Launch

Launch

Launch is the shipyard's delivery run: from mission brief to shipped, verified change. It stands on the verifiability boundary — agents continuously run everything repeatable and acceptable-by-evidence; humans decide what cannot be judged by the system or what fails expensively. The goal is not maximum automation — it is maximum delegation of verifiable work, so the human's time is spent only on the decisions only a human can make.

The verifiability test, applied to every step: if this is done wrong, can the system detect it? Can it redo or roll back automatically? Both yes → agent. No unique answer, system cannot judge, or expensive to get wrong → human.

Launch assumes the shipyard exists — and refuses to run if it does not. The yard gate is the first action of every invocation, before document-language resolution and before reading any supplied spec:

• Run the full drydock --check audit — missing surfaces, a missing or invalid CONTEXT.md frontmatter documentLanguage, dead paths, glossary terms unused in code, standards never referenced. This is the single criterion: Launch performs no separate facility inventory of its own.
• Actionable / high-confidence findings hard-block the run: list every such finding verbatim, point at /oh-my-claudecode:drydock, state that the run never started and no artifacts were produced, and stop. Without an explicit override, treat any finding as blocking.
• Narrow override (explicit intent only): low-confidence findings, findings explicitly classified as false positives in the drydock report, or a scratch/throwaway repository explicitly declared by the user may be overridden only with deliberate, per-invocation user intent — the override must name the finding(s) or the throwaway scope and must never silently swallow a high-confidence actionable finding. No general bypass flag.
• Current audit limitation: today --check is a skill-instruction checklist without a machine-readable finding/severity contract or executable — severity classification relies on the drydock report's wording until a structured contract exists. A machine-readable finding/severity exit contract is the intended follow-up; the gate wording stays honest about what it can and cannot rely on mechanically.
• A clean audit (or an explicitly overridden low-confidence/false-positive/scratch scope) admits the run. Every paper-trail slot (CONTEXT.md, docs/adr/, docs/business/) and facility surface already exists at that point; Launch fills the paper trail as decisions settle but never creates the slots.
• The rules entry is CLAUDE.md — the shipyard map recognizes no substitute.

The boundary

Between checkpoints the pipeline never idles: agents keep working every frontier ticket that does not depend on a pending human answer.

Lifecycle posture

Launch is a stateless composition over OMC's existing lifecycle — it owns no runtime state machine:

• Team owns task statuses, transitions, cancellation, and runtime cleanup; Launch never mutates them outside Team's contract.
• The canonical plan → execute → review → verify surfaces own their existing lifecycle behavior. Launch-authored artifacts are limited to .omc/specs/<feature-slug>/, CONTEXT.md, docs/adr/, and docs/business/ — plus, only after C5 approval, the sediment slots named in the Phase 5 table.
• Launch has no automatic resume. After interruption, re-read the artifacts and current Team status, but continue only through a new explicit Launch invocation after the owning Team lifecycle has reached a supported terminal/cleanup boundary. Never infer a human approval or replay an in_progress task.
• Foggy efforts are the navigator's jurisdiction: when the fog gate routes to /oh-my-claudecode:ask-navigator, the run never started — no artifacts, no partial state. The navigator's map is the only carrier across sessions; launch resumes only from the mission brief it hands back.
• Launch adds no approval receipt, revision counter, replay log, cancellation path, rollback mechanism, or cleanup lifecycle of its own.

Any durability claim in this skill is a claim about the files on disk, not about a hidden runtime.

Phase 0 — Entry

A run reaches this phase only through a clean yard gate. Before reading a supplied spec or entering Phase 1, resolve the document language. An explicit human choice in the current invocation wins; otherwise read a valid BCP-47-style tag from CONTEXT.md frontmatter at the exact stable key documentLanguage; otherwise require unanimous high-confidence inference from CLAUDE.md then README.md. A persisted bare or region-only Chinese tag is script-ambiguous and must be asked once at that authority tier, never bypassed by inference. Missing, mixed, conflicting, low-confidence, invalid-explicit, or script-ambiguous Chinese evidence requires one batched language question; do not guess. Chinese must resolve to an explicit zh-Hans or zh-Hant script tag. zh-Hans-* selects the Simplified companion and zh-Hant-* selects the Traditional companion while the full normalized tag is persisted. Persist the resolved normalized tag back to CONTEXT.md before any Launch-authored artifact so a fresh explicit invocation can read it without hidden conversation state. The human reads and maintains these artifacts; agents are language-agnostic.

Localize prose and human-facing labels/localizable scalar values only. Paths, slash commands, flags, code fences, placeholders, frontmatter keys and machine-semantic values, YAML/JSON keys, lifecycle tokens (plan, execute, review, verify), status enums (pending, in_progress, completed, failed, ready-for-agent), IDs, ticket blockedBy, public Team blocked_by, and all parser/control tokens remain byte-for-byte stable. Reference language companions are mutually exclusive: emit exactly one selected rendering, never bilingual duplicate headings or labels.

• Brief self-check before anything else: does the brief name an objective, a scope boundary, and non-goals? If two or more are missing, say so and ask for one sharpening pass — running the pipeline on a soft brief converts ambiguity into confident-looking output.
• Fog gate: after the sharpening pass, apply the navigator's fog test — Q1: can the destination be stated in one sentence (the spec, decision, or change this effort is finding its way to)? Q2: can the first three decisions be stated precisely right now, even though none can be answered yet? Either answer no → the run never starts: state that plainly, note that no artifacts were produced, recommend /oh-my-claudecode:ask-navigator (the shipyard's navigator charts fog as a map of decision tickets and hands back a mission brief), and stop. Hand over the residual questions and any vocabulary already settled, so the navigator's W1 does not re-ask them.
• Map check: before reading a supplied spec or entering Phase 1, look for an open navigator:map (tracker label, or under .omc/wayfinder/). One exists and this invocation supplies no new brief → recommend /oh-my-claudecode:ask-navigator to work the next decision on that map, and stop. One exists and a new brief is supplied → ask one question — continue the open map, or start a new effort — before proceeding.
• Spec path supplied → read it, jump to Phase 2.
• Mission brief → Phase 1.
• Single-point fix → hand off to execute, exit.

Phase 1 — Converge (human decides, agent prepares)

Run the interview with the design-tree protocol: map decisions and their dependencies, then work in frontier rounds — batch every currently-askable question into one round, numbered, each with a recommended answer. The human answers; the tree reshapes; recompute the frontier. Facts are always self-served by sub-agents from repo evidence — the human is asked only what no amount of exploration can settle.

Paper trail, written the moment each item settles:

• domain vocabulary → CONTEXT.md at repo root (one entry per term)
• decisions passing the ADR test (hard to reverse, surprising without context, real tradeoff) → docs/adr/NNNN-<slug>.md
• business rules and background discovered during convergence → docs/business/ (one article per business question, opening paragraph states why it matters)

Non-convergence here is normal work, not a failure: if the frontier will not empty, present the residual questions ranked — this is C2's input, not an error. If the residual questions themselves cannot be stated precisely (fog test Q2 fails), the destination itself is unsettled and that is beyond C2's authority: stop, note what already settled (vocabulary in CONTEXT.md, answered questions), recommend /oh-my-claudecode:ask-navigator, and exit — the pipeline never invents a destination.

Loft detour. A residual question that is precise but cannot settle in prose — it needs to be seen or clicked, not described (how the UI should look, whether a state model feels right) — is answered with an artifact, not more questions: call the Skill tool with "loft", let the captain react, and fold that reaction back into the interview. The lofted artifact is C2's input; the captain signs what they saw, not what they were told.

Harbor briefs. A mission brief handed over by /oh-my-claudecode:harbor carries signed decisions with links and applicable conditions: consume them as already-made — do not re-ask unchanged business goals. If the code has moved since the evidence was gathered (new head, changed base), re-verify the affected technical evidence; new implementation scope beyond the signed brief still gets its own approval.

Phase 2 — Spec synthesis (agent drafts → C2 approves)

Synthesize .omc/specs/<feature-slug>/spec.md:

# <Feature> Spec
## Problem
## Solution
## User Stories        (numbered, each with testable acceptance criteria)
## Implementation Decisions
## Testing Decisions   (external behavior only)
## Out of Scope

Draft all of it, then stop at C2: present the acceptance criteria and the test seam list for human approval. Seams are selected by repo evidence and the deep-module discipline (public interfaces, existing test seams, depth analysis); the human confirms or corrects the list — a seam the human has not approved gets no tests.

Durability gate (agent-enforced, no approval needed): spec and tickets carry contracts, never coordinates — no file paths, no line numbers. Fragments encoding a decision better than prose (state machines, reducers, schemas) are the exception and state their origin (usually a loft).

Phase 3 — Ticket decomposition (agent drafts → C3 approves)

Split into vertical slices under .omc/specs/<feature-slug>/tickets/:

• NN-slug.md, one file per ticket, dependency-ordered, each declaring blockedBy: [ids]
• each ticket crosses every layer, is independently demonstrable, and fits one fresh context
• wide refactors go expand-contract: add the new form, migrate in batches, remove the old — each batch a ticket

Agent-side mechanical validation runs first (independence, demonstrability, context fit). Then C3: present granularity, blocking edges, and proposed merges/splits for human approval. Iterate until approved. Mark every ticket ready-for-agent.

Integration-wiring rule: every vertical slice includes its own wiring and a smoke assertion — a slice whose output nothing mounts, serves, or imports is not done. Cross-slice seams that no single slice owns (route mounting, static serving, entry-point wiring) get an explicit integration ticket as the last frontier item.

Phase 4 — Run the frontier

The frontier is every ticket whose blockers are all complete.

Parallel (default, 2+ tickets). Hand tickets to team: each ticket becomes a team task, blockedBy edges carry over — team's claim mechanics pick only frontier tasks. Spawn N workers. Each worker implements with the tdd discipline at the seams approved in C2, applying /oh-my-claudecode:minimal-code-discipline as the writing-time discipline (it stays opt-in); a ticket closes only after code-review passes on the diff, declared by the reviewer — the implementer never self-approves.

Serial (single ticket, or --serial). Delegate one ticket at a time to an executor subagent; same review gate.

Two-axis review gate. The closing review runs along two axes, in parallel, reported separately — never merged or cross-ranked, because a change can pass one axis and fail the other (standards-conforming but wrong behavior; faithful but convention-breaking). The reviewer fails the ticket when either axis fails:

• Standards axis — the diff against the matching docs/standards/ volume, plus a judgement-call-only smell baseline (a documented repo standard overrides the baseline; anything tooling already enforces is skipped). This is the standing consumer that keeps the standards surfaces referenced.
• Spec axis — the diff against this ticket's acceptance criteria (the spec is the total ledger the tickets were decomposed from; it is consulted only to trace where a criterion came from and to rule on smuggled scope — behavior no ticket asked for): requirements missing or partial, behavior nobody asked for, and requirements that look implemented but look wrong — each finding quoting its source line.

C4 — decisions that emerge mid-run. When a parallel Team worker hits a decision passing the ADR test, it stops before decision-dependent mutation, records the question (options, recommendation, reversibility note) in the failed transition's error field and .omc/specs/<feature-slug>/decisions-pending.md, and exits through Team's supported in_progress → failed transition. This is a terminal Launch outcome: do not reopen the task, create an in-run successor, force cleanup, or start another Team from this invocation. Surface the blocker with pointers to the failed task and decision artifact.

On a later explicit Launch invocation, first require the owning Team lifecycle to be terminal and cleaned up through its supported owner. Then batch every pending C4 question for the human, record the answers in the decision log/ADRs, and rebuild the ticket frontier before starting execution. All ticket dependencies are declared before dispatch: ticket blockedBy metadata maps to the public Team blocked_by field with numeric task IDs when tasks are created through the Team task API. Team's existing task-ID dependency resolution rejects early claims and makes dependents eligible only after their predecessors complete. The team lead never claims a task unless it is explicitly registered as a Team worker. Launch never dynamically mutates a claimed task's dependencies and never promises automatic re-dispatch after C4.

Serial C4 (--serial). The executor stops before decision-dependent mutation and returns the question without claiming completion. Record and resolve the human question at the batch boundary, then start a fresh executor successor with the recorded answer and remaining acceptance criteria. Do not replay or resume the interrupted executor context, and do not manufacture Team tasks when Team is not active.

Repeated failure stop. The same verification failure surviving three repair attempts halts that lane with a root-cause hypothesis for the human. This is the one condition that interrupts C4's batching immediately.

Phase 5 — Closeout (agent reports → C5 accepts)

• all tickets terminal with evidence → run verify across the whole change

• reconcile the paper trail: CONTEXT.md accurate, ADRs complete, spec updated where implementation taught it something

• yard re-check: re-run the drydock --check audit; any new findings since entry are reported as yard drift, with a pointer to /oh-my-claudecode:drydock

• sediment pass — answer: what did this ship teach the yard? Sweep the source checklist first (three-strike failure root causes, C4 answers, review rejections, verify findings, and any map resolutions or deferred-sediment lines from a source map this run followed), then answer. Propose every lesson as lesson → slot → intended change against the slot table below, or decline it explicitly with a reason; a ship with nothing to teach must say so verbatim as "no new lessons". This requirement blocks non-answers, never empty answers — inventing lessons to have one is the same violation as skipping the question. The lesson list rides in the completion report next to the Open Assumptions, each line individually vetoable; approved lessons are written to their slots only after acceptance, and the report records each landing's file location. Before writing any lesson into a slot, call the Skill tool with agent-doc-discipline and apply its rules; the sediment pass is complete only after the skill's verification checklist passes.

  Lesson kind	Slot
  terms and boundaries settled mid-run	CONTEXT.md glossary
  checkable behavior rules (carry a why)	docs/standards/ matching volume (architecture / data / process)
  most-violated conventions (thin-entry grade)	CLAUDE.md body — propose only
  hard-to-reverse decisions	docs/adr/ (C4 answers already land here)
  business rules / background	docs/business/
  UI patterns / component contracts	design-system/
  reusable craft	.omc/skills/ (through the skillify gate)
  repeatedly needed automation / integrations	scripts/ or .mcp.json
  no slot fits	decline explicitly with the reason

• thin-entry budget: the CLAUDE.md body carries at most five hot entries. A lesson is thin-entry grade only when the source checklist evidences the same violation at least twice in this run, or the captain marks it load-bearing. Entries are listed most-recently-promoted first; the coldest entry is deterministically the last one listed, and a promotion over budget must demote exactly that entry in the same proposal, moving its full text back to docs/standards/ — nothing is deleted, only re-tiered. Bloat is rebalanced ship by ship and is deliberately not a --check finding.

• emit the completion report: shipped scope, verification evidence, paper-trail locations, yard-drift findings (if any), the sediment list (each line vetoable), and Open Assumptions ranked by how much a human would likely want to veto them

Context hygiene

• Phases 1–3 in one unbroken context window; compact at phase boundaries only (HUD high water is the signal).
• Long headless runs: prefer --output-format stream-json (or periodic progress markers) so the orchestrator sees liveness — plain text mode emits nothing until the turn ends.
• Phase 4 runs in fresh contexts per ticket by construction (team workers or subagents).
• Handoffs pass pointers, never content.
• Session died mid-run: preserve the artifacts and stop. A later explicit invocation may continue only after the owning Team lifecycle reaches its supported terminal/cleanup boundary; Team remains authoritative for runtime state.

Completion definition

All tickets terminal with evidence, verify clean on the whole change, paper trail reconciled, report emitted — and every decision the agents made on the human's behalf is answerable with one pointer to where it was recorded.