work-loop

Skill: work-loop

Work-loop contract

Surface = stop the current loop, emit a brief description of the situation (what happened, what you tried, current state), name the minimum viable recovery rung, and wait for human direction. Do not retry, redispatch, or silently continue. Recovery rungs in cost order: steer (redirect this session with corrected instructions — cheapest; preserves context) / rerun (new session, gap-closed brief — keeps prior commits, discards context) / salvage (manual recovery from the last clean branch — use when agent state is irrecoverable). (Reviewers also "surface" findings in the descriptive sense — context disambiguates.)

State flow: PLAN → EXECUTE → GATES → REVIEW → DECIDE. After a fix, return to GATES.

   ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │                                                         │
   ▼                                                         │
PLAN  ──►  EXECUTE  ──►  GATES  ──►  REVIEW  ──►  DECIDE    │
                          │           │            │         │
                          └─ failed? ─┴── findings? ──── fix ┘
                                                    └── back to GATES

Self-coverage gate. Between human gates, resolve everything a referent can resolve; surface only the irreducible. Work frontier. Resolve findings required to satisfy current intent. Do not expand the work frontier unless the finding blocks correctness, security, or the stated acceptance criteria. The two rules compose in that order: the frontier rule decides whether a finding is in scope, and only then does the self-coverage rule decide whether to resolve it against a referent or Surface it. A finding outside the frontier is resolved, not Surfaced, and its referent is the accepted intent: the intent does not require it, so DECIDE excludes it. That is a resolution, never a third disposition, so the resolve-vs-surface seam is unchanged. Three net-new obligations per loop: (1) conditional domain-grounding at PLAN (only when the build rests on an ungrounded domain claim); (2) resolve-vs-surface disposition record, opened at PLAN and closed at DECIDE; (3) done-checklist refusal — don't declare done until the record exists and every REVIEW finding is resolved. The obligations above are the operative runtime contract. Use references/self-coverage/resolve-vs-surface.md only when a disposition is ambiguous; references/self-coverage/protocol.md contains design rationale and calibration, not required normal-loop instructions.