Preflight

Clean Room Preflight

Create or validate preflight-goal.json before active clean-room artifacts start.

Preflight stops after a canonical preflight-goal.json is created or validated. Do not create behavior specs, handoff packages, skeleton manifests, implementation plans, coverage ledgers, or clean-run-context artifacts during preflight.

Use the canonical clean-room workflow and read skills/clean-room/references/PREFLIGHT.md when collecting missing goal details. Preserve the clean-room boundary: preflight-goal.json is a controller/contaminated-side artifact and must not be placed in clean-role readable roots.

If the user provides output from CLI clean-room-skill init (or npx clean-room-skill@latest init if the binary is not available), check the generated bootstrap scaffold before creating or copying preflight-goal.json: clean-room-bootstrap.json, contaminated/, clean/, the implementation root, quarantine/, target repo .clean-room/README.md, .clean-room/.gitignore, and .clean-room/local-state.json must exist and agree. In the project layout the task root sits at <base>/<project>/tasks/<task-id>/, the implementation root is the shared project-level implementation/, and clean-room-project.json must exist at the project root. Treat target-repo .clean-room/tasks/ as noncanonical unless explicitly configured; active artifacts belong in the external task root. Treat that scaffold as convenience output only; it is not an active preflight-goal.json, init-config.json, task-manifest.json, or clean-run-context.json.

Required Contract

Record these decisions:

• End goal, success definition, destination kind, and existing destination handling.
• Target stack: language, runtime, framework, package manager, and test framework.
• License and dependency policy, including blocked licenses, blocked dependencies, and native dependency approval.
• Compatibility policy: public behavior/API exactness only. Private structure, comments, and internal names must not be mirrored.
• Feature policy: preserve, remove, add, and non-goals.
• Code hygiene policy: file line caps, max files per iteration, split strategy, exceptions, and forbidden patterns.
• Output policy: artifact base root, implementation root, assumed output directory, and write mode.
• Controller policy: attended or unattended, iteration cap, and whether unattended is allowed after preflight.
• Intent confirmation: intent_confirmation with explicit-user-answer sources for end goal, target stack, and controller mode, plus user-facing summaries of the goal and target stack.
• Open questions, with blocking questions clearly marked.

The artifact must use the canonical preflight-goal.schema.json shape. Required top-level keys are goal_id, created_at, end_goal, target_stack, license_policy, dependency_policy, compatibility_policy, feature_policy, code_hygiene_policy, output_policy, controller_policy, and open_questions. Completed preflight inputs and unattended contracts also require intent_confirmation.

Reject non-canonical or legacy-shaped preflight artifacts instead of treating them as complete. Do not accept invented fields such as version, created, source, destination, exactness_policy, output_policy.artifact_base, output_policy.contaminated_root, output_policy.clean_root, or output_policy.quarantine_root as substitutes for canonical fields. Report the missing or invalid canonical fields and stop for review.

Mode Rules

Attended runs may continue with recorded open_questions, but each blocking question becomes a pause gate before the affected work starts.

Unattended runs require a complete preflight-goal.json with:

• controller_policy.mode: "unattended"
• controller_policy.unattended_allowed_after_preflight: true
• finite controller_policy.max_iterations
• intent_confirmation showing the end goal, target stack, and controller mode came from explicit user answers
• empty open_questions

Do not infer end goal, target language, runtime, framework, package manager, test framework, license, dependency policy, exactness policy, output directory, or feature add/remove policy from source code. If the user's end goal or target stack is unknown, leave blocking open_questions, keep unattended disabled, and do not write runner-ready task-manifest.json or clean-run-context.json.

CLI Helper

Use clean-room-skill init or npx clean-room-skill@latest init to create bootstrap scaffolds before this step. Project layout is canonical: ~/Documents/CleanRoom/<project>/tasks/<task-id>/ holds per-task contaminated/, clean/, and quarantine/, while ~/Documents/CleanRoom/<project>/implementation/ is shared by every task in that project. Do not accept hand-created folders as a bootstrap substitute.

Use the preflight CLI (clean-room-skill if installed, or npx clean-room-skill@latest as fallback) only for template creation or validation/copying:

The safest path is clean-room-skill preflight --template for drafts and clean-room-skill preflight --input for completed contracts.

clean-room-skill preflight --template --output ~/Documents/CleanRoom/task-xxxxxxxx/contaminated/preflight-goal.json
clean-room-skill preflight --input ./preflight-goal.json --output ~/Documents/CleanRoom/task-xxxxxxxx/contaminated/preflight-goal.json
clean-room-skill preflight --template --bootstrap ~/Documents/CleanRoom/task-xxxxxxxx
clean-room-skill preflight --template --bootstrap ~/Documents/CleanRoom/<project>/tasks/task-xxxxxxxx

--template writes an attended draft with blocking open questions. It does not support unattended mode. Use --input for completed contracts. --bootstrap accepts either the generated task root or clean-room-bootstrap.json, writes to the generated contaminated artifact root after scaffold validation, and requires completed input contracts to match the bootstrap artifact and implementation roots.

Handoff

Agent 0 must record preflight_goal_ref, preflight_goal_sha256, and the required handoff_sequence in task-manifest.json.

Clean roles receive only the clean-safe goal subset through clean-run-context.json goal_contract plus code_hygiene_policy and optional Agent 4 local commit policy. Do not send the full preflight-goal.json to Agent 1.5, Agent 2, Agent 3, Agent 4, or clean handoff packages.