mast

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.

1. 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.
2. Replaces a block; never appends a second. A duplicate heading is silently unread, so newly tuned values become invisible with no error.
3. Stamps Budgets only, where the grammar defines the stamps.
4. 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

1. Estimating anything unobservable, especially spend.
2. Gating on the weather note. It is a note.
3. Claiming the weather check catches hand-edits. It cannot, ever.
4. Opening the report with what cannot be seen. Recite first.
5. Proposing a default in Tune. A value accepted because it was pre-filled is not authored.
6. Judging the pact. A stop hour is not too late. It is theirs.
7. Writing from the agent, or sourcing the write library from one.