ds-freeze

/ds-freeze

Every feature stays "in scope" until someone explicitly says otherwise, so a release grows until every corner needs polishing and nothing ships — perfecting every detail is a losing race against scope creep. This skill forces the corner call: inventory every candidate feature and open issue, decide ship / defer-hidden / defer-backlog for each with the user, then only touch the kept set — implement it, file the rest as tracked backlog, and sync docs so nothing overclaims.

Release scope triage — collaborative feature-freeze, GitHub-issue-backed backlog, kept-set implementation, doc sync.

Completion Evidence — applies to every phase: Report done/OK only with the machine-checkable evidence the gates name — the exact command run and its observed output (or file:line diff). Missing evidence → report INCOMPLETE plus what is missing. Self-assessment is never evidence. (This band repeats at file end by design — both copies are normative.)

Triggers

• User asks to simplify or cut down a release, define an MVP feature set, decide what ships now vs later, or review open issues together to set release scope.
• Invoked by /ds-ship via the Scope-Freeze branch when the user's ask signals scope reduction before a launch-gate cascade.

Triggers — INVOKE / DON'T INVOKE

INVOKE	DON'T INVOKE
"simplify this release, cut non-critical features" / "too much to perfect every detail before release"	"audit if we're ready to ship" (no scope-cut ask → ds-ship)
"decide what ships in v1 vs later" / "define the MVP feature set together"	"remove dead code / simplify the architecture" (→ ds-simplify)
"review our open issues and figure out release scope together"	"file this one issue" (single item, no triage → ds-issue)
"freeze scope before we harden everything for launch"	"what's the ideal architecture vs competitors" (→ ds-benchmark)

Contract

Dimensions: none (carrier)

• One skill for the whole scope-freeze loop: candidate list → three-way disposition (ship / defer-hidden / defer-backlog) → release manifest → implement the kept set → sync docs.
• Never deletes code. defer-hidden gates a feature behind a flag/toggle so it is unreachable this release; permanent removal is ds-simplify's job, with its own approval gate — ds-freeze only proposes it as a follow-up.
• Undecided items default to defer-backlog — never silently ships an item nobody confirmed (W5).
• State-exempt. The tracking artifact (a GitHub issue, or docs/release/{milestone}-scope.md when gh is unavailable) plus git are the durable record; nothing is written to ds/audit/. Resuming = re-read the tracking artifact and its comments — decisions land in the thread as often as the checklist.
• Standalone — advisory handoff to ds-blueprint, ds-build, ds-issue, ds-docs, ds-backend/ds-frontend/ds-review, ds-simplify, ds-test (scope per skill: see Delegation); absent → inline fallback or gap-note, run continues either way. Every delegated call forwards no flags by default; --ask propagates to it.
• Pre-existing / out-of-scope errors detected during work are NOT skipped — fixed inline or escalated with concrete blocker.
• Full accounting enforced: every finding and planned check ends in an explicit disposition (fixed / skipped + reason / only you can do); summary totals balance.