Issue 197 Scaffold Lifecycle Grill Status

Scope: Requirements Phase for the accepted lifecycle direction. Q1-Q8 are accepted. No material decision remains open. Implementation/release has not started.

Current Round

• Round: R3
• Current frontier: closed
• Shared-understanding confirmation: confirmed by accepted brainstorm and Q6-Q8 answers

Branch Dashboard

Percentages describe decision closure, not implementation or test completion.

Technical Grounding

All branches are grounded by the linked research reports and decision log. Current code anchors cover repository detection, context compilation, update comparison, Commit Gate wiring, source-first skill delivery, scoped projection and receipt publication. The reported #197 candidate failure and particular user false-drift instances remain delivery verification targets; neither is claimed reproduced.

Exact schema spelling, module layout, supported command mapping implementation, and recovery choreography belong to planning. They do not reopen accepted product boundaries or permit weakening verification.

Accepted, superseded and unresolved

• Accepted: Q1-Q7 and the presented ownership, partial-state, portability, publication/recovery and authored-context preservation boundaries.
• Superseded: routine installation being agent-owned; observed quality scripts being mandatory before supported defaults can be planned; first-error-only checking; whole-directory or broad kind/path heuristics as ownership authority.
• Rejected: fabricated completion proof, silent legacy fallback after adopted state disappears, wholesale .devpunks/ reset, recurring unrelated authoring, and automatic deletion of workflow/recovery evidence.
• Unresolved: none. Q6 includes workspace/selected-skill changes; Q7 uses an explicit authoring/activation contract revision plus content hashes.
• Accepted in R3: Q8 makes the complete shared .agents/AGENTS.md scaffold-owned. The selected baseline declares and supplies its canonical asset and digest; missing, unsupported or mismatched capability is explicit and never silently falls back to installed CLI data. This is a source-authority decision, not a claim that runtime or publication work is complete.
• Parked: consumer-repository repair and product publication outside this phase; new directory layout or remote agent scheduler has no accepted requirement.

Design tree

The user accepted the focused brainstorm and answered both remaining questions. Requirements Phase proceeds directly to immutable specification retention and backlog projection. Implementation and publication require a later delivery scope.

Current inputs → Context Plan → Scaffold Plan
  ├─ check → independent findings and explicit unknowns
  └─ scaffold/update → apply → verify → record
                                      └─ bounded Post-Command Handoff when required

Glossary

Reuse accepted terms from the CLI Context Architecture, Scoped Agent Guidance, and Lefthook grill artifacts:

• Context Plan: neutral per-scope contribution intent, before paths or writes.
• Scaffold Plan: desired files, links, dependency/config changes and ownership.
• Post-Command Handoff: structured residual lifecycle work after the command.
• Quality Command Contract: one lint and one read-only format-check command for a Commit Gate Consumer.
• Scoped Coding Standard: repository-authored scoped AGENTS.md guidance.
• Generated Authoring Contract: baseline-provided criteria for authoring that guidance from actual code evidence.
• Operator Skill: independently installed hi-cli, outside project packs.
• Commit Gate Lifecycle Receipt: operational proof bound to desired gate state.

Relationships: Context Plan feeds Scaffold Plan; a Generated Authoring Contract guides agent authoring; native agent projection consumes authored scope state.

Pinned axioms: check is read-only; unresolved work is not completion; working skill delivery remains intact; unrelated baseline changes do not justify scoped agent reauthoring; project-owned edits cannot be silently discarded. Editable scaffolded context must not be reported as drift merely because its authored bytes differ from the initial scaffold. Q4 records the direct user requirement; Q5 closes per-artifact authority and ownership-preserving migration.

Flagged ambiguity: “scoped agents” can mean scoped AGENTS.md guidance or native subagent definitions. This assessment covers both and keeps their owners distinct. Relevant changes are dependency-affected contract revisions, scope/skill selection changes and explicit repairs. Ordinary source edits or skill body fixes alone do not trigger scoped reauthoring. See the canonical glossary.

Parked and deferred work

• Implementation waits for a later delivery invocation. Spec compilation and backlog projection are now authorized through Requirements Phase after closure.
• Publishing products and repairing other consumer repositories remain outside this phase. Backlog writes must follow immutable spec authority and exact readback.
• Existing hook-manager migration policy and settings-only ensure remain intact.

Evidence and links

• Decision log
• Research report
• Shared prompt baseline delivery research
• Installed CLI: 4.0.4. Current branch base: b9bb213d.
• Fresh network-enabled hi check --json: exit 1, incomplete Quality Command Contract for apps/api; no scaffold drift was established.