v0.6.0 — the agent contract

Every agent now reads the same rules from one file, instead of an orchestrator retyping them into every prompt

Half of every spawn prompt sent to smith, warden and scribe used to be identical, hand-typed from memory each time — how to read an exit code, what an agent must not run, how a probe is written. A rule that lived only in a human's memory of what to type was a rule that could go missing with nothing recording that it had, and it happened: a review round ran without a rule that had already been established two rounds earlier, and a reviewer's own forbidden full-suite run once produced a review's best finding, because nobody was assigned to run it.

agent-contract is a new skill carrying sixteen numbered rules that apply to every agent this plugin spawns. It is injected automatically — listed in each agent's definition, it arrives before the agent's first action, with nothing typed and no file to open. It appears in the skill listing because that is the mechanism the harness uses to deliver it, but it is not something to run yourself.

Each agent keeps only what is genuinely its own. warden keeps how it works in isolation and its report format; smith keeps its build procedure and mutation-testing discipline; scribe keeps its fact-finding rules. The session driving the work is bound by the same contract too — the rule that went missing before was broken by the orchestrator itself, not by an agent, so binding only the agents would have missed the party that needed it most.

Where this feature lives was decided by testing it, not by guessing. An earlier plan put it in a plain documentation file; six small experiments (in docs/experiments/) showed that location silently fails, and found the one that actually works.

What else moved

• Three GitHub milestones were reshaped so each carries one theme: 0.7.0 is now about giving agents a way to hand findings to the next step of their own work (a record of what a segment learned, and the measurement that watches it); 0.8.0 is the review-process bounds those measurements make possible; 0.9.0 adds two new agents.
• Two smaller issues were opened from what this work surfaced: whether the shared rule-file should split further once more agents exist, and whether a repository can tell "never set up" apart from "was set up and lost its records."

Full changelog: v0.5.0...v0.6.0