triage

Triage

.genius/BACKLOG.md is read whole on every /genius, and grows by how many discoveries the flow made. The rules bounding it are written already — the seed's shape and where a line goes when it leaves (BACKLOG-FORMAT.md), why it stops at 300 characters (record-prose) — each firing in its own moment, with nothing going back to check. /reconcile reaches the file from the repo's side. What no pass asks is what the flow's own records, and the user, say about these lines.

The concept: the rules exist; this is the pass that enforces them, one line at a time, and the user rules on each.

When to run it

The user types it — after a stretch of slices that each dropped one, when /genius shows a backlog nobody can scan, or when a work's leftovers land. Not on a schedule: a pass sent looking finds something, and a seed argued away on a made-up reason is worse than a long file. With an argument, only the line whose subject it names, and only the two questions one line can answer — should it be here, has it outgrown a line; pairing needs candidates and order needs the file, so say those went unasked.

What gets asked

Four questions in this order, because each earlier one can take away what a later one would have worked on:

• Should it still be here at all? Two ways it should not. A work already answered it — asked against the flow's own state, not the code: does a work name this seed's subject in its Problem, Slices or contract, with that slice closed? Which move that earns turns on which came first — the format holds that line. A work whose snapshot says the thing is still not done is evidence to keep the seed. Or its reason stopped holding. No file holds that answer, so the seed's own stated why is quoted back, and the user says whether it stands.
• Are two of them one discovery? Propose the pair, both texts, never the merge. Mechanical signals — a shared anchor, a shared symbol, a seed calling itself its neighbour's illness — were all false positives on the one real file tried, so nothing merges on a signal; the reason must be checkable in the two texts. The format holds the veto and the mechanics.
• Has it outgrown a line? Over 300 characters, counted in characters and never in bytes, the way the format's instrument counts (python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../genius-file/measure.py status says how many seeds are past the bound) — a byte count reads every non-ASCII seed as longer than it is, so its error only ever runs toward manufacturing work. record-prose names two cases; this tells them apart: a seed still holding an undecided choice is carrying detail that belongs elsewhere — route it out, to the log its link names or to BACKLOG.log.md, and trim. A seed that is one chosen route plus its steps is a plan, offered as work — one at a time, never a batch, because a work file is larger than the line it replaces and every status pass reads it.
• What does the order say? Top to bottom is the file's statement of what to do next. This pass proposes the position and the sentence it was read from; the text itself is left to the user.