Finish Card

When to invoke

Invoke when the user says "done", "close this", "finish X", "mark complete", "wrap up", "ship it", or completes work that satisfies a card's DoD. The DoD checkboxes ARE the closure contract (Scrum Definition of Done).

Close a card

Scrum's Definition of Done as a machine-checkable closure contract: goc done counts unchecked boxes and refuses to flip the status while any remain. The ticked checkbox list is the audit trail.

Closure is an eight-step contract — skip a step and the card is dishonest:

1. Verify the work satisfies the DoD criteria.
2. Run the project-specific closure audit (or honestly note that no project rubric applies).
3. Tick the DoD checkboxes in the README.
4. Append closure context to log.md (including the audit outcome).
5. Run goc attest <title> to record the Closure-verification block in log.md.
6. Run goc done <title> (DoD-100% gated).
7. Run any project-specific post-close action defined in the consuming repo's hook.
8. Commit or hand off per the consuming repo's hook / normal runtime workflow.

If at any step the work turns out NOT to be a closure (a fix attempt regressed, a hypothesis was disproved during verification), divert to the advance-card skill for disproved / re-open instead.

Edge cases live in reference.md — a sibling file in this skill's directory. Read the named section only when the situation actually applies:

Optional argument — title.

Step 1 — confirm the work satisfies the DoD

Read the card by running goc show <title> yourself with the real title bound. Re-confirm each DoD criterion against the actual work:

• - [ ] reproduce.py exits zero (defect no longer fires) — run uv run python deck/<title>/reproduce.py, confirm exit 0 with the no-defect output.
• - [ ] <metric assertion> — run the relevant pytest / sweep and capture the verification number.
• Doc-quality criteria — re-read the cited paper / axiom and confirm the doc now aligns.

If any criterion is NOT actually satisfied, stop the closure: a failed fix attempt → revert, append a ## Disproved fix attempt section to deck/<title>/log.md, leave status active or re-open via the advance-card skill; a disproved hypothesis → divert to the advance-card skill (with <title> disproved).

Step 2 — project-specific closure audit

Closure must align with the consuming repo's documented principles, not just pass tests — a green fix can still encode a default the project disagrees with. The audit makes the closer name which principle the closure aligns with, or honestly record that none is touched.

cat .game-of-cards/hooks/finish-card.md 2>/dev/null || true

If the hook above defines a closure-audit rubric, follow it, then write the outcome into the Step 4 log.md entry as exactly ONE of:

• <rubric-name> audit: PASS — invokes <principle> + <primary source>
• <rubric-name> audit: PASS — no principle touched, mechanical fix (be honest — if the fix binds any principle, name it instead)

If the audit FAILS — the fix encodes a default the rubric disagrees with, masks a missing concept, or contradicts a documented principle — STOP the closure: redesign the fix to align (preferred), or divert to the advance-card skill (with <title> open) and append an ## audit failed section to log.md. If no rubric is defined (hook absent or empty), record "no rubric configured; mechanical fix" verbatim.

No per-card DoD checkbox is required for the audit — it is a workflow gate on every closure; the closure log entry is the audit trail.

Step 3 — tick the DoD checkboxes (update the dashboard)

Edit deck/<title>/README.md and mark each criterion - [x]. The README is the dashboard: if the body's "Fix" or "Empirical evidence" sections still reflect the pre-resolution framing, rewrite them in place to describe the applied fix and final measurement. Do NOT append a "Resolution (DATE)" block below the original framing — the journal entry in Step 4 captures the transition (see the card-schema skill "What goes where").

If the fix added a sub-criterion the original DoD didn't anticipate, add a new ticked box and note in the body why. If a criterion turned out to be moot, strike it from the DoD with a one-line justification rather than ticking it falsely.

Step 4 — append closure context to log.md (the journal)

log.md is the append-only journal — never rewrite existing entries; the closure entry is one more entry at the bottom:

## YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ — Closure

- **What changed**: <file:line> — <one-line essence>
- **Verification**: <one or two key numbers>
- **Audit**: PASS — <principle + primary source> | PASS — no principle touched, mechanical fix
- **Project impact**: <project-defined dashboard line, or "n/a">
- **Tests**: <count> passed / <count> failed / <count> xfailed
- **Bundled with**: <title-A>, <title-B> (if any)

The timestamp is ISO 8601 UTC. (goc attest's closure-marker check date-prefix-matches, so legacy date-only headers keep validating.)

Step 5 — record the Closure verification (goc attest)

goc attest <title>

attest runs every project-wide (layer-2) and GoC-wide (layer-3) check from .game-of-cards/config.yaml — automated subprocesses (pytest, ruff, goc validate), derived card-state checks (DoD %, advanced_by closure, closure-entry grep), and interactive manual / agent confirmations — then appends a "Closure verification" block to log.md. On any failure it exits non-zero and closure blocks: fix the failing check and re-run. No waivers.

• --skip <name> records [~] SKIPPED for one genuinely flaky check — last resort, never routine (reference.md § Attest details and skip policy).
• An advanced-by-closed FAIL means a card in advanced_by is still open: either wait for it to close, or retract a false edge with goc unadvance <closing-title> --by <upstream-title>. Do NOT --skip past it — see reference.md § Retraction vs waiting.

Step 6 — close via the CLI

goc done <title>

Refuses (exit 2, ERROR: <title>: <n> unchecked DoD box(es)) while any box is unchecked. On success sets status: done + closed_at and prints <title>: open → done.

• done does NOT auto-commit — the closure flip ships with the work commit in Step 8, not as a state-only commit.
• A free-form prose DoD (zero checkboxes) needs --force; prefer adding checkboxes.
• One fix resolving several cards → goc done --bundle <A> <B> … writes one shared attestation and cross-referenced closure entries; read reference.md § Bundled closures before first use.

Before the flip, check whether your fix also retires a card nobody is looking at — dedup ran when those cards were filed, so none of them saw yours (reference.md § Other cards your fix also fixed):

grep -rli '<symbol-your-fix-touched>' .game-of-cards/deck/*/README.md

Per open/active hit describing the defect you just fixed: at gate none, goc status <other> superseded --by <title>. At gate decision/session the engine refuses — lowering a gate is the human's act — so append a ## <ts> — Staleness re-check entry to that card's log.md naming your commit instead.

Step 7 — project-specific post-close action

If the hook file loaded in Step 2 also defines a post-close action (a status-dashboard refresh, a changelog row, a release-notes entry), run it now; otherwise this step is a no-op. Step 2 and this step deliberately share the one hook file (.game-of-cards/hooks/finish-card.md) — the consuming repo authors both rubrics together.

Step 8 — commit or hand off

Follow the hook's commit flow if it defines one; otherwise use the runtime's normal commit workflow. The final commit ships the work: the code/doc diff plus the closure transition (DoD ticks, log entries from Steps 4 + 5, status: done). Claim/decide/advance flips usually committed earlier under workflow.auto_commit.

On a shared worktree, guard the index (rationale in reference.md § Parallel-agent commit safety):

git diff --cached --name-only   # foreign staged files? another agent is mid-commit — back off
git add <path>...               # explicit paths only — never `git add .` / `git add -A`
git diff --cached --stat
git commit -- <path>...         # pathspec confines the commit to this closure's files

Never use git stash, git restore, git checkout --, git reset --hard, or git clean as a commit-isolation technique.

Subject shape: fix(<scope>): <one-line subject> — closes <title> (bundled closures append more slugs); body carries the WHY plus verification numbers. Full conventions and commit-failure handling: reference.md § Commit conventions.

Cross-references

• reference.md (this skill's directory) — every edge case routed in the table above.
• the card-schema skill — DoD format + free-form-prose escape.
• the advance-card skill — divert for → disproved or re-open.

Sibling files on this host

This skill ships reference.md alongside its body. If a direct file read fails (sandboxed sessions cannot see the plugin install path), fetch the file through the goc tool: {verb: "skill", args: ["finish-card", "<file>"]}.