Use the existing accepted outcome, scope and real bounds. A clear change needs no Plan, Recall or Learn worksheet. Resolve uncertainty only when it could change the implementation or acceptance decision.
Take the smallest acceptance-advancing action. Plan shapes missing intent or revises a disproved approach. Once an implementer can act and a validator can judge, implement; do not keep improving the plan. Approach revisions preserve acceptance and authorized scope. Acceptance changes need caller authority.
Implement and repair ordinary known defects directly. A known test failure needs a fix and a discriminating check, not another planning phase, council or helper.
Use focused checks during edits and complete required integration checks before finishing. Reuse valid exact-input receipts; rerun affected checks after changes. Reserve capacity for integration and repair. Keep a subject unchanged while it is being judged.
Spend validation where a mistake is costly. For an ordinary change the checks and CI are the gate: finish. Obtain Validate from one fresh author-distinct context only when the caller asks, when a mistake cannot be cheaply undone after it lands (a published release or instructions users will follow, a security boundary, destroying data or tracker state, deleting a check that protects the product), or when no deterministic check covers the changed behavior. Use the author's model family unless the caller selects additional legs; explicitly required reviewers remain required.
One round. Give the validator the accepted criteria, the exact subject and one question written before it starts, never the author's confidence or desired verdict; it does not re-run the checks. Repair what fails the accepted behavior or would mislead a user, break install or the CLI, or remove protection for the product; treat the rest as optional notes. Confirm each repair with a check and finish. A repair does not start another review, and NOT_PROVEN is reported with its gaps, not chased. Keep review cost a fraction of the cost of the work; when it approaches that cost, stop and report what is unchecked.
Stop at completed acceptance, cancellation, refusal, a spent real bound or an unresolved causal stall after the help below. Adjacent improvements are not permission to expand the goal. Report them briefly only when useful; do not turn them into another work batch.

Delegation and handoffs

When delegation is authorized and useful, select the runtime's task-only dispatch option for independent work; a short prompt in a full-history fork still carries the full history. Supply accepted intent and scope, the exact subject, relevant evidence, remaining bounds, the result's consumer and check ownership. Resume an author for direct repair when useful. Observe actual dispatch settings: prompt wording proves neither isolation nor smaller inherited context. At completion, verify the expected subject and required results; a quiet or partial status is not success.

Return concise findings, check facts and evidence references in the existing handoff, and disclose missing or truncated evidence. Identify the combined subject at the integration or judgment boundary; unjudged worker increments supply content identity and check facts, not duplicate evidence bundles.

Causal stall and bounds

Unknown cause, recurrence, no progress or a wrong objective admits at most one bounded fresh helper for that incident within authority and bounds. Give it the failed assumption, evidence and one discriminating question. Resume only with a different testable approach; an unhelpful answer ends the attempt. Do not chain helpers or rename the incident. Known failures get direct repair. Cancellation, refusal and spent hard time/cost/quota skip help.

Respect actual caller/native limits, including explicit repair-round bounds. Retries, compaction, helpers and new subjects never renew them; retry count alone is not a spent budget. If interruption threatens evidence, preserve accepted intent, exact subject, useful receipts, unresolved cause, bounds and helper use in the native handoff. Prompt text proves no native enforcement. Outer-goal guidance remains optional.

Evidence and boundaries

When a validator is used, bind accepted intent, complete changed paths, exact subject and factual receipts for it; disclose affected orphaned acceptance evidence. Use existing provenance helpers rather than a new evidence format. Requested proof uses caller-selected protected external non-Git storage; preserve legacy .agents/ evidence. For a requested binding verdict, missing identity, freshness or proof means NOT_PROVEN; proven failed acceptance or scope violation means FAIL; PASS needs every criterion verified and empty not_checked. Authors cannot issue binding PASS.

Memory, specialists and runtime adapters are on demand; no-match and no-change are valid. Read boundaries when authority, scope, evidence or delivery is at issue. Do not invent a runtime, hidden machine artifact or workflow to finish an ordinary change.

Closeout

Report in this shape. Plans, activity, reviews and saved pages earn no capability credit, and an unchecked item is reported, not a reason to keep validating. Machine evidence such as rpi-report.v1 or verdict.v2 is optional unless a caller or declared consumer requires it. When no machine artifact is requested or required, return the result without creating one.

Result:      done | stopped: <cancelled, refused, bound spent or stalled> | NOT_PLANNED | NOT_BUILT
Subject:     <commit, branch or diff identity>
Acceptance:  <criterion> -> <evidence: check, receipt or ref>, one line each
Checked:     <checks run on the final subject, with results>
Not checked: <what was not run or not covered, and why> | none
Judgment:    none (checks and CI gate an ordinary change) | <validator context id>: PASS | FAIL | NOT_PROVEN
Limits:      <material gaps; adjacent work noticed but not done> | none

NOT_PLANNED (stopped before an actionable slice existed) and NOT_BUILT (stopped before a candidate change existed) describe progress, not semantic verdicts.

rpi

RPI

Operating charter