Consistency Check

Consistency Check

Purpose / When to Activate

Activate:

• After story generation
• After plan preparation
• Before implementation
• After remediation attempts
• During governance gating

This skill reports issues — it does not fix them.

Process

CRITICAL — Anti-Collision Guard (MUST execute before writing any output file): Before writing contexts/artefacts/consistency-reports/{story_id}.consistency-report.md, check if the target file already exists on disk:

• If it does NOT exist → proceed normally.
• If it DOES exist → read the existing file first. Then decide:
  • If the existing content is from a different entity (different story ID, different epic) → STOP immediately, surface the ID collision to the human, do not proceed.
  • If the existing content is from the same entity and an update is warranted → proceed, but preserve any human edits or prior findings that remain relevant. Treat this as an update, not a replacement.
  • If the existing content is identical or still valid → skip writing, report "no changes needed". This guard prevents the silent data loss incident of 2026-03-17 where concurrent sessions overwrote story files.

Structural Consistency

• Artefacts link properly (Story → Epic → PRD)
• Required artefact fields exist
• Frontmatter identity and linkage correct

Scope Consistency

• Story scopes align with Plans
• Plans contain no out-of-scope actions
• Story acceptance criteria match plan deliverables

Rule Consistency

• No triggered rule goes unhandled
• Compliance status of each artefact
• Rule violations flagged

Completeness Consistency

• No missing acceptance criteria
• No empty or placeholder fields
• No partially generated artefact

Inter-artefact Alignment

• No contradictions between Epics & Stories
• Plan steps correlate with acceptance criteria
• No unresolved split dependencies

Partial artefact handling: If the artefact set is incomplete (e.g., Story exists but parent Epic is absent), check only what is available. Report missing artefacts as ISSUE-{ID}: required artefact absent with severity: medium. Do not fail the entire check.

Output Format

ISSUE-ID naming convention: use format ISSUE-{STORY_ID}-{NNN} (e.g., ISSUE-E06S18-001).

ISSUE-ID
Type: structural | scope | rule | completeness | alignment
Artefacts involved: ...
Description: concise violation or inconsistency
Why it matters: short impact statement
Severity: low | medium | high | critical
Location: file/path/position

Quality Checks

• Issues are clearly reported with exact artefact/rule references
• Severity is explicit
• No duplicates
• No invented fixes
• Description fields must not contain fix proposals — report the inconsistency factually

Non-Goals

This skill must NOT:

• Invent fixes
• Suppress issues
• Judge without evidence

Check everything against everything. Consistency is a governance requirement, not an optimization.