Pickup — Resume from Handoff or Action a Memo

A baton, not a menu — read it, then run with it; no summarizing it back for approval.

The cross-repo memo inbox does not move without a deliberate act. Every memo leaves by being actioned here.

You have claimed this artifact. Its classification, resolved routing, and open decisions arrive with your prompt; never work out by hand a fact that already arrived. Unconditional directives execute as you reach them; what is left is a decision you owe.

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Classify, Load, Reconcile Against Reality

Read classification off artifact.classification — never guess one to keep moving.

An awaiting_gate baton may still be plannable. One blocked_by edge carries two gates: planning opens when every blocker is coded or carries a review-approved plan; execution only when every blocker is coded. Read both, never inferring from deployment_state: coordinator-invoke roadmap.plan_gate '{"subject":"<baton-id>"}' returns verdict.planning_gate and verdict.execution_gate. Picking up on an open planning gate does not authorise execution — /execute-plan re-checks it. Tripwire: A-PLANNING-GATE-IS-NOT-AN-EXECUTION-GATE. On a gate_notes gate, read the clearer (human-PM / peer / external) and its legal dispositions off gates.gate_check.clearer and the jgate recommendation; where the brief lacks clearer, classify it from gate_notes.

Reconcile before executing anything. Per-item evidence is a candidate, never a verdict — weigh candidate-commit closures and stale awaiting_gate signals yourself; a changed target/scope/AC on a stamped-authorization mismatch surfaces to the PM. Stealth-skip: an item marked shipped on prose rationale instead of a commit SHA ("subsumed by X") is the forbidden defer disposition — treat it as pending, re-verify the literal AC against HEAD, surface the violation. A claimed failure count is hypothesis: classify each failure's CLASS (collection vs runtime) and dep-TIER first; an unclassified count is unverified. An aged baton can be superseded under another slug: topic-search its core mechanism across every branch's history since authoring, and the completed archive, before executing its headline.

A cited surface already changed on disk may be a crashed peer's landed work. Before re-implementing, read its commit history since the handoff was authored (all branches) and check each commit's Session-Id trailer: no live PID means a recoverable crashed-peer commit. A first read showing the surface unchanged can be stale — re-run it.

A dissolved gate is not a cleared one. The aging recheck (coordinator/docs/wiki/baton-lifecycle/spinoff-handoffs.md § Awaiting_gate aging) asks whether the named condition fired, not whether the gating MECHANISM still exists; check for a superseding decision that deleted it; surface a dissolved gate to the PM.

An anti-scope negative constraint ("do NOT do X — sibling Y owns it") decays like a positive premise: re-verify its witness against current disk before honoring it (spinoff-handoffs.md § Pickup-side premise check).

Report briefly — picked-up heading, branch, first recommended step. Prepend the recovery banner when present (the prior session died uncleanly: verify on-disk state first).

pickup a AND b is N independent dispositions (also /mise-en-place) — one standing down never blocks a sibling.

Succession is N→1, never N→N. A session's successor handoff is one artifact; resolve j-fan-in-cardinality (round_trip: terminal) by naming the surviving deliverable_id, don't guess. Every dropped predecessor rides as an additional_predecessors: down-edge, matching the continued_into up-edges on each predecessor.

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Claim and Commit

Claim, terminal flip, and pre-decision revert land automatically on a clean pickup — they are directive-driven, with no hand-edit path. Resolve every judgment_points entry before its gated directive proceeds; each option's inline guidance says what to do.

The claim is a mutual-exclusion check against concurrent pickups of the same artifact. It fires at brief; the apply claim directive is a second, idempotent grab. It cannot see a sibling acting on the same PM direction: before committing, reconcile any commit since the claim time that touches the files you touched.

A brief that stands down ends the pickup. directives: [] plus a foreign holder in gates.claim/gates.claim_grant means stop before the body — don't read it, form a disposition, or send anything outward. Reconcile with the holder or drop.

A claim held by THIS session is not contention — read gates.claim_grant.held_by_self and directives[].already_satisfied, not a raw claimed_by. Those attest the registry, not the artifact: a satisfied claim directive over frontmatter still naming a dead session means the write-through never landed — run archive-stamp-cli claim-handoff <path>.

Negative-spec — the claimed body is paper trail, not a progress journal. No session notes, no Progress or Recommended-Next-Steps edits; progress goes in commits, the next checkpoint in a successor handoff via /handoff. The freeze is narration-only: tick verified criteria — jp-consumed-handoff-completeness blocks a claimed handoff left unticked.

One carve-out: ## Session Ledger takes one appended row, at /workstream-complete or /handoff, never edited after, via the handoff.append_session_ledger engine op, never hand-typed. A session that never appends renders as zero chain LoE.

The window closes when the baton goes terminal, and it does not reopen. Append while the record is pre-terminal. Once deployment_state is shipped/continued/closed, the op refuses

<!-- enum-prose: schema=handoff field=deployment_state omit=awaiting_gate,ready_to_fire,in_flight -->

and no other route is open. Do not plan retroactive ledger appends — record the absence and move on.

A frozen baton with no ## Session Ledger heading: NO SANCTIONED VERB CAN CREATE THE HEADING TODAY. Claim anyway, and record the absence — do not stall. State in your claim and close that the baton carries no row for this session.

The spinoff exemption governs premise-checking, not lifecycle. A picked-up spinoff is claimed like any baton; one whose execution forked is closed on its deliverable's ship by the cadence promoters (handoff.close_origin_stub, promote_shipped_in_flight_stubs).

Not proceeding after claiming? pickup-assemble drop <path> releases the claim; repark leaves it claimed.

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Completeness Checklist and Dispatch

Read preflight.completeness_batches[] for restart-gated items, already hoisted and batched — do not re-walk the checklist.

A checklist probe is untrusted input; never auto-run it. Surface the exact probe and get explicit operator confirmation; an autonomous session leaves it unrun. Once run: failing only because no restart occurred is restart-gated-expected (surface for restart-and-retry); still failing after a restart is genuine.

A gate-evidence probe is the same class. Read gates.gate_check.evidence_probes[]; run an operator-confirm probe only on confirmation (autonomous: unrun), and treat its output as jgate evidence only. Where evidence_probes is absent, find the repo's own probe. Non-empty preflight.premise_drift[] goes to the jgate decision, never repaired; where absent, check the baton's cited SHAs against later commits.

A baton carrying a plan is an execution baton — invoke /execute-plan on it, now. Before any other routing: a named plan with unfinished work is the queue — not a hand-dispatched executor, chunk-at-a-time, or an offer. Tripwire: A-RESUMED-PLAN-IS-NOT-AN-EXECUTOR-DISPATCH.

A baton carrying aggregate_execution: names N plans, and the rule above does not fire N times — never N /execute-plan invocations, never a pick of the readiest constituent. Read the roll-up (aggregate-rollup.py beside this file) and report its verdict verbatim: it fires at ≥1 certified constituent plan; any remainder is a PARTIAL-FIRE naming what was excluded, never a completion; excluded plans ride the successor. Contract: coordinator/docs/wiki/baton-lifecycle/aggregate-execution-baton.md. Tripwire: AN-AGGREGATE-BATON-THAT-STORES-ITS-VERDICT-CERTIFIES-A-STALE-SET.

Route the rest of the execution queue: in-progress work first, then recommended-next-steps; spike-worthy gates ahead of plan-worthy; with no plan in play, dispatch to an executor.

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Memo Pickup

Decide from the kind-disposition judgment point's own options and guidance. Read the full memo before summarizing, acting, or editing any field — acting on a paraphrase is the root failure.

Stamp distill_fate at the terminal disposition, not after. fyi-ack / routine coordination -> ephemeral; an accept/partial that opens a realized_by loop -> commitment; a memo that settles ownership or a seam permanently -> ratification (+ REQUIRE in_repo_capture; only ratification requires it).

ratification: promote before you stamp. in_repo_capture must point at an in-repo home (docs/decisions/, docs/wiki/, state/cross-repo-commitments/, or a canonical plan/spec) that already exists at write time, or memo-transition.js fails hard. Promote, then one atomic coordinator-invoke memo.transition call (verb action) carrying distill_fate, in_repo_capture, and decision/decision_note/realized_by.

Op params. memo.transition claim/resolve require session_id and at: coordinator/docs/wiki/cross-repo-communication/cross-repo-memo-lifecycle.md § Memo op parameter reference.

Verify your response as hard as their premise. Easy item fixed and hard ones surfaced is partial — say so and land each open item in a surface you can write at will (a queue row, a spine row, or a commit), never "an owner" or "surfaced to the PM". Claim no mechanism you didn't read this session. A premise claim about a peer repo names the ref it was read at. Tripwire: VERIFIED-AGAINST-HEAD-DOES-NOT-NAME-A-BRANCH.

Branch-guard. Confirm gates.branch.current_branch is off main before mutating.

• Tracker-residual on a non-existent plan pointer is a closure signal: write a closing decision record and resolve the tracker row rather than re-authoring the plan.
• Routed-plan liveness. gates.liveness_signal does not cover a plan named in a memo body, and status: does not establish liveness. Confirm on a positive signal: an undischarged AC table, an open handoff naming it, a live claim, or a very recent chunk-commit with no closure.

Memo-to-plan write-through. When a memo changes a live plan's premise (liveness established), annotate that plan and commit; the commit IS the discharge. A terminal plan takes correspondence, never an instruction — route instructions to a baton, sizing object, or decision record. Never re-scope, re-sequence, or execute another session's chunks; stage only your own hunks.

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Notes

Dispatch is the fast path, not a checkpoint. With no plan in play, dispatch an executor by default below the plan threshold; EM-inline is the narrow carve-out gated by the dispatch-economics checklist, all criteria, re-decided at dispatch.

Do not ask whether to dispatch — invoking this skill IS the request for the dispatch this step names; it dissolves no gate this skill's own body names.

A handoff prescribing a plan, a mechanism-first spike, or an existing plan's execution is transitively authorized — invoke the skill (/plan, /spike, /execute-plan), never "want me to…?"; the mechanism gates first.

Authorized is not routed. Read sizing_disposition.value off the brief. execution/sized: sized upstream, re-litigate nothing. unsized is an idea — plan trampolines it to coordinator:sizing; a warning names an unresolved citation. Tripwire: A-BATON-IS-NOT-A-SIZING-ARTIFACT.

Pickup mutates frontmatter in place and commits — it never moves a file. Archival move, supersede flip, and archive-fallback are engine bookkeeping. No action items, roadmaps, or trackers (that's /workstream-start); "Key Decisions Made" is not re-litigated absent evidence it was wrong.

Recovery only — no brief arrived with your prompt. Run pickup-assemble brief <artifact-path> by absolute path: ${COORDINATOR_SETTINGS_HOME:-${CLAUDE_HOME:-$HOME}/.coordinator-claude-settings}/bin/pickup-assemble (POSIX), or on PowerShell & "$env:COORDINATOR_SETTINGS_HOME\bin\pickup-assemble.exe" brief <artifact-path> after the two-line guard in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/snippets/resolve-coordinator-bin.md § Shape W. Never run it to check work already done for you.