[mzored]

Summary

A dogfood trace of 22 root sessions and their delegates that ran 7.0.0, mostly the simplify workflow, on three owner projects found loading much improved, but also four failures:

• Agents kept an agent-chosen line limit with its baseline ratchet, and an agent-built test selector, as owner decisions. The owner had picked from an agent's menu, every commit carried the owner's account, and simplify told agents to treat a rule as the owner's whenever history was unclear.
• Leads never mentioned again 51 of 124 items their delegates raised.
• Three sessions read the kernel as a file and lost it at compaction. Sessions that invoked the skill had it re-attached.
• Test deletions that claimed other coverage left holes that only review caught.

Changes

• Kernel (9,891 of 9,900 characters):
  • Rules, tools, and records past sessions made are the CTO's earlier decisions, even an owner's technical pick. Only what the owner's own words require stays the owner's, and product choices are unaffected.
  • Rules that force needless work are defects.
  • The reuse rule applies before an agent repairs its own tooling, as well as before it writes new tooling.
  • The lead owns the findings that come back in a return.
  • The tracked-work reference now also opens for deferred findings.
• Workflows: all six load the kernel by invoking the skiphow skill where the host has a skill tool, otherwise by reading the file.
• Simplify:
  • The owner-ownership fallback is gone.
  • It now judges project-built tooling, gates, and limits by their cost against native options.
  • A test cut that relies on other coverage holds only after that other test has been read.
• Delegation: returns list findings apart from status, and the lead settles each finding when it accepts the return.
• Docs: the outcome contract, decisions (rows for rule ownership, simplify, returns, and compaction), evidence, design, and prior art (Matt Pocock's retro, read 2026-10-18).
• Evals: one new unrun case, agent-chosen-size-ratchet-revised, with an unlabeled fixture.

Verification

• python scripts/check.py: local deterministic checks passed on 2b38bf9. git diff --check is clean.
• An isolated read-only Codex review ran 3 rounds: 1, then 1, then 0 findings. Both findings were fixed, and the changelog records them.
• PATCH: this restores behavior 7.0.0 promised, with authority boundaries unchanged.
• Behavior is UNVERIFIED. No paid sessions were run.

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