Compass Helm

Say so plainly and fall through to the plain action skills. Moving a date, fixing a sentence, changing one configuration value, answering a question: none of these want a declared System, a grounding phase and a decision trail, and a mode that fires on everything trains people to route around it.

The mode earns its cost when a plausible diff is not enough: work that must be reproduced before it is fixed, a design decision expensive to reverse, a run long enough that a human reviews it afterwards, or a domain the agent has not grounded itself in.

Declining is a normal outcome, not a failure to engage.

Name the level the session is acting at, which attenuates the catalogue to the slice in scope (Systems and levels). The narrowing is advisory everywhere except the audit channel: reach outside it by saying so.

Declare it once, at the start, and say which. A session that never declares is acting at every level at once, which is the variety problem the levels exist to solve.

Read Principles at task start, grouped by the moment each is cited. This is what makes a citation possible later: a rule the session has not loaded is a rule it will not think to cite at the judgement call.

Apply the matching rule in Methods and the mode: the ordered questions, the arbitration when two match, and the null case. Say which method matched and why, in one line. A match nobody can see is a match nobody can dispute.

Write the matched method's phases into the todo list before reasoning about the task, in the method's own words and order.

This is the step that carries the value and the step most easily lost. The known failure is reading a method, forming a private understanding of it, and writing a bespoke plan that quietly drops the phases that were inconvenient. Copying first makes the drop visible, because the phase is sitting in the list.

A phase deliberately skipped stays in the list with skip: and the reason. Silent skipping is refused: if the reason cannot be written down it is not a decision, it is an omission.

Work the phases in order. As each fires:

• anything touching an artefact calls an action;
• any command comes from a recipe, and a missing effector becomes a recipe rather than an inline command;
• a judgement call cites a principle by name;
• a fork the evidence cannot settle convenes deliberation, and the verdict is recorded on the work.

Re-check the match at each phase boundary. Discovering the shape was misjudged is a reason to re-match, not to push on through phases that no longer fit.

A delegate is spawned as a named System under this mode, never as a generic agent. It inherits none of the session's grounding, so the brief states what it must read first and what it may do (Running agents).

Resume an existing delegate rather than spawning a sibling beside it. Two delegates on one piece of work contend for the same files and produce two partial answers.

Finish through the actions: compass-agile-close-task then compass-pr-raise. What generalises beyond this piece of work goes to a memory, a principle or a check, with approval rather than automatically.