onboarding

name	onboarding
description	Route contributors through mecatl's human-reviewed development spine: contract PR, approved baseline, autonomous TDD implementation, final code-review PR. A router, not an executor. Use for onboarding or workflow questions.

onboarding

Read AGENTS.md, docs/architecture.md, and relevant docs/adr/ records before changing the repository.

Route by work class

Classify by decision and blast radius, never diff size:

• Spike: explicit-question evidence gathering that is not shipped as-is. It bypasses the spine only with explicit human authorization and must be reclassified before shipping.
• Routine: an established or mechanical, reversible change with no new durable decision or durable-contract change; it bypasses acceptance planning regardless of file count.
• Bounded: substantive contract work with no durable architecture decision; use the spine.
• Architectural: a durable public/API, persistence/data ownership, security/trust, deployment/operator, module/system-boundary, or cross-subsystem-invariant decision; use the spine and a new or superseding ADR.

If the lower class is not supported by evidence, escalate rather than silently downgrade. Choose Split or Combined only after classification: it is a delivery choice, not a work class. For classification detail and plan drafting, use /to-acceptance-plan.

The spine

Bounded and Architectural work use two human checkpoints:

1. /to-acceptance-plan writes docs/acceptance/<slug>.md, including exact **Contract:** human-reviewed/v2 metadata, a Bounded/Architectural classification with matching decision-record outcome, interfaces, verifiable behavior, and a machine-readable ## Human decisions section. Unchecked decisions keep it draft; proposed means every human decision needed for implementation is resolved and recorded. It opens a Plan / Interface PR, then stops.
2. Human contract review merges the plan PR. Merging is the approval event; no separate status-line edit is required. /plan-orchestrate proves approval by git ancestry and corrects a lagging proposed label on entry.
3. /plan-orchestrate <slug> starts from the merged approved commit, uses run-local .scratch/orchestrate/<slug>/ state and isolated TDD workers, gates and panel-reviews the implementation, then opens only the Implementation PR.
4. Human code review merges the implementation.

Combined delivery is a narrow exception for a compact one-task plan with exactly one ### Scenario, exact **Expected tasks:** 1 metadata, and a non-placeholder **Combined rationale:** explaining why separate plan review adds no value. gRPC/protobuf, exported Go APIs/interfaces, tool schemas, CLI/config, events/persistence, and security/authority each begin None — <rationale>. Compatibility/migration may describe workflow migration, and splitting must add no review value. A workflow-only meta-change may review its process-document/skill interface in the same PR. /to-acceptance-plan prepares the plan on the eventual combined branch and stops without opening a plan PR; only an explicit /plan-orchestrate invocation adds implementation and opens the sole Combined PR. Routine work remains exempt. Every path preserves human merge authority.

Two carve-outs put discretion with the human, never the agent: explicitly requested exploratory/spike work skips the plan and orchestration entirely — build it locally, never merge it to main as-is, and re-enter the spine normally if it's worth shipping. Separately, the directing human may explicitly waive the spine for a named piece of work; the waiver lifts only the plan/interface ceremony, not the layering rules, the AGENTS.md invariants, or the human-merge requirement. Do not infer either carve-out yourself or push the spine onto a request that already named one.

Issue references on plan PRs are non-closing (Relates to #N or Tracking: #N). Only a final implementation PR that fully completes the issue uses Closes #N or Fixes #N. Contract drift, including a worker discovering an unrecorded human decision, blocks orchestration; the worker does not make that decision. Only a separately, explicitly authorized /to-acceptance-plan amendment mode may open the required Split Plan / Interface PR for human approval and merge before work resumes.

Specialists

• /panel-review — final Spec / Standards / Test adequacy / Domain review.
• /test-writer — invariant-first failing tests.
• /cut-release — release workflow.
• /perf-optimization and /perf-mcp-interpretation — performance work.
• /mecatl-model-router-config — model-routing configuration.

This skill only routes. Use /to-acceptance-plan for classification detail and acceptance-plan authoring, and docs/acceptance/README.md for acceptance-plan repository navigation.