Syntavell Maintenance

Syntavell Maintenance

Goal

Classify maintenance work, expose risk, select the right workflow, and keep repository operations conservative and auditable.

Activation Boundaries

Use when:

• The task is dependency maintenance, CI upkeep, release readiness, versioning, submodule update, repository bootstrap, health files, or roadmap hygiene.
• The user asks to assess or plan a repository maintenance operation.
• The task spans operational contracts rather than product behavior.

Do not use when:

• The task is ordinary Rust or TypeScript implementation.
• The user only asks to commit already finished work.
• The user asks for security analysis; use syntavell-security-review instead.
• The task requires remote GitHub governance mutation and the user has not explicitly authorized it.

Companion skills:

• Use syntavell-security-review for dependency, release, CI, updater, signing, and secret-sensitive work.
• Use syntavell-git-commit only after a concrete maintenance change is ready to commit.
• Use docs/ADR workflows when maintenance changes create durable policy.

Source-of-truth precedence

1. The user's explicit requested maintenance operation and authorization.
2. Current repository files, manifests, lockfiles, workflows, and submodules.
3. Repository-local policy, accepted ADRs, and release docs.
4. Accepted organization defaults in Syntavell/.github.
5. This skill's defaults.

Never add community promises, licenses, support windows, release guarantees, or branch protection merely because this skill lists them as mature-project capabilities.

Inputs and Preconditions

• Target repository and maintenance scope.
• Current Git status and relevant manifests.
• Dry-run result or impact summary for dependency, release, or remote operations.
• Explicit approval for remote mutation, release publication, tags, or branch protection.

Select a mode

• repository-bootstrap: initial structure, README, health files, and CI planning.
• dependency-maintenance: dependency and lockfile updates with changelog, license, and test impact.
• ci-maintenance: workflow upkeep, permissions, runner behavior, and validation determinism.
• release-preparation: version source, artifact inventory, changelog, signing, tag readiness, and rollback plan.
• submodule-update: pointer update after the submodule commit is pushed.
• roadmap-hygiene: scope, milestone, and decision-state cleanup.
• github-administration-plan: plan branch protection, labels, or settings without mutating remotes by default.

Workflow

1. Classify the task into one mode.
2. Inspect current state: branch, remotes, status, manifests, lockfiles, workflows, and submodules.
3. Produce a dry-run or impact summary before changing dependencies, release metadata, CI permissions, or submodule pointers.
4. Identify authorization gates and stop conditions.
5. Execute only the local, in-scope maintenance change requested by the user.
6. Validate with repository-native checks and the relevant maintenance checklist.
7. Hand off to syntavell-git-commit only when the user asks to commit.

Authorization Gates

Explicit user approval is required before:

• Mutating remote GitHub settings, labels, branch protection, secrets, environments, or releases.
• Publishing tags, release artifacts, packages, installers, or checksums.
• Updating dependencies beyond the requested package or version range.
• Regenerating lockfiles in a way that changes unrelated dependency versions.
• Updating a submodule pointer to an unpushed or unreviewed commit.

Stop Conditions

Stop without modifying anything when:

• The task mixes maintenance with feature behavior changes.
• The repository has uncommitted unrelated work that would be touched.
• A dependency update has unknown license, security, or breaking-change impact.
• A release lacks version source, artifact inventory, or rollback path.
• The requested remote operation is not explicitly authorized.

Validation Matrix

Failure Classification

• caused-by-change: introduced by the maintenance edit.
• pre-existing: already failing before the maintenance edit.
• environment: missing tool, registry, credential, or network capability.
• unsupported: the requested operation exceeds authorization or project maturity.

Final Output Contract

Repository:
Mode:
Dry run or impact summary:
Actions:
Validation:
New failures:
Pre-existing failures:
Remote mutations:
Rollback:
Remaining risks:
Follow-up:

Reference Routing

• Read references/maintenance-playbook.md for repository health, dependency, CI, submodule, and roadmap maintenance.
• Read references/release-and-versioning.md for release, changelog, version, schema, template, or compatibility work.
• Maintain trigger scenarios in evals/trigger-validation.json.
• Maintain behavior scenarios in evals/behavior-evals.json.