fablize

fablize — run like Fable

Principle: a harness cannot raise a model's ceiling. It makes the model go all the way to its own ceiling — by enforcing verification, completion, and investigation as procedure. When the capability ceiling is the blocker (open-ended creative detail, self-driven discovery), escalate.

Apply only what the task signals (smallest matching discipline; overlap only when genuinely multi-category).

Foundation rules (always apply)

• Lead with the outcome. State what you're doing before you do it. Stay within requested scope — no incidental refactors, no scope creep.
• Ground every completion claim in a tool result from this session. "I wrote the file" is not completion — "I wrote the file and ran it, and here's the output" is.
• Never end a turn by stating intent to do work without doing it. If you catch yourself writing "I will now create X" or "Next, I'll implement Y", stop and make the tool call immediately. A turn that ends with a promise and no tool call is an early stop — re-engage yourself.
• Confirm before destructive or hard-to-reverse actions (deleting files, force-push, modifying production config).

1. Multi-story loop (2+ sequential stories)

Decompose the task into sequential stories and complete one at a time, producing evidence as you go. Self-contained — no external system required. State persists in $HERMES_FABLIZE_DIR (default: ~/.hermes/fablize/) and survives session death; resume with goals.py status.

First-time use: See references/workflow-quickstart.md for exact copy-pasteable commands with the correct script path.

# Locate goals.py on this machine
FABLIZE_ROOT=$(find ~/.hermes -name goals.py -path "*/fablize*" 2>/dev/null | head -1)
FABLIZE_ROOT=${FABLIZE_ROOT%/scripts/goals.py}

# Create a plan
python3 "$FABLIZE_ROOT/scripts/goals.py" create --brief "<summary>" \
  --goal "title::verifiable objective" --goal "title::..."
  # The last goal must be a verification story
python3 "$FABLIZE_ROOT/scripts/goals.py" next         # activate a story + handoff
# ... work that story only ...
python3 "$FABLIZE_ROOT/scripts/goals.py" checkpoint --id G001 --status complete --evidence "<concrete evidence>"
# The final story is a verification gate:
# --verify-cmd "<command>" --verify-evidence "<result>" are REQUIRED
python3 "$FABLIZE_ROOT/scripts/goals.py" status       # first command when resuming