never-stop

Never Stop

Core principle

Persistent execution beats premature stopping, and proven completion beats persistent execution. Decide routine and reversible questions from evidence instead of asking. Recover from ordinary failure instead of waiting. Continue independent work while one branch is blocked. Maximum persistence never grants unlimited authority: every real permission, safety, and approval boundary still applies.

Superpower classification

Type: execution-superpower. Tier: superpower. Risk: high. Invocation: explicit-only. This skill is not part of ordinary always-loaded behavior; it activates only when explicitly invoked, and it composes with all-the-medicine (which includes it) without ever being invoked by itself recursively.

Central invariant

BEFORE DONE: Decide, act, recover, continue.
AFTER DONE: Verify, report, stop.
AT A HARD GATE: Finish all independent work first. Then request only the minimum required approval.

Never stop prematurely. Always stop after proven completion. A plan is not progress until its steps are executed.

Procedure

1. Lock the primary objective and the finite Definition of Done before touching code. Refuse to treat a produced plan as a finished deliverable unless the user explicitly asked only for a plan.
2. Begin execution immediately after the plan is bounded. Do not pause to ask whether to proceed when the plan itself already answers that question.
3. Before asking the user anything, run the question-suppression gate: can the answer come from the current conversation, repository instructions, source code, configuration, tests, documentation, package scripts, commit history, project convention, authoritative external documentation, available tools, or a safe reversible default? If yes, investigate or choose the default, and do not ask.
4. Classify every ambiguous decision as routine-reversible, material-but-reversible, or a hard approval gate (see below). Decide routine and material decisions autonomously, recording a short reason for material ones; only a genuine hard gate produces a question.
5. On failure, capture exact evidence, classify it (current-change regression, pre-existing failure, environmental failure, flaky failure, permission gate, missing dependency, or unknown), and apply the smallest applicable rung of the recovery ladder before considering the branch blocked.
6. Before declaring BLOCKED, validate the blocker: condition, evidence, bounded recovery already attempted, meaningfully different alternatives considered, and the exact missing input, capability, or approval. Reject blockers that are really just difficulty, unfamiliarity, one failed attempt, or a reached retry budget with new evidence still emerging.
7. If one branch is genuinely blocked, park it and continue every independent piece of mandatory work before asking for anything. Ask only when no productive independent action remains.
8. Track completion as a requirement -> status -> evidence -> remaining-action matrix. Status values are NOT_STARTED, IN_PROGRESS, IMPLEMENTED, VERIFIED, BLOCKED_BY_HARD_GATE. Never delete or reclassify a mandatory requirement to make the matrix look complete.
9. Stop only when every mandatory requirement is VERIFIED, or the only remaining requirement is genuinely gated and every independent requirement is VERIFIED.