Skill: Craft Charter

"If the goal isn't clear, keep questioning. Don't start."

The Standard

• A charter is approved by a human before any work begins. This is the one gate a model may not pass on its own.
• It states what "done" means in gradeable terms. Without that, the adversary has nothing to judge against and the review degenerates into taste.
• It names the panel. Who judges is decided with the goal, not inferred later.
• Refusing is not self-approval. Anyone may refuse an unclear charter. Only the human approves.

The Interview

Match friction to stakes. A rename does not earn forty questions; an authorization change does not survive five. Ask more where the work is hard to reverse.

Drive toward three answers:

1. What must become true? Stated so it could be false. "Orders over €100 ship free" — not "improve checkout".
2. How would we know? The gates. If nothing mechanical can catch a failure here, say so — that is a finding about the task, not a formality (see craft-oracle, The Coverage Rule). When the work adds a check, first count what it must catch in what it will read today. One charter named six credential shapes. Of the 299 reports its check would read, the one holding a credential matched none of them.
3. What is out of scope? Explicitly. Scope drift is the most common way a run produces confident, unwanted work.

Is This One Charter?

One name routinely covers several projects. Run decide-boundary before approving — would this piece make sense if the request had never existed?

This gate refuses unclear goals. It also refuses mis-sized ones. Name the pieces and let the human choose the split.

The Artifact

.claude/panel/charter.md, and it is not committed. Add it to .gitignore.

A charter says what a run is for. Once the run lands, the pull request carries the reasoning and the history carries the change. A charter kept after that is a museum piece, and the tree answers what is true now.

The shape:

# Charter: <short name>

## Goal
One paragraph. What must become true, stated so it could be false.

## Done when
- [ ] Gate: composer test
- [ ] Gate: vendor/bin/phpstan analyse
- [ ] Judged: adversary approves with residual risks recorded

## Out of scope
Named explicitly.

## Panel
author, adversary

## Approved
<human> — YYYY-MM-DD

Unapproved means unstarted. An Approved line filled in by anything other than a person is the plugin lying to itself.

When Gates Are Weakened

If no second agent is available, the run may proceed with gate 1 self-run — but the charter must record it:

## Gates weakened
Gate 1 self-run — no adversary available. See `craft-spec` for what that costs.

A weak gate that declares itself is honest. A self-run gate that stays silent is the failure this plugin exists to remove.

The Anti-Patterns

Don't	Do	Why
Start while the goal is fuzzy	Keep asking	Ambiguity resolved by guessing ships wrong work
"Make it better"	A statement that could be false	Nothing to judge against
Infer the panel	Name it at approval	A model choosing its own reviewers is not review
Approve your own charter	A human approves	The one gate a model may not pass
Leave scope open	Name what's excluded	Scope drift is the common failure