donald-ada Triage
.genius/BACKLOG.md is read whole on every /genius, and grows by how many discoveries the flow made. The rules bounding it are written already — the seed's shape and its 300 characters (record-prose), where a line goes when it leaves (BACKLOG-FORMAT.md) — each firing in its own moment, with nothing going back to check. /reconcile reaches the file from the repo's side. What no pass asks is what the flow's own records, and the user, say about these lines.
The concept: the rules exist; this is the pass that enforces them, one line at a time, and the user rules on each.
When to run it
The user types it — after a stretch of slices that each dropped one, when /genius shows a backlog nobody can scan, or when a work's leftovers land. Not on a schedule: a pass sent looking finds something, and a seed argued away on a made-up reason is worse than a long file. With an argument, only the line whose subject it names, and only the two questions one line can answer — should it be here, has it outgrown a line; pairing needs candidates and order needs the file, so say those went unasked.
What gets asked
Four questions in this order, because each earlier one can take away what a later one would have worked on:
- Should it still be here at all? Two ways it should not. A work already answered it — asked against the flow's own state, not the code: does a work name this seed's subject in its Problem, Slices or contract, with that slice closed? Which move that earns turns on which came first — the format holds that line. A work whose snapshot says the thing is still not done is evidence to keep the seed. Or its reason stopped holding. No file holds that answer, so the seed's own stated why is quoted back, and the user says whether it stands.
- Are two of them one discovery? Propose the pair, both texts, never the merge. Mechanical signals — a shared anchor, a shared symbol, a seed calling itself its neighbour's illness — were all false positives on the one real file tried, so nothing merges on a signal; the reason must be checkable in the two texts. The format holds the veto and the mechanics.
- Has it outgrown a line? Over 300 characters, counted the way the format's measure counts — a byte count called five compliant lines over the bound on one real Chinese backlog.
record-prosenames two cases; this tells them apart: a seed still holding an undecided choice is carrying detail that belongs elsewhere — route it out, to the log its link names or toBACKLOG.log.md, and trim. A seed that is one chosen route plus its steps is a plan, offered as work — one at a time, never a batch, because a work file is larger than the line it replaces and every status pass reads it. - What does the order say? Top to bottom is the file's statement of what to do next. This pass proposes the position and the sentence it was read from; the text itself is left to the user.
How it runs
Read .genius/ and nothing else, and inside it only what the questions need: the backlog, HISTORY.md, the work snapshots in flight and done, and one log entry by the anchor a seed's link names — never a log whole. Not the code. That bound separates this pass from a session reading the whole project; one such run reached the same rulings after opening over forty files. A judgment it cannot reach inside .genius/ is reported as unreached, never guessed — "the repo may have satisfied this one" goes to /reconcile.
Read-only until the user has ruled, one line at a time. Each proposal carries the seed's own words, which question it answers, what it wants done, and where the text goes. Categories and counts are wrong here: every one of these is "is this still worth doing", the user's alone. An honest zero proves nothing was manufactured, so say it when there is nothing.
Then the calls land, each through the discipline that owns it: a retirement or a correction through errata's moves into BACKLOG.log.md, a merge by the format's own mechanics, a promotion through /genius as a new work, a reorder as a write of the lines. ⚠ One lands as a bare deletion: a seed that became its work writes no entry (the format says why), and filing it as a retirement puts a body in the log nothing was displaced into.
Done when every line in scope has been through the questions that scope allows and carries a ruling or an explicit no-change, and everything undecidable inside .genius/ is named.