ADR-0157 - Ruthless skills and closed artifact authorship

Context

Universal methods inherited artifact machinery, ambiguity boilerplate, and defensive instructions whose absence produced identical behavior. Triple-check recorded findings instead of destroying them. The inspection type persisted after its writers stopped needing documents.

Decision

1. Every skill is ruthless and economical. Keep only instructions that change execution. Use hard imperatives. Delete filler, soft framing, default behavior, announcement labels, inert negatives, and duplicated mechanics.
2. Fork every ambiguity. fork-me activates whenever ambiguity survives factual investigation. It stops dependent work and presents at least three genuine options through the native picker, recommendation first, with each reason and cost stated plainly. Other skills expose ambiguity; they do not copy picker mechanics or name a sibling dependency.
3. Artifact authorship is closed. Only sus-spec, sus-task, sus-review, sus-inventory, sus-change-plan, sus-audit, and sus-research create Suspec artifacts. Evidence receipts and run notes remain untyped sidecars owned by those workflows. The inspection artifact type retires.
4. Inspection methods resolve work in place. Bulletproof and Demolition return compact chat. Revolver runs at least six sequential stances. Triple-check runs exactly three fresh top-tier passes. For both loops, supported findings are fixed and verified, refuted findings carry decisive evidence, genuine human decisions stop for selection, and unresolved defects block the next reviewer.
5. The deterministic contract rejects the retired type. Checks contract 0.19.0 recognizes inventory, audit, and research as unchecked. inspection becomes an unknown type. No check ID changes.
6. Lifecycle close stays with artifact workflows. After an artifact is fully actioned and no downstream step needs it, its workflow requires one human disposition for the artifact and its sidecars: Delete, Leave, or Promote.

Narrowed decisions

• ADR-0145: economy now governs skill source as well as generated Markdown; one ambiguity method owns picker mechanics.
• ADR-0146: inspection methods no longer produce inspection artifacts; Triple-check resolves sequentially instead of splitting inspect and refine modes.
• ADR-0149: self-containment requires local method contracts, not duplicated cross-cutting mechanics.
• ADR-0150: lifecycle disposition remains on artifact workflows.
• ADR-0151: the catalog adds fork-me; the owned artifact set drops inspection.
• ADR-0152: the recognized type set narrows and the checks contract advances to 0.19.0.
• ADR-0155: Revolver's sequential resolution stands.
• ADR-0156: fixed procedures carry no generic picker boilerplate; genuine ambiguity still activates the dedicated selection method.

Consequences

• Universal methods leave no transient documents behind.
• Every ambiguity reaches a human as an actionable fork, not a guess or essay question.
• Revolver and Triple-check improve the target instead of compiling defect reports.
• Installed skill payloads spend tokens only on behavior-changing instructions.

Status

Accepted (2026-07-13). Narrows ADR-0145, ADR-0146, ADR-0149 through ADR-0152, ADR-0155, and ADR-0156.