midwork-triggers

# Mid-work triggers **The instructions already existed. On 2026-08-30 I broke seven things, and every one had a skill written for it that I never loaded.** That is not a gap in the library. It is a routing failure. The skill router fires on what the user *types*, and it is good at that. But the user does not type "I am about to add a guard instead of finding the bug." That decision happens two hours into the work, which is exactly when nothing is watching. So this file is keyed on **what I am about to do**, not on what the user said. --- ## The table | The moment I notice myself... | Load | The 08-30 failure | |---|---|---| | about to add a cap, band, assert or retry because output looked wrong | `locate-before-you-guard` | Banded `model_game` and `model_f5` against mislabelled lines and called it fixed. The **writer** was still filing football totals as MLB, 5,104 rows a week. The guard read as a fix and hid the cause for another six hours. | | explaining why something returned zero | `fail-loud` | "0 candidates" looks identical to "no edges today". College football needed FOUR fixes (mascots, short names, accents, a sort filing today's lines against next week) and every one presented as a quiet, plausible zero. | | writing a script that opens a browser on the user's sportsbook or dashboard | `user-state-is-sacred` | A screenshot script matched "tap for legs" by text, caught the neighbouring **"+ I took it"** buttons, and marked three straights and a parlay as placed that the user had not placed. The user's standing rule is that nothing enters the record until the user clicks it. | | about to regenerate, rebuild or re-render anything | `user-state-is-sacred` | A card rebuild replaced picks he had already bet. Two of those games had started, so the real wagers were unrecoverable from the card alone. | | adding a constant, threshold or new module | `wire-the-knob` | Built `pending_slip.js` to read the user's bet slip, shipped it, and **nothing consumed the file**. The reader existed; the reconciliation did not. Half a feature reads as a whole one. | | reading a cached file, capture, price or rating | `freshness-is-a-precondition` | Priced a card off odds captured ten days earlier and quoted an 18.5% edge on a line the board no longer showed. Separately: 12-day-old knowledge graph, stale intel silently dropping every strikeout prop. | | about to say done, fixed, working, or verified | `verification-before-completion` | Shipped `var(--card,#fff)` after screenshotting **one** theme. The page defaults to dark. The user opened it to white slabs on near-black and said it hurt to look at. | | ranking, sorting or picking a top-N | `enumerate-before-ranking` | Sorted the card purely by grade and got five strikeout unders, then did the same to the value list and went 2-for-7 with half of it in one market. | --- ## Two habits that would have caught most of it **Absence of an error is not evidence of correctness.** Six of the seven presented as clean, confident output: a zero, a push, a green screenshot, a written file. Nothing threw. The question to ask is not "did it fail?" but **"what would this look like if it were broken?"**, and if the answer is "exactly like this", go check. **When two sources disagree, name the authority before reconciling.** The user's sportsbook against my ledger, the box score against my grade, the rendered page against my intent. Every time I derived instead of read, the derived number was the wrong one. The book, the box score, and the browser are facts. Everything I compute is an estimate of them. --- ## What this is not Not a replacement for the router, which handles the user's prompts well. Not a checklist to recite. The trigger column is the whole point: recognise the moment, load the one file, move on.