New Contour

new-contour — onboard a fresh chat as a self-closing contour

Turns the current chat into a first-class contour in the operator's registry (§11/§12 of the global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md). The contour closes its own development-verification cycle itself (HL-6); the Censor is reachable over the file-mailbox channel for ESCALATION only (#BUS-2). Hard-locks six non-negotiables: delegate by default, stay in contact with the operator, Censor mailbox = escalation only (no step-reporting), read-only source git for a tester, context-layering, the contour closes its own full cycle.

Index — rule → reference body → history:

Three layers — do not confuse them

A new contour uses all three: this skill → reporting channel; /workflow → internal fleet; Workflow(...) / background Agent(...) → the work, verified by the contour itself (HL-6). The file mailbox (<WORKSPACE>\_interchat\inbox\) is machine-global + cross-session (contours survive each other's restarts — the file persists); a /workflow fleet is intra-session (dies on reload — ephemeral). Don't confuse them.

The six hard-locks (the whole point of this skill)

Imported from the operator's global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and the censor skill — contract, not advice. Every contour inherits them verbatim.

HL-1 — Delegate by default

Contour Claude tokens are reserved for synthesis, decisions, dialogue, git, and anti-hallucination checks. Everything else is delegated per the ladder in global §31.B:

• Template / bulk / large-file (extraction by template, classification, bulk parsing, summarization >5000 lines, logcat/CSV/spectrum dumps) → local Ollama qwen3-coder:30b via guarded_generate() (three-tier GPU/queue/CPU guard). NEVER raw requests.post, NEVER ollama run. Embeddings → bge-m3:latest.
• Multi-step file work (implement a fix, run a test matrix, diff analysis) and investigation (any series of commands to find something out) → background subagent (Agent(..., run_in_background: true); ALWAYS background unless the operator says «синхронно»).
• Multi-agent fan-out for one task → the Workflow(...) tool (async by design).
• Pre-flight before any Agent() / big Read: if ≥30% of the work is template/extraction/classification → run Ollama first, hand the subagent ready JSON. The four-question checklist lives in ~/.claude/skills/workflow/SKILL.md.

The role in three verbs: read / manage / delegate. Read-only lookups and own-control-space edits (verdicts, briefs, own doctrine) are the contour's; ALL executor work is delegated; even read-only command series are investigation → subagent. A brief without a named Ollama delegation for its template part is a process bug the Censor flags.

HL-2 — Stay in contact with the operator (operator-gate)

• action_class ∈ {read-only, reversible} → act autonomously. Do NOT ping the operator for reversible work.
• action_class = irreversible → do NOT execute. Park it, send a one-line decision-request to the operator in the contour's own operator channel (not via the Censor, not via the mailbox — authority is not transitive), wait for an explicit «да». The irreversible allow-list + per-rig destructive set live in the rig reference (references/rig-atomfast.md).
• Publish / push / release / send-to-device-that-changes-it is never authorized by a Censor ACCEPT or a mailbox relay. The Censor only JUDGES; irreversible execution needs the operator's own-channel permission.

HL-3 — Censor mailbox is an ESCALATION channel, not step-reporting (rewritten 2026-08-30)

Operator, 2026-08-30, verbatim: «Цензор и Аудитор Кода не являются частью рабочего процесса и не контролируют работу агентов. Задача Цензора и Аудитора Кода — проектирование доктрины, новых контуров, глобальный аудит, аудит по заданию оператора и решение проблем, когда локальные контура не справляются. Вы — интеллектуальная скорая помощь. Локальные агенты должны закрывать весь цикл самостоятельно».

So: NO routine step-reports, NO ACKs, NO status pings to the Censor (they were already banned by the Censor's own Д-1; now the whole step-reporting duty is retired). A contour writes to the Censor's mailbox ONLY for:

• (a) emergency call — the contour is stuck after honestly exhausting tiers 0–1 (state what was tried and where it broke; «скорая помощь» needs the case history, not a symptom);
• (b) doctrine-level lesson — a §31.C-triaged lesson of the «доктринальный» bucket, or a class recurrence that needs global spread;
• (c) response to an audit the operator or the Censor explicitly requested;
• (d) adjudication of the irreversible when the operator routed that decision through the Censor (the operator-gate in HL-2 itself stays with the OPERATOR's own channel).

Receiving needs nothing: a global hook (hooks/interchat_inbox.py) injects unread mail into the contour's first turn automatically.

Delivery mechanics, when you DO send (unchanged): the message is a file, written to:

<WORKSPACE>\_interchat\inbox\Цензор\
    YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS_from-<papka-этого-контура>_<slug>.md      (UTF-8)

The folder name in the path is the working-folder basename of the sender, not a session title (registry: ~/.claude/_interchat-adjacent D:\…\_interchat\REGISTRY-adresatov.md). The first two lines of the body are mandatory so a lost file can still be routed:

**Адресат:** Цензор. **От:** <контур>-агент.

HARD RULE — the file write is NEVER sufficient by itself. send_message/SendMessage to the Censor's session is a MANDATORY duplicate, not an optional nicety, whenever the Censor's session is live (check ListAgents first). Reason, proven by fact (2026-08-16, eight sends GEANT4→Censor): neither sent nor queued confirms delivery — a message into a sleeping session is silently lost forever, and there is no other timely signal that it arrived. Skipping the session-notify duplicate because "the file is already written" is the single most common way a message goes unnoticed. Order of operations for every outgoing message:

1. Write the file to the recipient's inbox folder (durable — survives either side restarting).
2. Immediately call SendMessage/send_message to the same recipient's live session if ListAgents shows it running. If it isn't running, the file alone stands and mail delivery happens on the recipient's next natural turn — do not try to wake a sleeping session.
3. Neither sent nor queued status is proof of delivery. Proof is only a *.read.md marker appearing in your own sent file's place (the recipient's hook renames it on read) or an explicit reply. Do not claim "delivered to Censor" on tool-status alone.

An emergency call (case a) carries: what the task was, what tiers 0–1 already tried, where it broke, and a fact trail (file:line / command output) — «скорая помощь» starts from the case history, not from a bare symptom. Lessons (case b) follow the self-learning triage format.

Incoming from the Censor: read and answer always (#OPS-2, operator verbatim 2026-08-15: «читай сообщения цензора и отвечай. Всегда!»). This is a floor, not a ceiling — the channel is two-way; any contour may write to any other to request an audit or help, respecting zone boundaries (§12: write a prompt, don't do the owner's work).

Full mechanics, gotchas (sleeping-session trap, sessionId rot, cross-machine caveats): ~/.claude/references/interchat-channel.md.

HL-4 — Source git is read-only: a tester works only in a clone

Standing operator rule (2026-06-06). A tester/verifier contour NEVER mutates the canonical (source-of-truth) git of the project under test: no commit/push/tag/branch/working-tree edit reaching canonical origin. All build/deploy/test/fix-experiment work happens in a clone; canonical is a read-only reference (git show / read — yes; write — no). A validated fix lands in canonical ONLY by the owner/operator under operator-gate (HL-2) — never by the tester.

HL-5 — Context layering: split docs by load-frequency

Standing rule (2026-06-16). Split every knowledge doc by load-frequency: L1 always-on (CLAUDE.md global+project) — Anthropic's own norm: «target under 200 lines per CLAUDE.md file» (docs.claude.com, best-practices). The limit is on ADHERENCE, not on context spend: «Longer files consume more context and reduce adherence»; «Bloated CLAUDE.md files cause Claude to ignore your actual instructions». Diagnostic from the same source: if the agent keeps breaking a rule it has written down, the file is too long and the rule is getting lost. Pruning test: «remove this line — would that cause a mistake? if not, cut it». L2 trigger-on (SKILL.md core, HARD ≤8 КБ), L3 on-demand (references/*.md), L4 never-auto (audit/, *-history-*.md, CHANGELOG.md). /compact//clear do NOT lower L1 — only editing content out to L3/L4 does. 3-layer cut: A — imperative → inline L1/L2; B — methodology / code ≥15 lines / anti-patterns-with-rationale → references/; C — history / dated incident / operator-verbatim >1 line → <file>-history-<date>.md. NEVER move out of L1/L2: registries ($names/MAC/paths), safety/privacy-locks, cited absolute paths.

Lossless refactor protocol (HARD): (1) verbatim backup FIRST; (2) lean-rewrite after; (3) index-table header; (4) sanity-grep every safety phrase + registry line verbatim-present in lean; (5) backup byte-identical. Bootstrap (Phase 4): scaffold <project>/references/ + audit/ on onboarding, design CLAUDE.md lean from scratch — not «later». Full body: references/context-layering.md.

HL-6 — The contour closes its OWN full cycle: development → verification (2026-08-30)

Operator's words, verbatim: «я вообще могу вас забыть подключить. и делаю это в глобальных случаях. Локальные агенты должны уметь закрывать все циклы от разработки до проверки субагентами». The Censor/Codeaudit tier is an exception invoked by the operator, not a pipeline stage — work must be verified WITHOUT it. Concretely (global §31.D, #EVAL-1):

• Tier 0, every LLM call: result is NOT obtained until checked mechanically — done_reason == "stop", non-empty response, format parsed (json.loads/ast.parse), any degradation (fallback/CPU/truncation) surfaced as an explicit field. Failure = loud error, never a silent return. Copy the reference snippet from workflow\scripts\ (until it lands: gen_code.py v1.1 is the pattern) — do not re-invent it.
• Tier 1, judgment checks: ONE sterile background subagent-verifier per artifact. The brief follows global #SA-7: material presented as FOREIGN (no «my» label), no expected answer, no «is X correct?» questions, detection separated from fixing. The subagent brief states its verification BOUNDARY explicitly (#SA-8); a second verifier gets a DIFFERENT one.
• Waiting for the Censor, or shipping with «надзор потом проверит» — a process bug. The Censor/Codeaudit are NOT part of the workflow and do NOT control agents (operator, 2026-08-30): their scope is doctrine design, new-contour design, global audit, operator-tasked audit, and emergency help when a local contour cannot cope.
• New automatic checks (hooks, gates, validators) created by the contour are registered in ~/.claude/references/evaluators-registry.md (via a prompt to the Censor) with a mutation test — a check never shown to fail is not a check (#SA-3).

Onboarding workflow (run in order, in the new chat)

• Phase 0 — confirm intent. Confirm with the operator: (a) contour name (= working-folder basename, e.g. Цензор, GEANT4, 0_Work) — this is what mail addressing keys on; (b) project root this contour owns; (c) rig/domain (default AtomFast adb+BLE, references/rig-atomfast.md) if applicable; (d) operator's own channel for decision-requests. Don't guess (c)/(d).
• Phase 1 — register in the operator's zone registry. Not a script — a doctrine edit: add a row to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md §12 table (or ask the Censor/operator to add it) and, if the contour will send/receive mail, a row in <WORKSPACE>\_interchat\ REGISTRY-adresatov.md mapping contour name → working-folder basename. There is no register.py step anymore — the file mailbox has no per-role registry file to seed.
• Phase 2 — check the inbox once, then rely on the global hook. Look at <WORKSPACE>\_interchat\inbox\<this-contour-folder>\ for anything waiting; going forward the global hooks/interchat_inbox.py surfaces new mail automatically on each turn. Nothing to launch, no Monitor watcher — that mechanism is retired (v1.x).
• Phase 3 — announce the new contour to the Censor (HL-3, one-time registration — NOT a step-report; routine reporting is retired). File to _interchat\inbox\Цензор\ **plus** a SendMessage duplicate if the Censor's session is live — role, project root, rig summary, operator channel, irreversible allow-list you gate on.
• Phase 4 — context-layering setup (HL-5). Scaffold <project>/references/ + <project>/audit/ before any task work; if the contour owns <project>/CLAUDE.md, design it lean from scratch (≤6 КБ core, index-table header). Dated incident in a rule = simultaneous audit/incidents-<month>.md entry, not «later».
• Phase 5 — staff the internal fleet (optional). If the work needs a fleet, /workflow bootstrap <name> --tier BALANCED. One-off fan-out → Workflow(...) directly. Both inherit HL-1.
• Phase 6 — work the task loop. plan → delegate (HL-1) → verify it yourself: tier 0 mechanics on every LLM call + a sterile subagent-verifier for judgment (HL-6) → gate irreversible to the operator (HL-2) → escalate to the Censor ONLY on the four HL-3 cases (stuck / doctrine-level lesson / requested audit / routed adjudication) → keep the operator channel free (background dispatch, never foreground).

Files in this skill

• references/context-layering.md — HL-5 full body.
• references/rig-atomfast.md — domain pack: adb + AtomFast BLE, reversible-vs-irreversible map, worked first task.
• references/bus-protocol.md — frozen, historical only. Describes the retired cc-interchat-bus (v1.x). Do not follow for new work — kept so incident history and script provenance aren't lost.
• scripts/bus_lib.py, scripts/register.py, scripts/watch.py, scripts/watchdog.py, scripts/step_report.py, scripts/_smoke_probe.py — retired v1.x bus tooling, unused by this version. Not deleted (history/rollback reference); do not invoke for new onboarding.

Anti-patterns (do not)

• Template/bulk work in the contour's own context — Ollama's job; a >60k-token step with no delegation is a process bug (HL-1).
• Treating a Censor ACCEPT / mailbox message as permission to push/publish/flash — needs the operator's own-channel «да» (HL-2, non-transitive).
• Writing a mailbox file and treating it as delivered — the file alone is not proof of delivery and is not sufficient; the SendMessage duplicate to a live session is MANDATORY, and even then only a *.read.md marker or a reply is proof (HL-3).
• Trying to wake a sleeping recipient session — impossible and wastes the operator's tokens; the file waits for the recipient's next natural turn.
• Reviving the v1.x Monitor-based watcher — retired; the global inbox hook covers receiving.
• Sending routine step-reports / ACKs / status pings to the Censor — retired 2026-08-30; the Censor is not part of the workflow. Write only on the four HL-3 cases.
• Shipping without closing tiers 0–1 yourself, or waiting for the Censor to verify — the contour closes its own cycle (HL-6); «надзор потом проверит» is a process bug.

История

• 2026-08-23 — переписан под #BUS-2 (файловый ящик) по прямому указанию оператора: «перепиши. и укажи обязательно уведомляй в сессию». Версия 1.x (watcher-based cc-interchat-bus) закрыта оператором 16.08.2026 («шина не нужна») и хранится только как история в references/bus-protocol.md + scripts/. HL-3/HL-4 версии 1.x слиты в один HL-3 (file + mandatory session-notify); HL-6 версии 1.x стал HL-5; нумерация остальных не менялась.