decide

Decide Each Discovery

Finished runs recorded discoveries: defects and gaps they proved outside their own change. Decide what becomes of each one, once. You judge and author; the next node performs exactly the writes you declare and nothing else. You write nothing to the tracker, the repository or the state store yourself, and the checkout must be exactly as you found it when you finish.

The repository: $INPUTS.repo_host/$INPUTS.repo_path. The base commit every claim is checked against: $INPUTS.base_sha.

Read first

• $ARTIFACTS_DIR/drain/queue.json: the queued runs and their undecided records. Each record has a ref of the form <run-id>:<ref>, a title, a claim and its evidence. reviewed: true means the run's review certified it; false is a raw record no review judged. Each run's artifacts directory holds the run's own report, discoveries.md and anything the evidence cites; open them when a record needs its context.
• $ARTIFACTS_DIR/drain/discovery-decisions.md: every decision made so far, one section per key, with its outcome, reason, the runs that found it, and any question asked with the maintainer's answer. This is your memory. Search it before deciding anything.
• The project's direction document, where it has one: at the root, in a config directory such as .archon/, or wherever its steering files point.
• The SDLC policy files this decision names, at .archon/sdlc/policy/, falling back to the pack's defaults. This decision names discoveries.md, triage.md and rulings.md; the pack's defaults are in $INPUTS.policy_defaults. A project's file replaces the default whole: when it exists, do not read the default.
• The project's engineering.md and architecture.md, only when a decision depends on what they rule.

Decide every record

For every record in the queue:

1. Verify the claim at the base. Read the code the evidence cites with git show $INPUTS.base_sha:<path> and git grep <pattern> $INPUTS.base_sha. Never check out, switch, reset or edit anything. A record's file:line evidence was true when its run wrote it; the base may have moved since. Do not run tests or probes: a claim you cannot settle by reading is unverified.
2. Check memory. A key in discovery-decisions.md that describes the same defect is the same discovery, however differently it is worded. Use its key.
3. Search the tracker, read-only: open and recently closed issues and pull requests that may already cover it. On GitHub, gh issue list --repo $INPUTS.repo_host/$INPUTS.repo_path --state all --search "<terms>" and gh pr list with the same flags. Read an issue and its comments (gh issue view <n> --comments with the same --repo) before you say it covers a record or that nothing does: the evidence an issue already holds is often in a comment, not its body.
4. Merge duplicates. Records from different runs, or several records in one run, that describe one defect are one decision: list every one of their refs under it. Related defects that one change would fix may share one filed issue the same way.
5. Decide under the policy.