v2.18.0 — optional deterministic overview-regen script (ADR-0040)

v2.18.0 — an optional, deterministic overview.md regeneration script

ADR-0040 (idea 0033 → plan 0029).

Overview regeneration had grown from a trivial agent task into a mechanical-yet-error-prone one — five derived views over ~100 artifacts, with three drift classes already observed — pitting Economy (#2) against tool-agnosticism (#3/#7/#8). This release resolves the tension without sacrificing either: a small, deliberate crack in the "instructions-and-markdown-only" purism that leaves the promises intact.

Added

• scripts/regen-overview.ps1 (shipped to adopters in starter/docs/scripts/) — a cross-platform pwsh script that deterministically rebuilds the three family tables, the ADR → plans sub-index, and the stand-alone list, and flags non-conformant headers (bare/bullet-less block per ADR-0026; title-line ordinal disagreeing with the filename slot per ADR-0028) instead of silently copying drift — aborting rather than emitting a misfiled index.

Four guards that keep agnosticism intact

• Prose stays normative — the script is an implementation of the refresh procedure, never a second source of truth.
• Strictly optional & additive — absence changes nothing.
• Instruction-triggered, invisible to the user — the trigger is standing agent guidance (the same plain "regenerate the overview" request; the agent runs the script if present, else regenerates by hand).
• Only the output's shape is contract — the script may be reimplemented in any language or omitted; adopters lacking the runtime fall through to the prose path.

Changed

• Landed the standing trigger in starter/docs/working-method.md (an "Optional regeneration script" paragraph + docs/scripts/ layout entry), this repo's AGENTS.md derived body, and the "Keep overview.md current" guidance bullet in both AGENTS.md renderings.
• Enriched idea 0030 (kept seed) with the ADR-0040 precedent and the widened question of further mechanical economy-win candidates (a conformance lint, insert-and-shift renumbering, reciprocal-link checks).
• starter/ provenance bumped to v2.18; overview.md regenerated via the new script.

Adopter migration

None. The script is a new optional scaffold that reaches you automatically via the copy-driven "bring me current" update (it lands at docs/scripts/regen-overview.ps1). Your existing hand-regeneration keeps working unchanged, because the prose refresh procedure stays normative. To use the faster path after updating, just ask the agent to regenerate the overview.