| name | tend |
| description | Turn a vetted PLANT seed into a charter — the First Twelve, the Minimal Loving Version, the never-list with a structural guard, the carrier moment, and an honest announcement plan. Use when the user wants to plan, start, or charter a seed that passed the vet, or asks "how do I grow this the right way". |
| argument-hint | a garden slug with verdict PLANT |
/tend — charter a seed for honest growth
Input: a garden seed with verdict: PLANT (if unvetted, route to vet first — no
charter without a vet). Output: $GARDEN_DIR/charters/<slug>.md, and the
seed marked CHARTERED. Resolve $ROOT and $GARDEN_DIR as in skills/seed/SKILL.md.
Read $ROOT/doctrine/DOCTRINE.md. Work each section with the user —
this is a conversation with pickers at the forks, not a generated document dump.
The charter's six sections
1. The First Twelve
Twelve real, reachable people/roles this will serve first — names or concrete roles
the user can actually contact. Not personas: people. The founding move is serving
twelve people so well they carry it. If the user can't reach twelve, the seed isn't
ready to leave the garden; say so.
2. The Minimal Loving Version
The smallest thing that fully serves the Twelve — minimal in scope, never in care.
A shoddy gift serves no one: cut features, never quality. Define: what it does, what
it deliberately doesn't yet, and the quality floor that is non-negotiable.
3. The Never-List and the Guard
The refusals, written now, while motives are pure and there's nothing worth selling:
what this project will never do (ads? tracking? lock-in? data resale? paywalling the
core? — draw from the corpus). Then ONE structural guard that makes betrayal hard:
license choice, local-first architecture, open format, public domain, nonprofit —
pick with an AskUserQuestion picker, trade-offs stated.
4. The Carrier Moment
Locate the moment where a helped person would naturally tell the next person — the
moment the gift lands, not a share button. Design the product to make that moment
undeniable and effortless to describe. If no carrier moment exists, growth will
require pushing; flag it as the design gap to close before building.
5. The Honest Announcement
Where the Twelve's people already gather; show the thing there plainly, once.
Attraction, not promotion: demonstrate, don't manipulate. No growth hacks, no
manufactured urgency, no hidden incentive. List the exact venues and the one
paragraph the user would post.
6. Stewardship
The maintenance promise the Twelve can rely on (cadence, channel for reports, what
"maintained" means here), and the patience clause: this curve compounds; it does not
spike. State the check-in the user will make with the garden (e.g. quarterly) to
verify the seed is still the seed.
Close
Write the charter, update the garden entry (status: CHARTERED, charter path).
Offer the handoff: build it with the production-grade pipeline, keeping the
never-list in the requirements from day one.
