Megaplan

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Megaplan

Use this pipeline for high-rigor planning workflows that need prep, plan, critique, gate, revise, finalize, execute, review, and tiebreaker stages.

For epic-sized, migration, public-contract, or otherwise drift-sensitive work, capture durable end-state intent with a North Star anchor: pass --north-star PATH to megaplan init for a standalone plan, or declare anchors.north_star in chain.yaml for epics.

North Star Actions (v1)

Where questions come from

North Star questions are explicitly authored — they are not extracted from code, diffs, or execution traces. In v1 the pipeline reads them from a NORTHSTAR.md file in the plan directory (standalone plans) and/or from sprint-brief anchors declared in chain.yaml (epic chains). There is no semantic-parity extraction step: if a question is not written in one of those sources it does not exist from the pipeline's point of view.

How actions flow through the pipeline

1. Gate (structured carry). When a gate or reviewer evaluator raises a concern tied to a North Star question, it emits a north_star_actions[] entry — an action with a concrete action_type (change_plan, add_gate, add_scenario, add_checker, dead_delete, or add_human_halt), a severity (blocking/advisory), supporting evidence, and optional plan references. Actions in the dangerous categories (route_authority, baselines, row_carrier_exemptions, target_narrowing, generated_conformance_authority, live_plan_topology_resume_risk) are blocking by schema rule regardless of what the evaluator labels them. All actions are normalized at gate time and carried forward through gate_carry.json (with gate.json as a fallback).

2. Revise (change the plan or halt). The revise worker prompt receives the carried north_star_actions[] with per-action-type instructions:

   • change_plan — make a concrete, traceable plan change.
   • add_gate — add an explicit gate requirement.
   • add_scenario — add a concrete scenario / test case.
   • add_checker — add an automated checker.
   • dead_delete — remove dead plan steps.
   • add_human_halt — halt; the action cannot be mapped to a plan change.

   Before the revise worker runs, a pre-worker guard halts through the existing CliError/step-failure path when any carried blocking action is add_human_halt, has an unrecognized action_type, or is a dangerous-category blocker with no concrete target (plan_refs or required_change). Revise must change the plan or halt — it cannot silently ignore a blocking action.

   After the revise worker completes, the pipeline validates that every carried blocking action has a corresponding north_star_actions_addressed[] entry with concrete plan_refs and the matching action_type marker. Prose-only resolutions, mismatched action types, and omitted actions are rejected (fail-closed).

3. Finalize / Review → done (closeout blocking). Finalize refuses to produce executable tasks if any carried blocking North Star action is unresolved in the latest revise metadata. The review→done transition runs a separate pre-check before TransitionPolicy.evaluate_review_done(); unresolved blocking actions deny the transition through the existing denial path. Absent or malformed north_star_actions_addressed[] is treated as all-carried-blocking-unresolved (fail-closed).

north_star_critical and robustness

Chain and milestone specs support an optional north_star_critical: bool (default false). When true, the milestone (or chain) declares that North Star enforcement is mandatory for that work unit and cannot be skipped.

north_star_critical: true is incompatible with bare and light robustness. The chain-spec validator rejects these combinations with a CliError — it never silently upgrades the robustness level. Acceptable robustness levels are full, thorough, and extreme. Milestone-level robustness takes precedence over driver-level robustness when both are present; north_star_critical is OR'd across the chain-level and milestone-level settings.

Missing packaged skill paths

Some North Star action types conceptually suggest packaged skills (e.g. a dead_delete action could map to a dead-code-removal skill), but no such skills ship with the pipeline today. These are packaging follow-up items — the pipeline enforces the structured action contract regardless, and any future skill packaging would consume the existing north_star_actions[] / north_star_actions_addressed[] metadata without a contract change.