Polish

/polish

The autonomous act-then-review loop (REQ-E2.1, D-12): repeat the /self-review pass against the feature branch until it drains every action disposition and only irreducible Needs-human-judgment forks (if any) remain, then hand off the audit record. Polish is local-only per the invariants below; after the read-only fetch that pins the base at pre-flight, iterations never touch the remote (nested /self-review passes reuse the pinned base without fetching). The pending-sign-off checklist it emits reaches the draft PR through whichever skill owns PR creation (/execute-task per REQ-E1.5, or a standalone /self-review).

Doctrine

Resolve and read the same rule docs as /self-review via the rule-doc resolution convention (scripts/resolve-rule-doc.sh <doc-name> or the documented PLANWRIGHT_ROOT/CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT chain): discovery-rigor, validation-rigor, finding-categorization, gate-wiring, research-rigor, refactor-instinct, security-posture, proportionality. All load at run start except research-rigor, read point-of-use inside the nested /self-review pass's finding-validation (the iteration loop below). Their definitions govern wherever this skill names a concept. If a rule doc does not resolve, halt with a clear message naming the missing doc and the chain consulted.

Doctrine manifest (the reading model above in machine-parseable form, per doctrine/instruction-hygiene.md; run-start docs load before work begins, point-of-use at the named step):

Doctrine: run-start discovery-rigor Doctrine: run-start validation-rigor Doctrine: run-start finding-categorization Doctrine: run-start gate-wiring Doctrine: point-of-use research-rigor (the nested /self-review pass's finding-validation) Doctrine: run-start refactor-instinct Doctrine: run-start security-posture Doctrine: run-start proportionality

Invocation modes

Read the literal flag --nested from $ARGUMENTS at the start of the run:

• Standalone (no flag): on exit, present the handoff to the human.
• Nested (--nested): a parent skill (typically /execute-task, which runs Polish as its convergence step per REQ-E1.4) invoked the loop in-session and receives the handoff; the parent owns the PR body the audit record lands in.

The loop behaves identically in both modes. Nested invocation is in-session skill composition (REQ-E2.2, D-13): one session, one context, hooks fire once per actual tool call, not once per skill layer. Record the resolved mode in every iteration summary.

Pre-flight

1. Resolve the doctrine docs (above).
2. Require a clean working tree. git status --porcelain must be empty; the loop's commit boundaries (per the gate-wiring commit discipline) are the audit trail, and uncommitted changes make them ambiguous. Dirty tree: stop and ask the human to commit or stash first (dispatched or unattended: record the unit to tasks.md Awaiting input and end the step, the pause protocol's dispatched arm); never stash or discard yourself.
3. Identify the base and the active kickoff brief exactly as /self-review pre-flight does (remote-tracking base first; brief from the planwright/<spec>/task-<ids> branch convention, with the parsed <spec> segment validated against the REQ-A1.8 identifier discipline before any path is formed; else resolved via the status render, accepting Ready or Active). Record both; with no active brief the Agent-resolvable bucket is unavailable for the whole run.
4. Initialize the loop ledger: an iteration counter at zero, plus the record of every finding the loop has already dispositioned (applied, resolved, applied pending sign-off, declined, queued).

Iteration loop

Each iteration:

1. Run a /self-review pass, nested. Invoke /self-review --nested in-session. The pass does its own discovery, validation, routing, and dispositions per the gate wiring, and returns the audit record; its finding-validation is where research-rigor loads point-of-use. Pass the loop ledger in: findings already dispositioned in a previous iteration are not re-routed (a declined finding stays declined; a queued fork stays queued), with one deliberate exception: a re-discovered finding whose ledger disposition is any on-branch application (applied, resolved, or applied pending sign-off) means the fix did not hold, and it counts toward the Loop detection safety condition instead of being suppressed. The signal never re-opens the item itself: a re-discovered pending-sign-off item keeps its checklist entry and its PR-review decision, and only the did-the-fix-hold signal escapes suppression.
2. Fold the pass into the ledger. Add every new disposition. Count the iteration's new dispositions of any kind: findings newly applied (Auto-applicable), resolved with evidence (Agent-resolvable), applied pending sign-off, declined with rationale, or queued. "New" means not already in the ledger: a re-discovered, already-dispositioned finding never counts, however it was dispositioned. ("Action dispositions" elsewhere in this skill means only the three applied-on-branch kinds; the convergence counter deliberately counts all five.)
3. Check the safety conditions (below). Any trigger: stop per its row.
4. Converged? If the pass produced zero new dispositions (everything found was already in the ledger, or nothing was found), the loop is drained: exit to the handoff. Otherwise print the iteration summary (iteration number, mode, brief path, new dispositions by bucket, commits created, tooling result), increment the iteration counter, and loop.

Finding fixes commit inside the pass per the gate-wiring commit discipline (loop-level writes, such as observation fragment writes, take their own chore commit at the iteration boundary): Needs-sign-off items one commit per finding with the [pending-sign-off] subject marker, action items batched per iteration, regression tests landing with the fix they prove. Before committing a marked finding, self-lint the subject by piping it in — printf '%s\n' "$subject" | scripts/check-commit-msgs.sh --marker subject --stdin (under the resolved planwright root) — so the marker sits at the canonical end-of-subject position (gate-wiring); a mis-placed marker caught here is reworded before it reaches history, never after. Polish never amends, squashes, rebases, or force-pushes; each iteration's commits stand as the per-iteration audit trail.

Signed-bundle edits. Each iteration's nested pass runs the stale-anchor pre-flight before its first edit to each Ready or Active bundle's anchored content, per the meta-spec's writer prose (doctrine/spec-format.md, Sign-off records and content anchors): a mismatch, an absent or unparseable entry, and a failed recompute block that edit alike, and the loop repairs none of them: the blocked finding queues as an irreducible fork whose route is the anchor repair, and the iteration drains its remaining findings normally. An expression-only fix carries its dated Changelog entry and the marked Class: expression-only self-re-anchor entry citing that entry, in the same commit as the edit, so the ritual never spans an iteration boundary. A meaning-class fix stays unapplied and queued for a /spec-kickoff delta re-walkthrough; the ledger keeps it queued rather than re-routing it on a later iteration.

Safety conditions (mandatory handoff)

Exactly two things interrupt mid-iteration, per the doctrine's pause protocol: a hard-disqualifier zone finding, or an irreducible Needs-human-judgment fork that blocks further progress. Both follow the gate-wiring pause protocol (attended: stop and present; dispatched or unattended: record the unit to tasks.md Awaiting input with the finding and recommended fix, end the step). Everything else below stops the loop at an iteration boundary (the dirty-tree check runs at pre-flight, before iteration one; its handoff emits empty none tables):

On any safety stop: emit the latest audit record, name the condition, and hand off. Work already committed stays committed (each item one revert from undone); a stop never resets, stashes, or rewrites prior dispositions.

Handoff

On exit (converged or safety-stopped), emit the loop-end handoff in the gate-wiring order, accumulated across all iterations:

1. The lens-coverage table from the final pass.
2. The four bucket tables in fixed order, an empty bucket as a single none row. These are audit, not a decision queue.
3. The declined log.
4. The pending-sign-off checklist, regenerated from the [pending-sign-off] commits ahead of the base (a single none row when empty).
5. The queued irreducible forks with their bespoke options: the only items that ask the human a question. Bespoke options are the actual decision branches, never timing labels, per the categorization doctrine.
6. The final iteration's pass summary (the per-iteration summaries cover the rest).

Standalone, present all of it to the human and put the queued forks to them directly. Nested, hand the record to the parent skill, which folds the tables, declined log, and checklist into the draft PR body it owns and surfaces the forks. Apply security-posture artifact data-hygiene to everything emitted; the record is bound for a committed PR body.

Local-only invariants

These hold at every step, in both modes:

• Never push, create a PR, or write to any remote. Remote interaction is limited to the single read-only base-pinning fetch at pre-flight. Polish converges the branch; publishing it is the owning skill's job.
• Never mark any PR ready for review, and never merge. The draft→ready flip and merge are the human's reserved controls.
• Never force-push, amend, squash, or rebase; new commits only.
• Never apply a finding in a hard-disqualifier zone without the pause protocol's human direction, however clear the fix looks.
• Never silently drop a finding: every routed finding ends in one of the five terminal dispositions, on the record.

Observations

When the repository has adopted planwright (a specs/ directory with at least one spec bundle exists), record anything the loop surfaced that is outside the branch's scope (recurring tooling gaps, doctrine gaps, complexity trends) as one fragment per observation through the shared helper: scripts/obs-record.sh --slug <topic> --scope <repo> --text '<observation>' (resolved under the planwright root; it composes the one-line entry form and writes one file under the host repo's specs/_observations/entries/) (REQ-E2.1, REQ-H1.6). Commit fragments within the iteration that produced them (its action commit, or a chore commit), so the tree returns to clean at every iteration boundary; surface a non-zero helper exit rather than silently dropping the observation. Skip this step entirely in repositories without specs/.

Maintenance

After the loop exits (converged or stopped), compare these instructions against the resolved doctrine docs listed above (REQ-B3.2, D-42). If a concept this skill names has changed meaning, gained or lost a step, or moved between docs, record a drift observation through the shared helper (scripts/obs-record.sh --slug skill-drift --scope <repo> --text 'skill-drift(polish): <what>' — the entry text keeps the skill-drift(...) prefix; in repositories without specs/, surface the drift to the user instead of recording it), commit the fragment (its own chore commit), and tell the user what drifted; surface a non-zero helper exit rather than silently dropping the observation. Do not edit this skill or the doctrine docs to resolve the drift; the accumulator's canonical reader (/spec-draft) owns folding drift into spec amendments.