settle

# Settle One unsettled point in `specs/requirements/prd.md`, taken to a decision. The instruction names the point — the line the user clicked. A bare instruction means the **Open Questions** list. The PRD carries **two kinds of unsettled**, and they are not the same job: - **An assumption** is a judgment the agent already made. It is flagged `*assumed*` and it is doing real work in the document. Settling it **challenges an answer that already exists**. - **An open question** is a hole nobody has filled — a fact only the user holds, which is why it was never guessed. Settling it **fills it for the first time**. The `grilling` skill owns the question mechanics; `prd-contract` owns the shape of what you write. ## Revision propagates **This is the whole job.** The point does not live alone: the document was written on top of it — stories it implied, decisions that leaned on it, an Out of Scope line it justified. So settling is one question, then a **sweep for everything the old answer held up**. Amending only the line the user clicked leaves the PRD agreeing with itself in one place and contradicting itself everywhere else. Story numbers stay permanent through all of it: a story the new answer kills becomes an Out of Scope line, never a deleted number. The sweep ends at the PRD. When a settled point would also change a design that already exists, say so in the close and leave it to the user. ## Challenging an assumption Put the assumption to the user as the decision it is — what you decided, why, and what the alternative costs — then: - **Confirmed** — the tag comes off. It was a real decision all along; it is now the user's. - **Overturned** — write the new answer in its place, unflagged, and sweep. ## Answering an open question An external service is a given or nothing: a Registered External resource or a service the user already uses is written as the decision; "no preference" leaves the capability unnamed, and the choice waits on the dependency's definition at design (`prd-contract`). Never settle a capability by proposing a provider. Ask it. The answer **moves to the section it belongs in** — a decision, a story, a scope line — and the entry leaves Open Questions. An answer parked in the Open Questions list is not an answer. A bare instruction walks the list this way, one `ask_question` per entry, including the deferred ones — the user opened the section, so they are taking it up. ## Deferring *"Later"*, *"I don't know yet"*, *"stop asking"* — mark the entry `deferred — the user will decide later` and leave it in place. Deferral is an **outcome of this conversation**, never something the user reaches for on its own, and it gates nothing: it is the user's way of saying *stop raising this*. Honour it — a deferred point stays out of later rounds until the user brings it back. ## Close Say what settled and what moved with it — the point, where its answer landed, and every other line the sweep changed. A sweep that changed nothing else says so, in a line.