claude-sdk-rs: Skill for Claude Code

Editing state.json

Paths below are relative to the brain root — the directory containing brain.toml, found by walking up from wherever you are. This skill is synced into every repo, so a repo-relative link would be wrong in most of them.

If it is not in state.json, it does not exist. Prose gates nothing, sorts nowhere, and shows up on no board. An item living only in a plan, a review, a handoff, or an ## Open questions bullet is lost, not deferred. Where a document and the graph disagree, the graph wins.

Prefer the tools over a hand edit. /update-state performs the edit per the canonical schema, and mev has a verb for most structural moves. Hand-edit only when no verb covers the field you need (description, note, a new depends_on edge) — and then follow the round-trip rule in Step 4.

To do this	Use	Not a hand edit because
Move one block's status	mev set-block-status <repo:id> <status> --write	validates the status, refuses blocked, no-ops if already there
Park / un-park an initiative	mev defer-epic <slug> --write · resume-epic	cascades deferred onto member blocks and skips in_progress ones
Declare an initiative finished	mev complete-epic <slug> --write	sets registry status the boards read
Fix epic/block status disagreement	mev sync-epics --write	reconciles both directions; never un-defers
Clear an operator gate	mev close-operator-gate <slug> --exit-verified	removes the edge from every block carrying the slug, fleet-wide
Clear an approval gate	mev approve <slug> --digest <d> · mev reject <slug>	verifies the digest still matches the reviewed payload

Three shape rules worth knowing before you reach for one:

• Dry-run is the default for set-block-status and the four epic verbs — the change is printed, not applied, until you add --write. Run it once without the flag and read the plan.
• close-operator-gate has no dry-run. It refuses outright unless --exit-verified is passed: mev never checks the filesystem for the edge's exit artifact, so that flag is your assertion that you looked. Refusing rather than defaulting to a preview is what keeps it a human gate.
• approve is digest-bound and alarms on mismatch. A digest that no longer matches means the payload changed since review, so the approval is void: nothing is removed, the edge re-queues, and mev raises E_APPROVAL_DIGEST_MISMATCH rather than failing quietly.

An agent cannot clear its own operator gate, by construction. set-block-status --write to in_progress on a block still carrying an unmet operator edge is refused with E_BLOCK_OPERATOR_GATED. The only override, --force-operator-gate, is itself refused whenever stdin is not a TTY (E_FORCE_OPERATOR_GATE_NOT_TTY). There is no priority threshold or other bypass. If you are blocked here, the answer is /begin-session <slug> with the operator — not a hand edit of the depends_on array, which is the same bypass wearing a different hat.

Every verb in that table re-runs emit-state --write on success, so each one is a whole-corpus derived-surface rewrite, not a one-field poke. Read the derive-state-safely skill before using any of them with --write — a stale binary regresses boards fleet-wide identically whether you typed emit-state or set-block-status.

Field tables: docs/state/state-schema.md and docs/state/reference-container-schema.md. Routing table: base-template/.claude/workflows/block-registration.md.

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