rigor-tiers

name

rigor-tiers

description

WellForge rigor tiers — match ceremony to stakes. The spike / mvp / production vocabulary that governs how much of the pipeline runs (agents, approval gates, models, quality gates, eval) for a feature. Use whenever running /wellforge:spike, when /wellforge:orchestrate or /wellforge:implement is given a --mode, when reading a feature's `rigor:` frontmatter, or when deciding how strict gates should be. Authoritative reference for the three tiers, the non-negotiable security floor, advisory-gate behavior, and the rigor precedence rule.

Rigor tiers — velocity vs. assurance

Full WellForge rigor (7 agents, 2 approval gates, frontier models, 80% coverage, LM-judge eval) is right for production and wasteful for a feasibility spike that may be thrown away. A rigor tier matches ceremony to stakes.

Principle: don't lower the bar — defer it, explicitly and reversibly. Lower rigor is a declared, recorded, promotable lifecycle stage, never a silent corner-cut. A lower tier is a tracked debt (the rigor: frontmatter), paid by /wellforge:promote when the work becomes real. The failure mode this design exists to prevent: a spike silently becoming production.

The three tiers

Tier	Intent	Throwaway-ok?
spike	Feasibility / business-model experiment	Yes — expected
mvp	First real release to validate with users	No, but debt is acknowledged
production	Full rigor (the default everywhere today)	No

What each tier tunes

Lever	spike	mvp	production
Pipeline depth	main loop builds from a brief; NO subagents	PO → tasks → dev agents → light QE (no separate architect/designer)	full 7-agent team
Human gates	0 (autonomous; human reviews the result)	1 (spec approval)	2 (spec + plan)
Spec ceremony	one brief.md	spec.md + tasks.md (plan folded into tasks)	spec + plan + design + tasks
Models	inherits the session model (no per-agent routing)	mid agents only — frontier architect/evaluator are NOT spawned	full model-routing.yml
Quality gates	lint + typecheck + build, advisory	+ smoke tests + SAST-high blocking; coverage advisory	full 80% coverage + SAST + eval
Eval (LM-judge)	off	off	on — the gate into done
Effort cue	minimal (bias to speed)	moderate (pragmatic)	full (deliberate) — see below

mvp gets cheaper not by re-tiering agents (frontmatter model: is fixed per agent) but by composition — it simply never spawns the frontier agents (architect, evaluator). See config/model-routing.yml.

Effort cue — how hard to think, gated by tier

Distinct from which model runs (routing) and which agents run (composition): the effort cue is how hard the chosen model deliberates. It is not a per-agent config field (that would break tool-neutrality) — it's a plain-text directive the dispatching command adds to each agent's task prompt, derived from the resolved rigor tier. Tool-portable (just words), zero new config. Most useful for agents that span tiers (PO, dev agents, QE) and for the spike main loop; the frontier agents (architect, evaluator) run only at production, so their effort is already "full".

Prepend the tier's cue to each dispatched agent's task (and, for spike, the main loop applies it to itself):

• spike — "Effort: minimal. Take the shortest path that answers the question. No gold-plating, no exhaustive edge-case analysis; leave // SPIKE: where you cut a corner. Bias hard to speed."
• mvp — "Effort: moderate. Be pragmatic and correct on the main paths; cover the obvious error cases but NOTE deferred edge cases rather than solving them all now."
• production — "Effort: full. Reason carefully about trade-offs, edge/error/failure modes; verification is adversarial. Thoroughness over speed."

This is a nudge, not a hard budget — honest about the seam. Where a tool exposes a real thinking-budget parameter, a future model-tiers.yml-style mapping could bind these levels to it; until then the directive is the mechanism.

Security floor — non-negotiable, ALL tiers (incl. spike)

These always run and always block, regardless of tier. Fast must never mean "leaks credentials":

• Secret scan (gitleaks / equivalent) — no committed secrets.
• No hardcoded credentials in changed code.
• Dependency audit on CRITICAL CVEs — critical advisories block even a spike.

A tier may make coverage/lint/SAST-medium advisory; it may NEVER waive the floor.

Advisory vs. blocking gates

Outside the security floor, lower tiers run the gates but report results as advisory — the same mechanism as the brownfield ratchet baseline: measure, show the gap-to-target, do not block. The numbers are still visible (so the debt is honest); they just don't fail the run.

• spike: lint/typecheck/build advisory. Report failures; don't stop on them.
• mvp: SAST-high blocks; coverage is advisory (reported with gap-to-80%); lint/typecheck block.
• production: everything blocks (today's behavior).

rigor: frontmatter & precedence

A feature records its tier in its spec.md/brief.md frontmatter: rigor: spike|mvp|production. Absent ⇒ production (safe default — full rigor unless explicitly relaxed).

Resolution precedence, highest wins:

1. Invocation — --mode <tier> on the command.
2. Feature — the rigor: frontmatter of the feature being worked.
3. Project default — .forge/manifest.json rigor (scaffolded projects) or .forge/adoption.json rigor (adopted/brownfield projects, set by /wellforge:adopt).

State the resolved tier before acting, and why (which level supplied it).

Graduation

A lower tier is debt, not a destination. /wellforge:promote <feature> --to mvp|production (or --project --to … for the scaffold default) raises the tier and pays the deferred rigor: brief → spec → retro plan, backfill tests to the coverage floor, flip advisory gates to blocking, and run the eval. Production rigor is reached ONLY through promote, and only on an eval PASS — never implicitly. Promotion only RAISES; a tier is never lowered via promote.

Visibility (the guardrail)

A lower tier must never be mistaken for production-grade. Always:

• Print the resolved tier at the start of a run.
• For spike/mvp, end with a one-line reminder that gates were advisory and the work is unpromoted (e.g. "rigor: spike — gates advisory, not production-ready; /wellforge:promote to graduate").