From 16756135ff2b70a47aded26e8ccf33dc249a9f17 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Craig Jennings Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:52:02 -0500 Subject: docs: file rightsizing follow-up, fix the first-person referent I filed the remaining rightsizing work as a DOING task, because what's left is decisions I haven't made rather than work to execute: whether verification.md's honesty core survives the over-verification warning, what to do with interaction.md now that it's the largest rule, whether to cut the TDD rationalization table, and which of my approval gates are preference versus guardrail. The three working docs are a commit behind the two splits, so they get reconciled first. I also fixed the first-person rule I added earlier today. It said to write in the first person without saying whose voice that is, so it read as an agent narrating work on my behalf. The "I" is mine. I'm the author of record on every commit and review in these repos and they go out under my name, so the voice is me writing about my own work, and an agent never appears in the prose as a separate party. That lives in commits.md, which is symlinked machine-wide, so it covers every project from now on. Pattern #32 in the voice skill carried the same ambiguity and now matches. I filed work's recurring-loop proposal with three findings, and work's reply corrected the weakest of them. I'd offered either a rare heartbeat or failure-breaks-silence, and both are needed: a failed subagent covers a scan-level failure, but only a heartbeat catches the scheduler dying, since then nothing spawns and there's no failure to report. CronCreate expires recurring jobs after seven days, so a fully silent loop is guaranteed to die quietly. The session archive covers the day. Always-loaded rules went from about 57,800 tokens to 28,949, path-scoping and the de-duplication were both confirmed against a live session, and two bugs in my own tooling turned up, one of which had killed a work session mid-flight. --- todo.org | 43 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 43 insertions(+) (limited to 'todo.org') diff --git a/todo.org b/todo.org index d50cb29..867b920 100644 --- a/todo.org +++ b/todo.org @@ -39,6 +39,49 @@ Tags are assigned and refreshed by =task-audit=; =task-review= keeps them honest * Rulesets Open Work +** DOING [#B] Finish context-engineering rightsizing :refactor: +:PROPERTIES: +:LAST_REVIEWED: 2026-07-27 +:END: +Started 2026-07-27 from three Anthropic posts Craig supplied. Always-loaded rules went from ~57,800 tokens to ~28,949, plus 13,461 path-scoped. Shipped: =paths:= frontmatter on the three file-type rules, the per-project generic-rule de-duplication, =commits.md= split into a 2,804-token invariant core plus the =publish= skill, =testing.md= split into a 347-word directive plus the =testing-standards= skill, the approval-gate signal fixed from =.ai/=-tracking to remote host, and the first-person directive. + +*What remains is Craig's decisions, not execution.* Each of these needs him: + +1. *C1 — =verification.md= (3,388 tok).* The Opus 5 guide says explicit verification instructions cause over-verification and should be removed. His standing direction is never guess, always check. My read: the honesty core (don't claim a green suite you didn't run) stays and shortens, the process injection (green baseline, suite-as-its-own-step) moves to the publish skill. His call — and it's the rule closest to a preference he's stated outright. +2. *=interaction.md= (3,828 tok, now the largest).* Carries genuinely universal output constraints (no popup menus, no reverse-video markup) plus the new peer-reasoning contract. Splitting it means deciding which parts must fire on every turn. +3. *The TDD rationalization table.* Moved to =testing-standards= rather than cut. The posts argue that kind of over-argument is counterproductive on current models. Deleting his defense against me skipping TDD is his call. +4. *D3 — the gate separation.* Which approval gates are preference (he wants to see what goes out under his name) versus guardrail (written when the worst case was worse). They read identically in the files; only he can tell them apart. Highest-leverage input remaining. + +*Do first:* the three docs in =working/context-engineering-rightsizing/= are one commit behind — they were corrected at d74d98d, before the two splits and the gate fix. Reconcile before deciding anything from them. + +Risk on the record: =testing.md='s margin is thinner than =commits.md='s. If =testing-standards= fails to trigger mid-test-writing the mocking-boundary rules are lost — a quality regression, visible in review, but a real bet where =commits.md='s moved half was purely procedural. + +** TODO [#B] Recurring-loop mechanics as a shared rule :feature: +:PROPERTIES: +:LAST_REVIEWED: 2026-07-27 +:END: +Work proposes promoting the pattern behind its 2026-07-27 auto-mode triage-intake into a standing rule covering all recurring agent tasks: fixed interval via =CronCreate= rather than dynamic self-pacing, a subagent per firing so raw scan output never reaches the orchestrator, silence with no heartbeat when subagent-backed, and accumulate-don't-mutate between closes with explicit "close the X" / "stop the X" verbs. Likely touches =triage-intake.org= auto mode, =inbox.org= monitor mode, and a new short rule in =claude-rules/= so individual workflows point at one definition of cadence, isolation, and silence. + +Points 1, 2, and 4 mostly promote existing practice. Point 3 changes documented behavior and needs a real decision. Three findings from the skeptical review, all to resolve before this ships: + +1. *Point 1 is too absolute.* Fixed interval is the right default, but not the right universal. A loop waiting on unpredictable external state (a CI run, a deploy queue) should pace to how fast that state actually changes, which is what dynamic scheduling exists for. Write it as "default to a fixed interval; use dynamic pacing only when polling external state whose timing you can't predict." +2. *Point 2 collides with a standing instruction.* Craig's harness prompt says not to spawn subagents unless he requested it. Making subagent-per-firing the standing pattern needs that reconciled explicitly — the honest reading is that asking for the loop *is* the request, and the rule should say so rather than leaving two instructions to fight. The isolation argument itself is sound and matches the Opus 5 guidance (delegate for genuinely independent, sizeable work). +3. *Point 3 has a silent-failure hole.* Removing the heartbeat means a loop that died looks exactly like a loop quietly finding nothing. "The subagent completing is proof it ran" only holds if a *failed* subagent still surfaces. Either keep a rare heartbeat (hourly, not per-fire) or specify that failure always breaks silence. Suppressing success is fine; suppressing failure is not. + +Also underspecified: what counts as "signal" for a subagent-backed loop. And the silent-until-signal spec (=docs/specs/2026-07-20-silent-until-signal-monitors-spec.org=, IMPLEMENTED) documents the per-fire heartbeat, so it needs a superseding history line rather than a silent contradiction. + +*** 2026-07-27 Mon @ 16:55 Work accepted all three findings and sharpened point 3 + +Work agreed without pushback and corrected my either/or on point 3, which was too weak. Both mechanisms are needed, not one: a failed or hung subagent breaking silence covers a *scan-level* failure, but only a periodic heartbeat catches the *scheduler* dying — because in that case nothing spawns at all and there is no failure to report. Heartbeat rare (hourly), not per-fire. + +The live consequence makes it urgent rather than theoretical: =CronCreate= auto-expires recurring jobs after seven days, so any fully-silent loop is *guaranteed* to die quietly. Work's auto-triage loop is running under exactly that contract right now. + +Work also added the reason that makes point 2's carve-out principled and should go in the rule text: the subagent exists to keep N sources' worth of raw scan output out of the orchestrator across a multi-hour loop, not to parallelize. + +Craig's call on point 3 is pending; work is surfacing it and will send the answer. + +Source: work handoff 2026-07-27 14:51, reply 16:55. + ** TODO [#B] Sentry triage split — work mail and messengers in, personal mail out :bug: :PROPERTIES: :LAST_REVIEWED: 2026-07-27 -- cgit v1.2.3