refactor: keep boundaries, drop work-generating constraints

[shinpr]

Summary

Reviews the workflow against the distinction between constraints that protect a boundary and constraints that only create work, and removes the second kind. Three passes: escalation conditions, responsibility boundaries between templates / skills / agents, and artifacts that no consumer reads.

The net effect is that agents stop for fewer things, carry less text, and record evidence in one place instead of several.

Escalation

task-executor and task-executor-frontend carried roughly twenty escalation statements across five sections, while the ENFORCEMENT rule at the end already limited escalation to a changed product outcome, a major approved design change, user-held authority, or an irreversible action. The checks above it no longer matched that rule.

Seven checks that map to those four categories remain. The rest now resolve from repository evidence and record the choice:

• Quality-standard bypasses move out of the pre-implementation judgment criteria into a positive delivery statement.
• Step 2 becomes the accepted-source rule for existing-test expectations, the one boundary in that group.
• Gray-zone examples become boundary classification feeding Step 1; similar-implementation overlap is decided by Step 3 evidence.
• Implementation Continuable is removed — its permission restated the escalation boundary rule in reverse.
• dependency_version_uncertain fires only when a concern needs a dependency or pattern the repository does not already use.

Elsewhere: acceptance-test-generator uses the budget-exception authority integration-e2e-testing already grants it instead of asking; document updates stop once at the end rather than three times; cross-layer sync stops only when conflicts remain; security-reviewer separates a missing input, which the orchestrator can supply, from committed credentials, which need user authority.

Responsibility boundaries

external-resource-context — the hearing protocol needs AskUserQuestion, which no agent has. Eight agents declared the skill and could not run it. The producer side moves to references/hearing.md for the session that can ask; consumers execute the three-step lookup inline.

documentation-criteria — the skill now answers routing only: which documents a change requires and where they live. Per-document content requirements duplicated the six templates, which every authoring agent already reads by explicit instruction, so they move there. A new What Each Document Fixes section gives the always-loaded tier each document's purpose, its downstream consumer, and what an unfilled section costs.

Generic skills — ai-development-guide, frontend-ai-guide, and implementation-approach instructed writing into named Design Doc sections. They load into agents that hold governing documents read-only, so those instructions now name the artifact the agent owns.

Skill references are cited by path throughout, matching the existing convention, so content that moved into templates stays one hop away.

Unread artifacts

• Work Plan review status: nothing wrote approved, nothing read it. Approval is the orchestrator's [Stop] gate.
• Design Summary (Meta), the Agreement Checklist scope and constraint subsections, Work Plan progress notes: no consumer, and Requirement Convergence already carries scope and non-goals. Standards, assumed behaviors, and quality-assurance mechanisms stay — they are design evidence.
• e2eAbsenceReason and budgetUsage: the first made the generator justify every correctly empty lane in prose the orchestrator then graded; the orchestrator now confirms an empty lane against the Design Doc directly. The second had no consumer at all.
• Discovery commands in recipes: they pinned a base branch, filtered for template files the workflow never creates, and described searches the model performs without instruction.

Compatibility

e2eAbsenceReason and budgetUsage are removed from the acceptance-test-generator result. The only in-repo consumer is updated in the same change. Released as a patch on that basis; anything reading that JSON externally would see a contract change.

Verification

• pnpm sync:check — all plugin subdirectories in sync
• claude plugin validate — marketplace manifest and all four plugin manifests pass
• pnpm check:skills-index — all 13 skills consistent
• Relative markdown links across skills/ resolve

🤖 Generated with Claude Code