🚨 MANDATORY: Voice Notification (REQUIRED BEFORE ANY ACTION)

1. Send voice notification:
   bashCopy

   curl -s -X POST http://localhost:31337/notify \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"message": "Running the WORKFLOWNAME workflow in the ISA skill"}' \
     > /dev/null 2>&1 &

2. Output text notification:
   Running the **WorkflowName** workflow in the **ISA** skill to ACTION...

ISA — Ideal State Artifact

What It Does

The Problem

How It Works

The Twelve-Section Body (locked v6.2.0)

Three-Guardrail Taxonomy (Principles vs Constraints vs Anti-criteria)

Tier Completeness Gate (HARD at all tiers)

Workflow Routing

Gotchas

• ID-stability is the cornerstone of Reconcile — never re-number on edit. When the Splitting Test produces a finer-grained version of ISC-7, preserve ISC-7 as the parent and add ISC-7.1, ISC-7.2, etc. Even when an ISC is dropped, leave a tombstone (- [ ] ISC-N: [DROPPED — see Decisions YYYY-MM-DD]). Reconcile keys on stable IDs; renumbering breaks ephemeral feature-file merges silently and the failure mode looks like "the worker's checkmarks didn't land in master."
• Ephemeral files are derived views, never sources of truth. Scaffold's --ephemeral mode produces a slice of the master ISA at MEMORY/WORK/{slug}/_ephemeral/<feature>.md. Workers operate against that slice; Reconcile merges back. Hand-editing master content from an ephemeral file is policy-forbidden — the master is what persists; the ephemeral is what gets archived.
• The Changelog format is non-negotiable. Every entry needs all four pieces (conjectured, refuted by, learned, criterion now) in that order. Append refuses to write a partial C/R/L; if any of the four is missing, the entry is a Decision, not a Changelog. The format is what makes the Deutsch error-correction trail auditable across sessions.
• Project ISAs upgrade tier to max(declared, E3) regardless of the active task's tier. A <project>/ISA.md is the long-lived system of record for a thing with persistent identity. One transient E1 task on the project must NOT downgrade the structural minimum. CheckCompleteness applies this override automatically.
• Empty sections never appear. The twelve-section body is a capacity, not a requirement at every tier. Sections required-but-empty for the tier are populated; sections not required and not yet written are simply absent from the file. CheckCompleteness distinguishes present / thin / missing / empty and only empty is acceptable for Verification before VERIFY phase.
• Anti-criteria are derived from Out of Scope plus regression-prevention concerns. They are how the prose-guardrails (Out of Scope, Constraints, Principles) become probe-able. At least one is required at every tier; the absence of an anti-criterion at OBSERVE is a hard CheckCompleteness failure.
• Antecedents are required when the goal is experiential. For art, design, content, and anything that has to "land," at least one ISC must use the Antecedent: prefix to name a precondition that reliably produces the target experience. Verifiable goals (build, deploy, schema) don't need antecedents; experiential goals always do.
• Reconcile is deterministic — there are no conflicts to resolve. Either an ISC ID exists in master (mechanical merge) or it doesn't (abort with ID-stability violation). If the ephemeral made structural changes (split ISC-7 into ISC-7.1/ISC-7.2), those structural changes belong in master via a separate Edit by the user before Reconcile runs.
• The format spec wins on contradiction. IsaFormat.md is the file-shape contract. If this skill's prose ever drifts from the format spec, the spec is canonical and the skill updates to match — not the reverse.
• Features are vertical slices, not horizontal layers. Each ## Features entry cuts end-to-end to a verifiable increment satisfying ≥1 ISC — not "the data layer" then "the API layer." A Feature you can't independently verify on its own is a horizontal slice; re-slice it vertically. This is a rule about the shape of the decomposition (the artifact), not about how to write code — it exists so every Feature produces a testable increment. (Pocock's tracer-bullet / vertical-slice principle, folded into Features where it belongs.)
• Prefer test-first probes (red-before-build). Where an ISC's probe is a runnable test (bun-test/bun-property/bash/curl/SELECT), write it so it FAILS before EXECUTE and passes after — the probe exists and is red before the build, green after. Probes that can only be a screenshot or manual check are exempt. This tightens the existing Inline-Verification Mandate from "name the probe" to "run the probe red first," and it is a rule about when the probe is written/run (the process), NOT a coding-craft instruction telling a capable model how to do TDD. (The structural kernel of Pocock's tdd, folded into the ISC layer; the red/green/refactor mechanics are deliberately NOT encoded — a competent coder does those unprompted.)

Examples

ID Stability Rule

Ephemeral Feature Files (Ralph Loop / Maestro pattern)

Relationship to the Algorithm

• OBSERVE: Skill("ISA", "scaffold from prompt at tier T") → returns populated ISA at canonical location.
• OBSERVE: Skill("ISA", "check completeness of <path> at tier T") → pass/fail + gap report.
• PLAN: Skill("ISA", "extract feature <name> as ephemeral file") → ephemeral excerpt.
• LEARN: Skill("ISA", "reconcile <ephemeral-path> → <master-path>") → deterministic merge.

Format spec cross-reference