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Slipway

Workflow

Slipway routes governed work through intake, planning, implementation, review, and closeout. The active lifecycle state lives in artifacts/changes/<slug>/change.yaml.

For the full workflow document, see Governed Workflow. This page explains the mental model.

Lifecycle

Section titled “Lifecycle”
Stage Purpose
S0_INTAKE Capture intent, scope, open questions, and initial evidence.
S1_PLAN Produce research, requirements, decisions, tasks, and plan-audit evidence.
S2_IMPLEMENT Execute dependency-ordered task waves and record task evidence.
S3_REVIEW Run selected reviewers, repair findings, author assurance, and reach done-ready.
done Archive terminal state after done-ready closeout.

slipway run is a shortcut driver. It advances until an operator-facing stop: a skill handoff, blocker, or done-ready state.

Read-Only Before Mutation

Section titled “Read-Only Before Mutation”

Use read-only commands to understand the current state:

Terminal window
slipway status --json
slipway validate
slipway next --json --diagnostics

Then run the named stage command or complete the surfaced skill. This keeps the agent from guessing from old context.

Fail-Closed Recovery

Section titled “Fail-Closed Recovery”

A fail-closed blocker means one of the current-worktree proofs is absent, stale, malformed, or out of scope. Good recovery does one of these:

  • Author the missing artifact from slipway instructions <artifact>.
  • Rerun the owning stage or selected reviewer in a fresh context.
  • Record task evidence through the wave execution path.
  • Run bounded local repair only when health --doctor names it.
  • Start a new governed change if the objective changed.

Bad recovery edits state files by hand, changes timestamps, removes blockers without fresh proof, or teaches an agent to bypass review.

Done-Ready Is Not Done

Section titled “Done-Ready Is Not Done”

Done-ready means gates have passed and the change can be finalized. slipway done archives the terminal state. If done reports a dirty-worktree warning, commit the intended implementation diff together with the archived Slipway record before removing the worktree.

Section titled “Related”