Pre-Edit Investigation Gate

Purpose

Prevent blind edits by requiring explicit investigation evidence before high-risk changes.

Inspect First

• files and manifests likely affected by the task
• docs, specs, feature state, validation wrappers, architecture boundaries, migrations, dependency policy, and recent diffs
• existing docs/development/pre-edit-investigation.md if present

Procedure

1. Decide whether the gate applies.

   • Apply it for broad edits, security/auth/data changes, dependency additions, migrations, CI/validation rewrites, and user-facing UI/API behavior.
   • For trivial one-file edits, record a short skip rationale.

2. Gather evidence before editing.

   • List files read, commands inspected, affected surfaces, known invariants, assumptions, and expected validation.
   • Use assets/templates/pre-edit-investigation.md.tmpl when creating a durable artifact.
   • When docs/observability/task-trace.jsonl exists, add an inspect or pre-edit event so $trajectory-risk-supervisor can see that inspection happened.

3. Validate the evidence.

   • Run scripts/check_pre_edit_evidence.py <repo> when an artifact exists.
   • The evidence must be specific enough for another agent to understand why the edit path is justified.

4. Route related work.

   • Use $task-planning-and-pr-protocol for implementation planning.
   • Use $agent-reviewer and $termination-gatekeeper after edits.

Validation

• Confirm the investigation names real files, commands, affected surfaces, assumptions, and validation commands.
• Confirm any skip rationale is proportional to the risk.

Completion Criteria

• Risky edits have pre-edit evidence before implementation starts.
• Reviewers can distinguish inspected facts from assumptions.