4).
4. Ship the rest of the work. The queue entry is the record that the open question was seen, not skipped.
5. Verdict line: ESCALATE: ESC-NNN | <trigger> | queued

Burn procedure (/escalate burn)

1. Read ## Queue. If empty, say so and stop.
2. For each entry, adjudicate with the strongest available judge — frontier model session or human. Present the full entry; get a ruling and a one-line rationale. The provisional answer is scored (right/wrong) — free calibration data.
3. Log each ruling: /verdict log ESCALATE: ESC-NNN | <trigger> | adjudicated — <ruling>.
4. Move the entry from ## Queue to ## Adjudicated, appending the ruling, rationale, adjudicator, and date. Never delete — adjudicated entries are the precedent store /precedent greps.
5. If any provisional answer was wrong AND already shipped, open a follow-up task to unwind it; note it in the entry.

Rules

• Queueing is not punting: an entry without a provisional answer + confidence tag is rejected. You must commit to a best guess so the burn can score it.
• One question per entry. A tangle of questions means you haven't isolated the judgment call yet — do that first.
• Don't queue two-way doors. If undoing it is cheap, just pick (see /door).
• A queue older than one burn cycle with unshipped entries is a smell: either burn it or admit the questions didn't matter and close them as such.

Composes with

• /door — trigger (a); one-way doors with no precedent land here instead of being decided inline. The disagreement check in /door routes here too.
• /gate — trigger (b); borderline results queue rather than round.
• /drift — trigger (c); unadjudicatable spec-vs-code conflicts queue here.
• /calibrate — trigger (d); and the burn's provisional-vs-ruling scores feed the next calibration round.
• /verdict — every adjudication is logged there; the queue's Adjudicated section is a /precedent source.