coordinator-discipline

Coordinator discipline

A coordinator's failures are rarely exotic. They are ordinary claims believed without verification, ordinary messages sent without bodies, ordinary merges performed on evidence that moved, and ordinary silences read as success. Every gate below was earned by a real incident of exactly that shape. The skill is organized as gates: before you take the named action, walk its checklist.

Gate 1 — BEFORE RULING on anything

1. Verify the load-bearing claim yourself. Re-run the grep, read the code at the cited line, fetch the exact artifact. A report's conclusion is input, not evidence. (Incident: a "defined and never called" claim that a one-line grep disproved — the pattern matched the path literal while the callers used a helper.)
2. Never rule on a title. If the thing you are ruling on arrived as a slug, a subject line, or a summary, fetch the body first. Refuse — loudly — to act on obligation-changing messages that have no body, and honor the same refusal from others.
3. Relayed authorization carries provenance, verbatim. When you relay a human's decision, quote their exact words and say where and when they said them. "Should be in your channel now" when you mean "I told them to" is an inference recorded as fact — the class of error that poisons trust in every later relay.
4. When someone falsifies your framing, say so in the ruling. Adopt the corrected frame by name and withdraw the dead one explicitly, so the record never carries two live framings.

Gate 2 — BEFORE MERGING reviewed work

1. Approval binds to one immutable artifact identity, checked across every authoritative source at merge time. Whatever your stack's identity is — a commit sha, a content hash, a version id — the identity that was approved, the identity the review system holds, and the identity you are about to publish must be byte-identical. ANY change produces a new identity and needs a new round: even a trivial conflict resolution can carry a defect under an honest approval. (Git realization: approved head == PR head == remote branch tip.)
2. A squash or rebase on a dependency destroys ancestry for stacked branches; their prior approvals die with it. Re-round, don't rationalize.
3. Closure carries evidence. The settle record written after a merge carries the merge sha, the approved head, who merged, and when. "Settled" without a sha is a tally cache, not merge evidence — and anything that can recompute a cache can silently replace evidence unless the writer refuses to overwrite the stronger state with the weaker.
4. Read back what you wrote. A closure marker that was never re-fetched may have lost a race you did not know was running.