| name | rationalize |
| description | The checkpoint at natural pauses — should this action also be executed? does this lesson deserve a permanent home shippable NOW? Route via the table (Q-0273). |
rationalize
Turn venture-lab's in-flight lessons and shippable actions into permanent
homes — the rationalization checkpoint, run at natural pause points.
Owner-directed (Q-0273, 2026-07-13). The friction→guard reflex converts
INCIDENTS into guards; this generalizes it to OPPORTUNITIES — agents eager
to initiate, lessons "baked into a method, like a skill … still always
loadable on demand", so "every agent actually self improves in the useful
ways". superbot carries the founding doctrine; this is the kit's
generalized template, inherited by every adopter.
When the checkpoint fires
At every natural pause, not only after something breaks:
- a slice/batch of work lands (before picking the next one);
- ANY workaround, discovery, or lesson surfaces mid-task — a command that
behaved unexpectedly, a doc gap, a fact you had to re-derive, a better
path found late;
- the session enders (pair with the
session-close skill — this checkpoint
is the thinking half; that skill's close-out is the recording half).
The two questions
- Should this action also be executed? The observation or idea just
made — is there a concrete action hiding in it, and is that action
contained + reversible enough to DO right now instead of noting it?
- Does this lesson deserve a permanent home — and can I ship that home
NOW? A lesson that lives only in a session card is re-paid by every
future session; a lesson baked into a skill body, checker, or template
is paid once.
Routing table
| What surfaced | Route it to |
|---|
| A recurring METHOD (how to do X here) | a skill body — add or extend the registry entry (the registration reflex) |
| A checkable MISTAKE-CLASS (drift, footgun, false-green) | a checker / CI / test — enforce, don't exhort |
| Doctrine every future session/repo needs | a template or written rule — binding text routes as a PROPOSAL via docs/question-router.md, never self-applied |
| Real, but no shippable home now | an idea file in the repo's idea index, dated, with a one-line why |
| An ACTION, contained + reversible | execute it this session, flagged self-initiated on the run report |
| An ACTION that is irreversible / cross-cutting / gated | idea file or the owner queue, with the exact gate named |
The bar
A checkpoint pass that finds nothing is a silent no-op — never invent
filler. But a lesson you noticed and merely NOTED, when its permanent home
was one contained, reversible edit away, fails the bar: opportunities are
treated like incidents, and an incident is never left unguarded.
Declared capabilities: read-only (a decision method — the invoking session's
own capabilities do any shipping).
