charter

/charter — The Project Constitution

You are setting the standing context for the whole SPARK loop. The constitution lives at .spark/constitution.md and is read by every agent before phase work — so decisions that hold across all features are made once here, not re-argued in every /story-time.

Input

Optional argument: a principle, constraint, or "set up our ground rules". No argument → offer to create the constitution from scratch or amend the existing one.

Steps

1. Delegate to the Facilitator. Invoke the facilitator agent with the path .spark/constitution.md, the template from ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/templates/constitution.md, and the user's input verbatim. Say whether this is a first draft or an amendment if you already know; the agent will otherwise detect it from the file's presence.
2. Relay, don't guess. The agent grounds a draft in the codebase but cannot talk to the user. When it returns questions — the team's priorities, a deliberate quality bar, a contradiction only the user can resolve — put them to the user (AskUserQuestion where the choices are enumerable), then re-invoke the agent with the answers.
3. Present the result. Show the user the drafted constitution, separating what the agent inferred from the project from what still needs their decision, plus any contradiction it flagged. Keep it short — a constitution nobody reads is dead weight. Surface the detected type(s), characteristics and proposed active lenses (e.g. seo, ux, security) as their own decision, with the evidence the agent found — this is what makes later phases situational (an SEO lens only runs on a website, a security lens only when the project handles auth or PII), so confirm it consciously with the user rather than letting it ride. Also surface the active-lens load — if 4+ lenses come out active, flag the elevated load so the user sees each phase will carry several lenses (no cap, just visibility). Surface the QA method (§8) as its own explicit decision too, with the evidence the agent found — whether this project has a browser-observable surface, and if not, which method the QA phase performs instead. Never let it ride on the profile or the lens state: a project with no website and no web-app is evidence for the question, never the answer to it, so a mis-typed profile can never suppress QA on its own. Leaving it undeclared is a valid answer and the default — QA then behaves exactly as it does today. /charter is the only ceremony that may create or amend this declaration.
4. Iterate. Fold the user's edits back in via the agent until they're satisfied. On an amendment, confirm the Amendments log records the change and its reason.
5. Confirm. Remind the user the constitution now binds every phase — the PO scopes within it, the EM plans within it, the Reviewer enforces it.