| name | mast |
| description | Use when reading or authoring a self-declared pact — carries the two modes, the clear-weather rule and the exact blind spot of the check that enforces it, the flag discipline for a budget whose keys are mostly unobservable, the rules the pact writer guarantees, and the anti-patterns that would turn a pact-keeper into a gate |
The Mast
A limit you set for yourself in advance holds. A limit you set in the moment
you are about to breach it does not — you will simply move it, because the
thing you want at 18:00 is to keep working.
That is why the pact file exists, and why nothing scaffolds one: an imposed
default is not a pact. But a pact nobody reads is also not a pact, and a pact
nobody has authored is not one either.
The Mast — the pact-keeper. It brings a pact into existence, and reads it
back to you.
What it attacks: outsourced governance — the drift where the decision about
when to stop migrates from a person who decided it in advance to a person who
is tired and mid-thought.
It never stops anything itself.
Two modes
| Mode | Does |
|---|
/mast | recites the pact and says where you stand against it |
/mast tune | the only sanctioned path that authors or amends it |
Boundary notices, the hard stop, and the override record are not here —
they are a separate slice. What lives here is the gauge and the ritual.
Recite first, measure second
Read mode opens with the human's own declared words, and annotates afterwards.
A report that opens with a table of what the plugin cannot see is an inventory
of limitations, not a gauge.
The flags, and the honest cost of them
| Key | Flag | Why |
|---|
hard_stop_hour | observed | the clock is past it or not |
focus_blocks | inferred | the clock being inside a block is not having spent it working |
sessions_per_day | inferred | the registry is a lease over live sessions, not a day's log |
daily_cost_ceiling | not observable | nothing here sees spend |
Two of these are easy to get wrong in the flattering direction.
focus_blocks looks observable because a focus block is a clock range. But
consumption against it is did you spend it working, which needs the day's
history the registry does not keep — the same sentence that disqualifies
sessions_per_day.
daily_cost_ceiling is not asked. Reporting a declared ceiling back is
reading a pact, not asking a question; asked means the human was asked and
answered. An unearned flag invites an implementer to invent the question, and
the plausible invention — asking what someone spent today — is a question about
their spending that nothing authorises.
Never estimate. A fabricated figure against a real ceiling would make a
person stop, or not stop, on a number nobody measured.
Only one key in four ever moves. That is the price of not fabricating the other
three, and it fixes what a budget is here: a declaration to be recited, not a
quantity to be metered.
The clear-weather rule, and exactly what enforces it
Tune stamps authored_at. Read mode notes when the budget it is reading was
tuned today — this pact has not been lived with yet, which is worth a line
when it asks something of you tonight.
What the check does not see. authored_at moves only when Tune writes it:
| The human does | Stamp | Note fires |
|---|
| Hand-edits the stop hour at 18:00 | unchanged | no |
Runs /mast tune on a calm Tuesday morning | today | yes, that evening |
It fires on the honest path and stays silent on the dishonest one. Say so, in
the note itself. A check that claims coverage it lacks is worse than one that
claims none, because silence gets read as an all-clear.
Something stronger is not available. The pact file is never committed, so there
is no diff and no CI can see it. Checksumming would catch the hand-edit, but it
would also flag the calm Tuesday tweak, which is the deliberate authorship the
rule wants. A disclosed note at the Unverified rung is the honest position —
the same call the flag table makes about spend, for the same reason.
It is a note, never a gate. Refusing to honour a pact because it was authored
recently would be second-guessing the person it serves.
Tune
It is an editor, not only an author. It reads current values back as each
question's context — your line is 18:30; what should it be? That is not a
proposed default: what is shown is the human's own prior authorship, not the
template's illustration. Without it, changing one number means re-running the
whole ritual, and the cheapest path to a small edit becomes the editor — the
channel the weather check cannot see.
The stop hour first, then an offer to stop there. A useful two-line pact is
reachable in one question. A person asked cold for max_switches_per_hour has
no basis for an answer, and a number invented to move the dialogue along is not
more authored than one they declined to give.
It says what nothing reads yet — before asking. Sync cadence entirely;
three of Session WIP's four keys until the WIP Warden ships;
notification_policy_after_stop, which is declared intent nothing enforces;
daily_cost_ceiling, which is never checkable. Disclosing for one block and
not the others would leave a human authoring their first pact under two
regimes without being told there were two.
It composes, shows, then writes. Per-value confirmation is not enough
alone: the parts the human did not author — the mandatory clause, the reserved
marker, the stamps — are exactly the parts that decide whether the block reads
as declared, and without a preview they land unseen.
It proposes nothing as a default, and every block is skippable.
What the writer guarantees
lib/pact-write.sh — commands and hooks only, never sourced by a sentinel.
- Derives the mandatory clause and reserved marker from the template,
never from a copy. A restated clause agrees with the reader only by
coincidence of wording.
- Replaces a block; never appends a second. A duplicate heading is
silently unread, so newly tuned values become invisible with no error.
- Stamps
Budgets only, where the grammar defines the stamps.
- Preserves the preamble — which is the only content genuinely outside
every block, since everything after a heading belongs to it.
Then the validation checkpoint: read the block back, assert block_state
returns declared, fix in place. Without it a malformed write is discovered
later, silently, as sentinels dropping to observe-only.
Anti-patterns
- Estimating anything unobservable, especially spend.
- Gating on the weather note. It is a note.
- Claiming the weather check catches hand-edits. It cannot, ever.
- Opening the report with what cannot be seen. Recite first.
- Proposing a default in Tune. A value accepted because it was pre-filled
is not authored.
- Judging the pact. A stop hour is not too late. It is theirs.
- Writing from the agent, or sourcing the write library from one.
