Effort joins model as a mandatory pin: an omitted field inherits the
session effort, coupling every dispatch's thinking budget to whatever
the user happens to be chatting at (often xhigh) — the same
session-state coupling the model pin removes. The assignment follows
the model split:
- xhigh on every opus agent (judgement roles are the pipeline's
quality floor and must not degrade with the session);
- high on every sonnet agent (tightly-scoped plan execution gains
little from xhigh but pays its latency per dispatch, and these are
the per-task in-loop roles — wall-clock is the efficiency metric;
not lower than high, since re-loops cost more than saved thinking);
- medium inline in the workflow scripts for schema-bound
extraction/verification stages that author no code (preflight,
plan-extract, mini-verify, tree-check, finalize, build/suite
verify).
Workflow agent() calls pass effort explicitly on every call — whether
frontmatter effort propagates through an agentType dispatch is
undocumented, so the scripts do not rely on it. Policy documented in
docs/agent-template.md § effort, mirroring § model.
Agents and workflows previously carried no model field, so every
dispatch inherited the session model — including fable, which is
banned for all plugin agents and workflows by owner decree. Every
dispatch now pins opus or sonnet explicitly.
- opus (low-volume judgment gates whose misses silently poison
downstream work): architect, bencher, debugger, fieldtester,
grounding-check, plan-recon, quality-reviewer, spec-skeptic,
tdd-author
- sonnet (mechanical scope, in-loop or fanned out): docwriter,
glossary-extractor, implementer, spec-reviewer, synthetic-user,
tester
- workflows: all 13 agent() call sites pin a model — sonnet
everywhere except the quality-reviewer gate in implement-loop,
the loop's last correctness check (spec-reviewer only gates
task-text correspondence; real-bug finding is the documented
opus strength)
- docs/agent-template.md: model is now a mandatory frontmatter
field, with the assignment rule and the fable ban recorded
The profile was never parsed — it was prose the skill bodies told the model to read, so most slots were dead, constant across every project, or fiction (the whole pipeline block, including the "tdd is opt-in" claim, was enforced by nothing).
Split it in two: constants become fixed conventions named directly by the skills (new docs/conventions.md), and the few genuinely per-project facts move to each project's CLAUDE.md under '## Skills plugin: project facts'. tdd/fieldtest/docwriter are now always available; the only behavioural toggle left is spec auto-sign.
Delete docs/profile-schema.md and templates/project-profile.yml; add docs/conventions.md and a project-facts section to templates/CLAUDE.md.fragment; rewrite all SKILL/agent prose and the pipeline/design/migration/README/INSTALL docs accordingly.
A new opt-in alternative to the brainstorm -> planner design entry,
for work whose desired behaviour is test-specifiable. Instead of a
prose spec the user approves, `tdd` produces one minimal RED
executable-spec ("how it should work") and treats it like a bug to
be fixed: the GREEN side hands off to `implement` mini-mode, the
same two-stage RED-first handoff `debug` uses.
Skill + agent split mirrors debug/debugger: a thin SKILL.md owns
trigger, dispatch, the orchestrator-side loop, and handoff; the
agent (tdd-author) carries the authoring discipline. The agent
guards two failure modes specifically — guessing a design into a
test (a genuine design fork bounces back to `brainstorm` rather
than ratifying an un-chosen design), and pushing harder on a
headline test that won't go green (one iteration that can't reach
GREEN triggers a reactive decompose into a ladder of BLOCKER
sub-tests; two failed rounds bounce to `brainstorm`).
The boundary is the design line: `tdd` owns the work iff one honest
minimal assertion pins it; otherwise `brainstorm` reclaims it. This
is distinct from the per-task TDD the implementer already practices
inside `implement` — `tdd` authors the one headline spec above it.
Wires the phase into the docs it references:
- docs/profile-schema.md: opt-in `tdd` pipeline slot
- README.md: skill table row
- docs/pipeline.md: entry-path in the graph, phase description, skip rule
- templates/project-profile.yml: commented-out slot
install.sh picks up tdd/ automatically (top-level dir with SKILL.md).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Brummel