Clarify WHAT before building anything. Clarity over completeness — invented details are worse than gaps; assumptions compound silently downstream.

Contract

The card

The pipeline's handoff artifact. One admission rule: carry only what the next stage can't cheaply re-derive from the code in front of it.

• Checksum first — open with one sentence: what this is, why it exists. Everything after is facts.
• Recoverability test — admit a fact only if the next stage couldn't cheaply recover it by reading the code: re-read all the code later — could it land on the same choice for the same reason? Yes → re-derivable, never carry. Cheap local facts always answer yes. Two kinds answer no. A decision — the code compiles either way (indifferent between ≥2 paths) and the human's goal, not any retrievable fact, broke the tie (e.g. cursor pagination over offset because the product needs stable ordering under writes); carry the choice, its reason, and the viable paths declined. A hard-won external fact — a dependency or third-party behavior whose ground truth lives outside this codebase and cost steering to pin down.
• Vocabulary, not template — sections (non-goals, acceptance, constraints, ...) appear only when the session produced them. No empty scaffolding, ever.
• Stranger test — every fact must be understandable with zero session context.
• No temporal information — no session narrative, no relative time ("currently", "for now"). Phrase decisions timelessly: "X over Y: reason". Absolute dates only when the fact IS a deadline.
• No volatile references — concepts only. No file paths, function names, or line numbers. The next stage retrieves its own cheap local detail.
• No provenance markup — provenance was visible live in the session, not encoded in the artifact.
• Carry-forward last — the costly residue the human won't re-read closes the card: decisions and their reasons, paths ruled out (what was steered away from — including an option the human declined when it was offered), and hard-won external facts. Captured when the stage locks so the next stage skips the work that produced them. The human reads it only if they want.
• Size by deletion, not cap — a deletion pass in the gate audit governs length: every fact earns its place. Never a numeric limit.
• Storage-agnostic — emit in conversation. Persisting it is the user's call; because a complete card passes the stranger test, a persisted card is a resume token — paste it into a new session and the stage resumes without re-asking. No store, no convention beyond paste.

Work loop

1. Understand — state what you heard in 1-2 sentences.
2. Close gaps — decision prompts (mechanics below) target unknowns: anything you would have to invent if you wrote the card right now.
3. Probe the negative — at least once, ask what this should NOT do.
4. Gate — when no unknowns remain that you would otherwise invent, run the gate audit.

Decision prompts

• Auto-gather when the answer is retrievable with certainty: cheap local reads, docs, web research, parallel subagents. Return with decisions, not raw findings. Never ask the user something research already made obvious — that is a named stop condition.
• Only non-obvious judgment calls reach the user. Every such AskUserQuestion: exactly 3 candidate answers + 1 uniform escape hatch — "Gather facts" (research/explore). The hatch is a first-class option, never hidden behind Other.
• Re-entry after a detour: if the detour made the answer obvious, state the decision and proceed; otherwise re-ask the same question with the new evidence inside the prompt.
• Presentation rule: EVERYTHING the user needs to answer lives inside the question UI — question text, descriptions, previews. Never in prose before the tool call (the dialog hides it).

The gate

"Is the intent clear enough?" — agent audits, user locks.

• Before presenting, run a deletion pass over the draft card: cut every fact that does not earn its place, every empty section, every temporal or volatile reference.
• Then a completeness pass: would the next stage have to re-ask the human anything this stage already settled — a decision (the tie the human's goal broke), an option declined when offered, or a hard-won external fact? If yes, it is missing — carry it with the reason code can't re-derive it. Deletion keeps the card short; completeness keeps it sufficient. The two run together; "the next stage doesn't re-ask" is the arbiter. Add a carry-forward line only when the session actually produced that residue — never a fixed slot padded to look thorough.
• Present verdict-FIRST via AskUserQuestion: the gate question answered PASSES or FAILS, then the deletion pass's kills (what was cut and why) AND the completeness pass's carries (what was kept and why code can't re-derive it) — proof both passes ran.
• On FAIL: name exactly what is missing and ask for it. Never pad the card to look complete.
• The user locks. The lock is theirs, not yours.

Boundaries

User owns intent. If they say "I know what I want," proceed without clarification. When interpretations diverge, present options — never pick for them.