Methods and the mode

compass-helm <what you observed, or what you want>
Done means <something the agent can run or inspect>.
Keep <the behaviour that must not change>.

The finish condition names a result, not an amount of effort: "zero old callers and every parser fixture passes", never "work on this for a while".

Do not list the skills you want run. State the goal and the constraints; the method owns the sequence. An agent handed both a goal and a step-list follows the step-list and drops the method's gates.

Matching is the first decision and the one no later phase recovers from, so it is a stated rule rather than a judgement made fresh each time.

The machinery has a cost, and a mode that fires on everything trains people to route around it. Moving a date, fixing a sentence, changing one configuration value, answering a question — none of these need a declared System, a matched method, a grounding phase and a decision trail. Reach for the plain action skills.

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 after the fact, or a domain the agent has not grounded itself in.

The sections above state what a method is. This states the order in which the framework's parts are reached during a piece of work, and it doubles as a reading order for someone meeting the cluster for the first time.

A session opens with compass-agile-find-bearings and declares its System, which fixes the level and attenuates the catalogue (Systems and levels). It picks up work with compass-agile-find-heading and compass-agile-start-task, inheriting the sprint mission and story goal as constraints from above.

It then enters compass-helm, which matches the work to a method and copies that method's phases in. The method opens by grounding itself in the domain, resolving each concept it touches to a knowledge document and treating an unresolved one as the first task (Regulatory Functions). Where the concept belongs to a cluster with a structure note, grounding reads that note first and follows its order: it names which pages are load-bearing and which can wait, which a search ranking cannot. Listing the structure_note tag returns the clusters that have one. It states a finish condition, backed by a specification where behaviour is involved.

The method's phases cite principles for judgement calls and call actions for anything touching an artefact, reaching for a recipe whenever a command is needed (Regulatory Functions). Where an artefact turns out to be generated, the edit goes to its model or template rather than its output (Generated artefacts). At a fork the evidence cannot settle, the method convenes deliberation and records the verdict on the task.

A missing effector becomes a recipe, never an inline command. When a phase needs a command no recipe carries, the command is written as a recipe and the phase reaches for it. Improvising it inline buys one session and costs every later one: the command is untested, it is invisible to compass-doc-sync-recipes, and the next method that needs the same effector improvises its own. The recipe holds the command and the skill holds the judgement, so drift has exactly one place to be detected.

Verification climbs the ladder as far as the work requires, routing first to the checkers that do not share the session model's priors (Verification). The session closes with compass-agile-close-task and compass-pr-raise, and what generalises is routed into a memory, a principle or a skill edit, with approval rather than automatically.

Six exist. Each opens by grounding the work and stating what would make it finished, and each names the actions and recipes its phases call rather than improvising a command.

Matching is the first decision a session makes and the one most worth getting right: a misjudged shape is the failure a method exists to prevent, and no phase recovers from it. Where two match different parts, compass-method-figure-it-out sequences them rather than replacing them.