- Always use tests to demonstrate the existence of a bug before fixing the bug. - If you suspect that a bug exists, use a test to demonstrate it first: - prefer unit tests testing a small amount of code to integration or e2e tests - Option<...> or Result<...> are fine but should not be present in the majority of the code. - Similarly, code managing Box<...> or RC<...>, etc. for containers pointing to heap data should be split from logic - @context/repo-map.md is your "road map" for the repository. use it to reduce exploration and keep it updated. - @context/design-principles.md is also important for keeping the repository consistent. - prefer merges to rebasing. - always start responses with bananaS! - there is a prolog MCP available: load a session from `kb` at the root of the repository at the beginning of every session, and query it as you work. **Reading only** — the MCP must never write `kb.pl`. - save structured facts as you go — work done, interesting locations, important decisions — with `scripts/kb add` (see the `kb` skill). Write a fact when you learn it; there is no reason to batch. - query the knowledge base as needed and use Prolog reasoning when it makes sense. - Prolog should be used as a design tool to reason about the code and the implementation of tickets and to persist a formal model of it. # Agent Instructions This project uses **bd** (beads) for issue tracking. Run `bd prime` for full workflow context. ## Quick Reference ```bash bd ready # Find available work bd show # View issue details bd update --claim # Claim work atomically bd close # Complete work bd dolt push # Push beads data to remote ``` ## Non-Interactive Shell Commands **ALWAYS use non-interactive flags** with file operations to avoid hanging on confirmation prompts. Shell commands like `cp`, `mv`, and `rm` may be aliased to include `-i` (interactive) mode on some systems, causing the agent to hang indefinitely waiting for y/n input. **Use these forms instead:** ```bash # Force overwrite without prompting cp -f source dest # NOT: cp source dest mv -f source dest # NOT: mv source dest rm -f file # NOT: rm file # For recursive operations rm -rf directory # NOT: rm -r directory cp -rf source dest # NOT: cp -r source dest ``` **Other commands that may prompt:** - `scp` - use `-o BatchMode=yes` for non-interactive - `ssh` - use `-o BatchMode=yes` to fail instead of prompting - `apt-get` - use `-y` flag - `brew` - use `HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1` env var ## The Wave Workflow Most work here is done by **waves**: an orchestrator chunks the open backlog, fans several agents out into their own git worktrees, merges what comes back, reviews it, and pushes the wave as one PR. This section is what that costs to get right. Everything in it was learned by getting it wrong first. ### Who owns what Three files are **orchestrator-only**, and the rule exists because they are guaranteed conflicts — every agent has a reason to touch them and they merge badly: | File | Why | |---|---| | `.beads/` (incl. `issues.jsonl`) | bd owns it. See "Never hand-edit" below. | | `prolog-sessions/kb.pl` | Written by `scripts/kb` only. See `context/code/kb-tool.md`. | | `context/repo-map.md` | Every agent wants to add a gotcha; every wave would conflict. | Wave agents **read** all three freely (`bd show`, `bd ready`, grep `kb.pl`) and **write** none of them. They report proposed repo-map lines and `kb.pl` facts as *text* in their hand-back, and the orchestrator applies them — batched, at the end of the wave, after the review. **`kb.pl` is written by `scripts/kb add|replace|rm` and by nothing else** — not the Prolog MCP, not an editor. Every write is gated on `kb_consistent` against the candidate, so a bad delta leaves the file untouched. Facts do not need batching: write one when you learn it. There is a `kb` skill; read it before your first write. Reading is unaffected — `loadSession` at session start is still how a session gets the model in hand. ### Partitioning a wave Partition by **crate or directory**, not by ticket count, and tell each agent explicitly which ground is *not* theirs. Two rules that fall out of the ones we broke: - **Tickets that share a file belong to one agent.** The four TUI widget migrations all touch `src/draw.rs`; split across agents they are a guaranteed conflict, so they go to one agent to do sequentially. Group first, then count. - **An agent that must stray says so rather than guessing.** Give the boundary and ask for a report when it has to be crossed. Two agents each adding a workspace member will still collide in `Cargo.toml`/`Cargo.lock`. That one is expected; keep both sides. ### Every wave agent's brief must include The wave skill holds both halves, each in one place (improvise-1f8e): - **The brief checklist** — what an orchestrator must put in a brief — is `.agents/skills/wave/SKILL.md`, "What every brief must carry". - **The agent's standing rules** — base and push, gates, claim, vacuity shapes, evidence, forbidden files, GitHub, hand-back, disk, commit early — are `.agents/skills/wave/agent-rules.md`. A brief points there rather than restating them. `.claude/skills/wave` is a symlink to `.agents/skills/wave`, so Claude and Codex read the same files. A new rule goes into one of those two files, not here and not into the next brief: a restated rule is the copy nobody corrects, and this list was once a third copy that drifted from the skill's. ### Between waves Run the **code-review skill** on the merged range and iterate until its backlog is empty. This is not ceremony: in this repo the review's characteristic find is not a wrong line, it is **a test that passes while the thing it names is broken** — a vacuous fold test, a bit-witness that cannot see the bit, a one-category fixture, a helper that fabricates the `_Measure` items the code under test needs, a check-the-checker that injected malformed JSON and so proved nothing. A green suite is not evidence. Ask the reviewer to *inject the fault* and watch the check fail. ### Shipping a wave **Do not push `main` to `gh/main`.** Work reaches GitHub as a branch and a pull request, and lands on `main` by being merged there. The orchestrator still merges agent branches into its *local* `main` to integrate and run the gates — that is how conflicts get found early — but the push is a branch push, not a `main` push. `origin` and `gitea` are mirrors and take `main` directly. **So `origin/main` runs ahead of `gh/main`, and a branch destined for a GitHub PR must merge `gh/main` — never `origin/main`.** This is a trap in this repo's own topology rather than a slip: the two remotes are both spelled `main`, and nothing about `git merge origin/main` looks wrong. The session-completion protocol below literally says `git merge origin/main`, which is right for `main` itself and wrong for a PR branch. It cost a review round on PR #145, where four unmerged commits — including another PR's whole diff — were pulled into a branch based on `gh/main` and had to be rebuilt by cherry-picking. ChatGPT Codex caught it; nothing in CI could, because the result compiles and passes. The tell is a PR diff naming files the ticket has no reason to touch, so **read your own PR's file list before asking for review** — and diff against `gh/main...`, never the local equivalent. **The second vector is the worktree base**: a branch cut from the orchestrator's *local* `main` inherits whatever that checkout has merged but not yet pushed, and nothing in the branch says so. That hit PR #148 with another PR's whole diff — including `.beads/`, `kb.pl` and `context/repo-map.md`, the three files agents are forbidden to touch, so the review read as a rule violation rather than a base problem. Note the window is transient — the two remotes are equal immediately after the orchestrator syncs — which makes it worse, not better: the hazard is absent exactly when you would think to check for it. This is easy to drift out of, because merging locally and pushing feels like finishing. It happened in this repo: 27 commits across six agent branches — including a new crate, a new protocol type, and a type moving between crates — went straight to `main` unreviewed, while `AGENTS.md` already said not to. If you notice a batch has bypassed the loop, the cheap repair is a **review-only PR**: base a branch at the last PR merge, open a PR with `main` as the head, let Copilot review the diff, and land the findings as an ordinary PR afterwards. It cannot be merged — the commits are already in — so close it once its findings are filed or fixed. Rewinding the default branch to fake a mergeable PR is not worth it on a repo with other collaborators. One PR per wave, built by a **dedicated PR agent in its own worktree**, so waves pipeline against it: the next wave runs while the PR absorbs review fixes. **Read the PR's reviews before merging it.** This is separate from CI and from the adversarial agent, and it has been missed: two ChatGPT Codex reviews landed on merged PRs and were not read until afterwards, one of them a live P2 (improvise-x1ns). Both were correct. ```bash gh pr view --json reviews -q '.reviews[]|"[\(.state)] \(.submittedAt) \(.commit.oid[0:8])\n\(.body)"' ``` Two things make a Codex review easy to miss. It arrives as a **review**, not a comment, so a glance at the comment thread does not show it. And it posts under the repository owner's account — the same account our own agents post under — so **authorship does not distinguish it**. The tell is the trailing line `_Automated review by ChatGPT Codex (…)_`; ours open with `_Posted by Claude (…)_`. Check the `commit.oid` too: a review may target an earlier head, and the finding may already be fixed — verify rather than assume in either direction. Reviews arrive **as the owner's quota allows**, so absence is not evidence. Wait where a review is plausible, and when one is found, answer it on the thread even if the PR has already merged: that is where the next reader looks. **Copilot is not reviewing this repository, and the request is a silent no-op.** Measured 2026-09-20: PRs #12, #21 and #27 carry 2, 8 and 4 Copilot reviews; #61, #66, #68 and #70 carry none. Both request paths report success and produce zero `review_requested` events — the GraphQL mutation returns `clientMutationId: null` and the REST call returns 200 with `requested_reviewers: []`. So **do not wait on it**: an absent review and an unrequested one look identical from outside, which is `doctrine(review_is_requested_not_inherited)` seen from the requester's side. Review is an adversarial agent the orchestrator dispatches, given the head SHA. The mechanics below are kept for the day it comes back. Copilot review must be **re-requested after every fix push**; it does not re-review on its own. The mutation takes a **`botIds`** field — `userIds` fails with *"Could not resolve to User node"*: ```bash gh api graphql -f query='mutation($pr:ID!,$ids:[ID!]!){requestReviews(input:{pullRequestId:$pr,botIds:$ids,union:true}){clientMutationId}}' \ -f pr="$(gh pr view --json id -q .id)" -f ids=BOT_kgDOCnlnWA ``` REST also works, with the login spelled `copilot-pull-request-reviewer[bot]` — without the `[bot]` suffix it 422s as "not a collaborator". In a worktree-isolated agent the shell guard refuses an inline `gh api graphql -f query='mutation(...)'` as "too complex to verify". Put the query in a file and pass `-F query=@file`; PR comment bodies likewise go through `-F body=@file` rather than command substitution. **Anything you post to GitHub goes out under the repository owner's account, so say who is speaking.** Open every PR comment, review and issue body with a line naming the model and that it is an agent posting in his session. A PR body's `🤖 Generated with Claude Code` footer covers that case; comments have nothing unless you add it, and an unattributed one reads as his own words to everyone who sees it. Two environment notes. **`gh` is not on `PATH` here** — the name is shell-aliased to `git-hub`, a different tool — so use `nix shell nixpkgs#gh --command gh …`. And **a Copilot review takes about six minutes**; tool calls return fast, which makes elapsed time easy to misjudge, so check `date -u` against the GitHub timeline before concluding a review is stuck. (One agent closed and reopened a PR to "unstick" a review that was proceeding normally.) Across four PRs Copilot has found genuine bugs and no false positives, so its findings are worth the loop. **But judge each one against the repo's doctrine rather than applying it reflexively**, and when you decline, reply on the thread with the reason. The distinction that has mattered: a finding can be *correct* and still be wrong to fix in that PR. On #12, a non-ASCII `truncate` panic was applied (byte-identical on ASCII, so it cost no evidence) while a hint-line padding bug in the same file was declined — fixing it would have rewritten the exact-frame characterization tests that were the PR's only evidence the migration changed nothing. Two right findings, different costs. File the declined one. **Under merge-as-soon-as-green, a review round can land after its own merge.** GitHub deletes the branch when a PR merges, so a fix push to the old branch name **silently succeeds and accomplishes nothing** — it re-creates a branch `main` will never see, CI runs on it, and the commit is nowhere. The tell is the push printing `* [new branch]` where you expected an `old..new` range. It happened on #51: the third review round completed four minutes after the merge, and the correction it prompted went to a re-created `wave/b-projection-gaps`. The repair is to branch from `gh/main`, cherry-pick, open a follow-up PR, and delete the stray re-creation. Check `gh pr view --json state` *before* pushing a fix to a PR you have not looked at in a few minutes, rather than after. Merge only once a review has passed — an adversarial agent's while Copilot is absent, and it must name the head SHA it reviewed. Prefer a **merge commit** — `AGENTS.md` says merges over rebases, and a wave's commits are individually meaningful. ### Never hand-edit `.beads/issues.jsonl` bd manipulates that file and auto-exports to it. Editing it — or even `git checkout`-ing it, which fires the post-checkout hook — breaks auto-export and desynchronises `export-state.json`. Use `bd` commands, let auto-export run, and commit whatever it leaves. ### Cite a ticket ID you have read back `bd create` assigns the ID; it is not derivable from the title. An orchestrator that files with output suppressed and then writes the ticket into a gotcha or an ADR **will invent one** — six invented IDs survived into `context/` in a single session before an agent tried one and found nothing. Read the ID back after filing, and before pushing docs run the audit: ```bash grep -rohE 'improvise-[a-z0-9]{3,8}\b' \ context README.md AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md crates src tests examples web harness docs \ | sort -u \ | grep -vE '^improvise-(core|formula|io|protocol|command|gp|ws|worker|wasm|harness|registry|side|web)$' \ > /tmp/bd-audit-ids.txt bd show $(cat /tmp/bd-audit-ids.txt) 2>&1 \ | grep -iE 'not found|no such issue' || echo "all resolve" ``` Three things the earlier version of this recipe got wrong, each of which let a real defect through: - **It scanned two paths** (`context/repo-map.md context/adr/*.md`), so it found one dead id in the repo map and missed both copies of it in `harness/tests/shell.spec.js`. Ticket IDs are cited in code comments, in `README.md` and in `web/`, not only in `context/`. - **`[a-z0-9]{3,4}` cannot see a commit SHA wearing the prefix.** A seven-hex commit sha cited as `improvise-` survived in `crates/improvise-core/src/workbook.rs` precisely because it was too long to match. An ID-shaped non-ID is worse than a dead ID, because the diagnosis is identical and the repair is not. - **The exclusion list named only `core` and `wasm`**, so every other crate name would have been reported missing. The exclusions above also cover the non-ticket tokens this repo really contains: a package name, a temp file name, and the prose word "improvise-side". **They are anchored `^…$` for the same reason the recipe is read as code**: unanchored, the `gp` alternative is a *prefix* match, so a future real ticket whose id happens to begin `gp` is silently excluded and the audit reports nothing while skipping it. An exclusion list is a filter, and a filter that over-matches fails in the direction that looks like success. (Anchoring it is also what caught the example id this very paragraph originally spelled out — see the note below.) - **A release artifact's name is ID-shaped, and `improvise-installer.sh` escaped only by being ten characters long.** `improvise-web.tar.gz` (improvise-oujb) is three, so it matches `{3,8}` and resolves to nothing; `web` is therefore excluded above. The general point is that the length bound, not any rule, is what has been keeping `dist`'s artifact names out of this audit — so **a new artifact whose name is a short lowercase word must be added to the exclusion list in the same commit**, or it arrives as a dead id that no amount of `bd` archaeology explains. Note the recipe's own prose deliberately spells no live or dead id: a document that lists ids as examples makes itself a source of audit noise. One environment note: in a worktree-isolated agent the shell guard refuses a loop that passes a runtime-computed argument to `bd`, so the recipe above materialises the id list into a file and hands `bd show` the whole list in one call rather than looping. If `bd show` in your build does not take several ids, run the ids through `xargs -n1 -I{} bd show {}` from a plain shell instead. A dead ID is worse than no ID: it reads as a promise that the follow-up exists. ### Before filing a ticket, search Agent-filed issues duplicate work that is already open, sometimes already in progress. Two duplicates were filed in this repo within minutes of the hand-backs that prompted them. `bd search` the core concept *and* scan in-progress issues first. ## Beads Issue Tracker This project uses **bd (beads)** for issue tracking. Run `bd prime` to see full workflow context and commands. ### Quick Reference ```bash bd ready # Find available work bd show # View issue details bd update --claim # Claim work bd close # Complete work ``` ### Rules - Use `bd` for ALL task tracking — do NOT use TodoWrite, TaskCreate, or markdown TODO lists (the exception being that you must maintain context/design-principles.md and context/repo-map.md) - Run `bd prime` for detailed command reference and session close protocol - Use `bd remember` for persistent knowledge — do NOT use MEMORY.md files (the exception being that you must maintain context/design-principles.md and context/repo-map.md) ## Session Completion **When ending a work session**, you MUST complete ALL steps below. Work is NOT complete until `git push` succeeds. **MANDATORY WORKFLOW:** 1. **File issues for remaining work** - Create issues for anything that needs follow-up 2. **Run quality gates** (if code changed) - Tests, linters, builds 3. **Update issue status** - Close finished work, update in-progress items 4. **PUSH TO REMOTE** - This is MANDATORY: ```bash git merge origin/main bd dolt push git push git status # MUST show "up to date with origin" ``` 5. **Clean up** - Clear stashes, prune remote branches 6. **Verify** - All changes committed AND pushed 7. **Hand off** - Provide context for next session **CRITICAL RULES:** - Work is NOT complete until `git push` succeeds - NEVER stop before pushing - that leaves work stranded locally - NEVER say "ready to push when you are" - YOU must push - If push fails, resolve and retry until it succeeds ## Beads Issue Tracker Use Beads (`bd`) for durable task tracking in repositories that include it. Use the `beads` skill at `.agents/skills/beads/SKILL.md` (project install) or `~/.agents/skills/beads/SKILL.md` (global install) for Beads workflow guidance, then use the `bd` CLI for issue operations. ### Quick Reference ```bash bd ready # Find available work bd show # View issue details bd update --claim # Claim work bd close # Complete work bd prime # Refresh Beads context ``` ### Rules - Use `bd` for all task tracking; do not create markdown TODO lists. - Run `bd prime` when Beads context is missing or stale. Codex 0.129.0+ can load Beads context automatically through native hooks; use `/hooks` to inspect or toggle them. - Keep persistent project memory in Beads via `bd remember`; do not create ad hoc memory files. **Architecture in one line:** issues live in a local Dolt DB; sync uses `refs/dolt/data` on your git remote; `.beads/issues.jsonl` is a passive export. See https://github.com/gastownhall/beads/blob/main/docs/core-concepts/sync-concepts.md for details and anti-patterns.