risk-analysis

name	risk-analysis
description	Probability × impact risk assessment for curation and planning decisions. Categorize risks (quality, coherence, scope creep, token budget, breaking change, staleness), score by likelihood × impact, and route by risk score to ship / gate / ADR. Use before shipping a change, when accepting an external artifact, when running a pre-release gate, or when triaging findings.

Curation Risk Analysis

ACT Tenet VI: Match rigor to stakes. Reversible decisions deserve speed; irreversible ones deserve doubt.

Applied to curation work: accepting a bad skill is reversible (revert next patch). Shipping a broken release to consumers is expensive to undo.

Shared Knowledge Gate

Before evaluating non-trivial, repeated, or consequential risk, consult scout-knowledge-base for relevant prior decisions, failure modes, procedures, and gotchas.

1. Search the shared index using the risk's problem-specific terms.
2. Read only records whose signals or preconditions match the current risk.
3. Treat records as evidence and context, not authority; verify whether their conditions still hold.
4. If the knowledge base is unavailable, state that once and continue with the current evidence. Do not create a local fallback while assessing risk.

Skip this gate for trivial, isolated work. If shared storage needs first-time configuration, route to scout-shared-data-setup after the current task or when the user asks to enable it.

Risk Categories (Curation-Specific)

Category	Examples
Quality	Skill has bugs, stale references, or misleading content
Coherence	New content conflicts with existing brain architecture
Scope creep	Feature belongs in a different repo or surface (not Core / Mall / Steward)
Token budget	Addition pushes Core past 25K instruction budget
Breaking change	Rename/remove that breaks heir upgrades
Staleness	Store/skill stays past its useful life, misleading by presence

Risk Matrix for Curation Decisions

	Low Impact	Medium Impact	High Impact
High Likelihood	Ship with note	Gate on review	Full ACT pass + ADR
Medium Likelihood	Ship	Ship with note	Gate on review
Low Likelihood	Ship	Ship	Ship with note

Impact Calibration for This Repo

Level	Curation Impact
High	Breaks heir upgrades, violates Cardinal Rule, token budget breach
Medium	Quality gap ships to heirs, coherence drift, stale reference
Low	Cosmetic issue, suboptimal wording, minor inconsistency

Likelihood Calibration

Level	Probability	Curation Signal
High	>60%	Multiple heirs affected, or same issue seen before
Medium	20-60%	Plausible failure mode, no prior occurrence
Low	<20%	Theoretical risk, strong mitigations in place

Decision Routing by Risk Score

Score (L×I)	Route
Low × Low	Ship immediately, log in curation-log
Any Medium	Ship with trimmed ACT pass visible in curation-log
Any High	Full ACT pass, write ADR, require explicit approval
High × High	Surface as ADR + direct Fabio conversation before acting

Risk Register (Running)

Maintained in your project's audit trail (Alex ACT itself uses operations/ledgers/brain-qa-changelog.md) — every entry carries implicit risk assessment via the Severity column. Explicit risk registers warranted only for:

• Release candidates (per your project's release process)
• Adopting an external artifact that scored below your project's acceptance bar
• Structural changes to your project's brain architecture

Would Revise If

Revise by 2026-11-30 or sooner if any of the following fires:

• The risk matrix produces no differentiation (everything routes to "Ship with note") across 10+ curation decisions in a quarter
• A curation decision that scored Low×Low ships and produces fleet-breaking impact ≥1 time (impact calibration too lax)
• A High×High decision is over-routed to ADR when a trimmed pass would have sufficed ≥3 times in a quarter (rigor calibration too tight)
• The Likelihood/Impact tables drift from observed reality (most "High Likelihood" rows turn out Low) ≥3 times in a quarter