djnsty23 The spine
A skill library has two failure modes and only one of them is discussed. The discussed one is a missing skill. The other is fifty skills and no order, where the model picks by description similarity and the pick is a lottery. This file is the order. It adds no capability; it decides what fires when.
Four steps. Each ends on a condition you can check, not on a feeling that the step is finished.
1. Isolate: before the first edit
Load isolate. Work happens in a git worktree branched from the remote default
branch, never in a tree another session is using.
Ends when git branch --show-current prints something other than the
default branch, and git status --porcelain in the new tree is clean.
Skip only when the repo has one working copy and one session in it. A repo running parallel agents has no exemption: two agents in one tree produce a collision whose symptom is a lost edit, and a lost edit is not reported by anything.
2. Build: the work itself
No skill owns this step. The repo's own conventions do, plus whichever rule skills the paths you touch pull in.
Ends when the change compiles and the thing you set out to change behaves differently. Not when it is correct. That is step 3's job, and merging the two is how a build declares itself proven.
3. Prove: evidence, not assertion
Load prove. The before state is captured while the defect still reproduces,
which is the only moment it is free, and the after state once the change works.
Ends when two artifacts exist on disk, they differ, and the difference is the change you claim to have made.
The trap this prevents: a fix verified only after the fact cannot distinguish
"I fixed it" from "it was never broken the way I described". rule-diagnosis
carries the cost of that confusion; this step is what makes it observable.
4. Ship: gate, then hand over
Load commit, then ship if the change deploys. Run the repo's whole gate on a
clean tree, after committing.
Ends when the gate is green on the commit you are shipping, and the evidence from step 3 is in the commit body or the pull request description where a human reads it, not only in the session that produced it.
A gate run before the last edit graded a tree that no longer exists.
4b. An independent read, when the change is worth one
The gate is for the machine and the evidence is for the reviewer. Neither is a second opinion on whether the change is right.
Load review for ordinary work. Load adversarial-loop instead when a wrong
fix is expensive: gates, harnesses, security paths, anything that grades other
code. The difference is not thoroughness, it is order. adversarial-loop has
the adversary write FAILING tests before any fix, because a reviewer reading a
finished diff cannot see the worst class of defect, a suite that passes without
asserting anything.
Ends when every finding has been answered: fixed, or refuted with the reason written down. Not when a count is low and not when a score is high.
Never terminate on a score. A number that a loop optimises toward stops
measuring the thing it was named after, and a reviewer's confidence rating is a
claim about a diff rather than about the code's behaviour. "Loop until it says
5 of 5" trains the loop to satisfy the grader, which is the same failure
rule-gate-integrity documents for gates that cannot fail.
Skip it, and say you did, when the change is small, reversible, and covered by a gate you have mutation-tested. Most changes are. The step exists so that the ones that are not get a read, rather than every change getting a ritual.
What the spine is not
It is not a ceremony for a one-line change. A typo fix in a repo with one checkout runs step 2 and step 4. The threshold for steps 1 and 3 is whether anyone else could be in the tree, and whether the change has a before state worth showing.
It is not a substitute for the rules. rule-verification says what counts as
done per task type; rule-gate-integrity says whether the gate can fail at all;
rule-local-first says where verification happens. The spine only says which
one comes first.
A step skipped is a step to name. Saying "no before state, the change is additive" is a finished step 3. Saying nothing is a skipped one, and from the outside those look identical.