rationalize

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

1. 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?
2. 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).