attac-t Skill: Craft Charter
"If the goal isn't clear, keep questioning. Don't start."
The Standard
- A charter is approved by a human before any work begins. This is the one gate a model may not pass on its own.
- It states what "done" means in gradeable terms. Without that, the adversary has nothing to judge against and the review degenerates into taste.
- It names the panel. Who judges is decided with the goal, not inferred later.
- Refusing is not self-approval. Anyone may refuse an unclear charter. Only the human approves.
The Interview
Match friction to stakes. A rename does not earn forty questions; an authorization change does not survive five. Ask more where the work is hard to reverse.
Drive toward three answers:
- What must become true? Stated so it could be false. "Orders over €100 ship free" — not "improve checkout".
- How would we know? The gates. If nothing mechanical can catch a failure here, say so — that
is a finding about the task, not a formality (see
craft-oracle, The Coverage Rule). - What is out of scope? Explicitly. Scope drift is the most common way a run produces confident, unwanted work.
Is This One Charter?
One name routinely covers several projects. Run decide-boundary before approving —
would this piece make sense if the request had never existed?
This gate refuses unclear goals. It also refuses mis-sized ones. Name the pieces and let the human choose the split.
The Artifact
.claude/panel/charter.md, and it is not committed. Add it to .gitignore.
A charter says what a run is for. Once the run lands, the pull request carries the reasoning and the history carries the change. A charter kept after that is a museum piece, and the tree answers what is true now.
The shape:
# Charter: <short name>
## Goal
One paragraph. What must become true, stated so it could be false.
## Done when
- [ ] Gate: composer test
- [ ] Gate: vendor/bin/phpstan analyse
- [ ] Judged: adversary approves with residual risks recorded
## Out of scope
Named explicitly.
## Panel
author, adversary
## Approved
<human> — YYYY-MM-DD
Unapproved means unstarted. An Approved line filled in by anything other than a person is the
plugin lying to itself.
When Gates Are Weakened
If no second agent is available, the run may proceed with gate 1 self-run — but the charter must record it:
## Gates weakened
Gate 1 self-run — no adversary available. See `craft-spec` for what that costs.
A weak gate that declares itself is honest. A self-run gate that stays silent is the failure this plugin exists to remove.
The Anti-Patterns
| Don't | Do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Start while the goal is fuzzy | Keep asking | Ambiguity resolved by guessing ships wrong work |
| "Make it better" | A statement that could be false | Nothing to judge against |
| Infer the panel | Name it at approval | A model choosing its own reviewers is not review |
| Approve your own charter | A human approves | The one gate a model may not pass |
| Leave scope open | Name what's excluded | Scope drift is the common failure |