Skills/docs/design.md

Design

Why split plugin from project

The skills system originally evolved inside the AILang project, where it grew organically against AILang's specific paths, build commands, vocabulary, and contracts. Lifting it into a plugin requires a clean separation between what is universal (belongs in the plugin) and what is project-specific (belongs in the project's CLAUDE.md).

The litmus test: would a sentence in a SKILL or agent body still make sense in a Python web project, a Rust CLI, and a TypeScript library? If yes, plugin. If it mentions cargo, crates/, docs/design/INDEX.md, Form A, or any project-specific identifier, it goes to the project's CLAUDE.md — either as a project fact (the few mechanical facts the skills consume) or as sittenkodex (domain contracts, anti-patterns).

There is no separate profile file. An earlier design had a per-project dev-cycle-profile.yml, but it was never parsed — it was prose the skill bodies told the model to read, and almost every slot was constant across projects, dead, or derivable. So the constant parts became fixed conventions (conventions.md) and the genuinely-varying parts moved into each project's CLAUDE.md.

Plugin layer (universal)

The plugin owns:

• Pipeline form — the directed graph of phases: design → plan → execute → review → close, entered through a selector cascade of entry paths walked on a verification / enumeration axis (observed bug → debug; design fork → brainstorm; behaviour-preserving type/signature edit → compiler-driven; test-specifiable → tdd; else → spec-driven). The taxonomy of paths and their oracles lives in pipeline.md § The methodology taxonomy.
• Hard-gates — spec before plan, plan before implement, audit before cycle-close. Skipping rules are codified per skill.
• Agent template — every agent file follows the same structure: frontmatter (name, description, tools), Iron Law, standing reading list, numbered process, status protocol, output format, common rationalisations, red flags.
• TDD as an independent inner-loop discipline — the implementer agent carries TDD even when the plan task forgot to script a RED-first step.
• RED-first bug fixes — non-negotiable for any observable misbehaviour; the debug skill is the gate.
• Status protocol — DONE / DONE_WITH_CONCERNS / PARTIAL / BLOCKED / NEEDS_CONTEXT, plus reviewer-specific terminal states.
• Working-tree-as-quarantine — agents write artefacts to the working tree, never commit. Only the orchestrator commits.
• main HEAD sacrosanct — no reset, no revert, by any actor. main moves forward only via orchestrator commits.
• No nested subagent dispatch — a hard Claude Code platform constraint: an agent cannot spawn further agents. Workflows do not lift it; a workflow script orchestrates from the top level, and the agents it spawns still cannot spawn further agents. This is exactly why the autonomous execution loops moved onto the Workflow substrate: the implement-loop and compiler-driven-edit scripts (implement/workflows/) run the per-phase agents as their own top-level agent() calls, so a single phase is independently invokable — which retired the former implement-orchestrator agent's inline-role-switch workaround (it had to absorb the three phases into one context precisely because it could not nest). The four phase agents survive as the agent-types the scripts dispatch; what was retired is the dispatch/aggregation prose. The interactive paths (specify, brainstorm) stay prose skills — their oracle is human intent and needs a human in the loop, which a run-to-completion workflow cannot host.
• No orphan agents — every agent lives under the skill that dispatches it.
• Output budget discipline — agents have word budgets on their reports.

Fixed conventions (universal)

The constants that used to be configurable but were the same in every project are now plugin conventions, named directly in skill and agent bodies and documented once in conventions.md: spec dir docs/specs, plan dir docs/plans, 4-digit per-directory naming, the vocabulary cycle / iteration / milestone / contract, standing reading (CLAUDE.md + git log -10), git discipline (only-orchestrator commits, main sacrosanct), Gitea + closes #N, and the whole pipeline graph (see pipeline.md).

Specs and plans are ephemeral active-cycle artefacts — the two directories stay git-tracked and hold only what is in flight; at cycle close each is git rm'd from the repo, kept only in git history, never as a durable file (see conventions.md § Lifecycle).

Project facts (project-specific)

The handful of facts that genuinely vary per project live in the project's CLAUDE.md under ## Skills plugin: project facts: code roots, build / test / lint / doc-build commands, regression scripts, architect sweeps, design-ledger / glossary / contracts / models / bench / public-interface / fieldtest-examples paths, by-role standing reading, and the issue-tracker repo slug and commands. The template is in ../templates/CLAUDE.md.fragment; the per-fact reference is the table in conventions.md.

Resolution model

The plugin uses convention-and-fact prompts, not template rendering and not a config parser. Each SKILL.md and agent file is generic prose that either names a fixed convention directly or points at a project fact:

Write the spec to docs/specs. Use the project's build command (its CLAUDE.md project facts).

The project's CLAUDE.md is always in context (it is standing reading #1), so the model resolves the facts at read-time. This avoids a build step and keeps a single source of truth in the repo.

Sittenkodex split

The plugin does not carry project-specific anti-patterns, feature-acceptance gates, or domain contracts. Those belong in the project's own CLAUDE.md. The plugin only carries the universal discipline constants (only-orchestrator commits, main sacrosanct, no orphan agents, agents-don't-call-agents) which are conditions for the plugin's own correctness.

The relationship:

• Plugin (this repo): mechanics, universal discipline, fixed conventions
• Project CLAUDE.md: project facts — the few mechanical facts the skills consume (code roots, build/test, tracker slug, …) — plus sittenkodex (domain-specific anti-patterns and acceptance criteria)

What's out of scope for this plugin

• Issue-tracker integration: the plugin reads the project's issue-tracker commands (the repo slug, list command, and single-issue-with-comments command, all in its CLAUDE.md project facts) and invokes them, and specify may post a reconciliation comment or create a seeding issue via the tracker's comment / create commands — but the plugin does not directly call Gitea / GitHub / Linear APIs. Every read and write goes through the configured shell command, so the plugin remains transport-agnostic.