Refine Deck

When to invoke

Invoke when the user says "tidy up the deck", "check for stale cards", "hygiene pass", "clean up the queue", "archive old", "audit the deck", or invokes /refine-deck. Covers retagging stale cards, pruning 90-day unverified parks, surfacing defunct file:line references, surfacing orphaned dependencies (epics with no children, meta-fix families not wired, log.md migration TODOs), surfacing engineer-jargon titles for retitling, and proposing new canonical tags (XP refactor mercilessly + Kanban continuous improvement).

Context (project-local extension)

Before running the body of this skill, the agent should see current deck state. Run these via the goc tool (top-level filters like --status / --tag / --worker map to the tool's flags parameter; the subcommand maps to verb). For bare-queue listings with no subcommand, shell out via the exec tool:

• cat .game-of-cards/hooks/refine-deck.md 2>/dev/null || true

Refine the deck

Every iteration the BOARD gets better, not just the code on it: this skill is the recurring hygiene tax that keeps the deck's read-pattern guarantee alive as filing slows down and rot accumulates. The hook above may extend the flow with project-specific categories or thresholds (scope rules in reference.md § Rationale).

Surface rot and act on it before commit. Two action paths depending on the finding's nature:

• Hygiene findings (mechanical: stale unverified parks, defunct file:line cites, missing summaries, orphaned-edge mechanical wires) — apply the edit directly; a non-firing tag row is the one exception, reported and never edited.
• Structural findings (epic-shaped clusters, missing canonical-reference families, contribution-recall proposals, meta-decision umbrellas, newly-emergent tag candidates surfaced by a project hook's pattern-discovery pass) — file via the create-card skill, disprove via the advance-card skill (with <title> disproved), or park --tag unverified per Step 4.5. "Surfaced and discussed in chat" is not a disposition.

Long-form material lives in reference.md — a sibling file in this skill's directory. Read the named section only when the situation actually applies:

Step 1 — sanity floor

goc validate 2>&1 || echo "[refine-deck] validate found rot; the skill body below will route you through fixing it"

If validate fails with half-edge errors, run goc repair-edges to preview the missing reverse-edge writes, then goc repair-edges --apply and re-run goc validate. If repair reports a structural cycle, park that card for human review instead of guessing which edge is wrong. Fix unknown tags / missing required fields FIRST too. Hygiene runs on a valid deck. The precondition above is intentionally soft-gated so a failing validator surfaces its output into this skill rather than blocking the skill load.

Step 2 — survey by category

Stale unverified parks

goc --tag unverified -v

For each entry: check created against today's date. Cards parked

90 days that nobody has reproduced or refuted are decay candidates. Options:

• Retry the falsifying recipe. If the body's "what-evidence-would-falsify-it" recipe is now feasible (infra exists, sweep budget available), run it. On evidence: drop the unverified tag (promote) or flip to disproved.
• Demote to disproved. If three independent rounds have failed to reproduce, the lead is dead. the advance-card skill (with <title> disproved) with a one-line "Three rounds attempted; no reproduction" rebuttal.
• Keep parked. Add a one-line note in log.md explaining why this round didn't have the budget; the 90-day clock resets.

Stale-open cards (no log activity)

goc --status open --json 2>&1 | head -100

Cards with status: open whose log.md has no entries in 60+ days are at risk of being forgotten. For each: read the body, decide if the lead is still real, and either:

• Re-prioritize via the next-card skill (recommend it on the next loop iteration).
• Escalate the gate from none to decision if blocking on a framing question.
• Flip to disproved if the original evidence has rotted away.

Defunct file:line citations

Check each open card's cites against current code with an ANCHOR test, not a bounds test. An in-range line number is no evidence the cite is current: a file that grew keeps every old number valid while the code that was there moved down, so line ≤ EOF can only fire on a file that SHRANK. Compare what is AT the cited line now against what the card says is there.

Scope by what the cite CLAIMS, not by where it sits. A cite asserting where code lives NOW is in scope in prose and inside a fenced block alike — the fenced form is a COMMENT LABEL, a # or // marker before the cite on its line. A cite that is part of a dated record — pasted grep -n output (path:line:content), a reproduce.py transcript, a quoted error — is OUT of scope: rewriting its number fabricates output the command never produced. Repair the labels; leave the records and report their count apart from the declines below. Undecidable → record.

Per cite (long form: reference.md § Citation anchor check):

1. Resolve the path — cards write engine.py:N for goc/engine.py:N; prefer a non-mirror match. A range names one BLOCK: map both endpoints, then check the PAIR — emit only if it is ordered (start <= end) and the span still fits a block. An unordered pair or an implausible span is a DECLINE, reported. A range that ARRIVES incoherent is an earlier pass's damage, not drift: its endpoints anchor to whatever they were last moved onto, so re-mapping launders the corruption. Report it; never rewrite it.
2. Anchor = that line's text at the commit that last WROTE the number: walk git log --follow --format=%H -- <card>/README.md oldest → newest and take the newest commit where the cite token turns from absent to present — the filing commit for a virgin cite, the repair commit for one an earlier pass rewrote. Anchoring a repaired number at the filing commit reads unrelated code and moves the cite onto it. Presence is SET MEMBERSHIP over that version's extracted cite tokens, never a substring search: path:N must not read as present inside path:N-M, or it inherits the range's older anchor. And a token the card holds at TWO OR MORE in-scope occurrences is undecidable — the occurrences share one history, so no walk anchors them apart. DECLINE it, report it, leave the numbers alone.
3. Refuse a trivial anchor BEFORE comparing it: a blank, a bare brace, or anything under ~12 chars matches everywhere, so re-finding it at the cited offset is no evidence the cite is current. DECLINE and report it, never current. Else anchor ≠ the line in HEAD → the cite is defunct.
4. Relocate the anchor text in HEAD and rewrite the number only on a UNIQUE match — step 3 already refused the lines that match everywhere. Never guess. When the anchor is a def/class line whose exact text is gone, retry on a unique def <name>( / class <name>(: a definition is identified by its NAME, not by its parameter list, so a keyword-only argument appended to a signature must not read as "the code was refactored away". Two or more definitions of that name is an ambiguous match — DECLINE. The name rule feeds the endpoint mapper only; step 1's pair check still decides what a range emits.

Cites the recipe declines — ambiguous occurrence, trivial anchor, anchor gone, ambiguous match, incoherent pair — are REPORTED for a human to read, never silently skipped. Anchor text that exists nowhere, with no unique definition of its name either, usually means the cited code was refactored away: re-read the card and, if the refactor also fixed the defect, close via the finish-card skill with a note "fixed incidentally by ".

End the step by RE-RUNNING the decision phase over the cards you just wrote: a correctly repaired deck is a FIXED POINT, so it must propose ZERO further repairs. Every per-cite rule passes on a second-round proposal — real anchor, unique match, confident rewrite onto the wrong line — so the re-run is the only thing that catches a pass repairing its own output. A non-empty second round is a recipe defect to file, not more rewrites to apply.

Missing summaries

Pre-2026-05-01 cards may have empty or absent summary: fields. Surface these:

goc --status all --json | \
  jq '.[] | select(.summary == "" or .summary == null) | .title'

For each surfaced card: read the body, write a ≤3-sentence summary into the frontmatter. Mechanical doc edit; no status change.

Tags without firing predicates

Per the card-schema skill, a tag must satisfy its own row, not a fixed text window; the row's check column says whether that is scorable or a judgment (reference.md § Tag sweeps). Survey 5–10 random cards per round. Report, never strip — a non-firing row costs a line of output, not curated grouping.

Orphaned dependencies

Relational rot the validator cannot see: it enforces edge SYMMETRY at commit time but not edge ABSENCE — epics with zero linked children; meta-fix cards whose body lists a family roster but carry zero edges; open cards with legacy **Depends on:** / **Next:** / **Part of:** body markers but empty schema arrays; unactioned log.md migration TODOs (formerly parent: X / formerly spawned_from: X). Run the four sub-checks in reference.md § Orphaned-dependency sub-check scripts, judge each surfaced card's edge direction, and wire it via goc advance X --by Y (symmetric-by-construction, so the validator stays happy). A card whose family members are code sites has nothing to wire — leave it.

Card metadata quality pass

Title antipatterns + missing-summary scan via:

goc quality-pass --status all

What it surfaces:

• Title antipatterns — same regex predicates goc new uses to reject filings (engineer-jargon: r88, path-2, phase-3, bug-140, _md_/_py_ infixes, camelCase tokens, math symbols). Catches legacy cards filed before the antipattern guard was wired. For each surfaced title: rename via goc move <old> <new> so cross-references rewrite atomically.
• Missing summaries — pre-2026-05-01 cards may lack the summary: frontmatter field that triage views (goc -v) depend on. For each: read the body, write a ≤3-sentence summary into the YAML.

Step 3 — file new canonical tag candidates

When a coherent body of work emerges that isn't covered by an existing tag (e.g., a sprint of 6 cards all about a specific research front), file via the create-card skill a card whose DoD is the SCHEMA.md PR adding the new tag + its predicate. Adding the tag itself remains a SCHEMA.md PR per the schema's "Adding new tags" rule; the filing that schedules that PR is imperative. Like every other structural finding, the candidate either becomes a card here, gets disproved (the proposed predicate doesn't fire on a sufficient set), or parks --tag unverified per Step 4.5 — not a chat-only proposal.

Step 4 — surface and act

For each surfaced issue, output one line documenting the action taken (hygiene) or the card filed / disprove flip / park (structural):

<title>: <issue> → <action>

Sample lines in reference.md § Example Step 4 output.

Step 4.5 — Park-or-disprove unfollowed structural candidates (mandatory)

Project hooks may extend Step 2 with a pattern-discovery pass that surfaces more structural candidates than this round can verify and file. Structural candidates that didn't get applied this round MUST go somewhere durable before commit:

1. Filed as a new card via the create-card skill.
2. Disproved via the advance-card skill (with <title> disproved) — when you re-read the cited code and the candidate is wrong on its face.
3. Unverified via the create-card skill (with ... --tag unverified) — when the candidate has substance but no verification budget this round. Body must include: the candidate's hypothesis with file:line (verbatim quote), why deferred, falsification recipe, the category (Step 2 sub-section) that surfaced it.

Scope, minimum-vs-maximum bound, and the noise escape valve: reference.md § Step 4.5 scope notes.

Cross-references

• the advance-card skill — for status flips (disproved / re-open / unblock).
• the card-schema skill — tag application predicates and the schema PR contract for new tags.
• the create-card skill — when a hygiene issue surfaces a NEW defect (e.g., the defunct citation reveals a real bug, not just rot), file via create-card.
• Project commit workflow — to land the hygiene edits as a chore(deck): hygiene pass — <date> commit.

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: ["refine-deck", "<file>"]}.