ADR-0178 - Restartable campaign goals

Context

The campaign method coordinates long, multi-pull-request delivery but leaves its goal prompt handwritten. One observed prompt grew to 109 lines by embedding artifact counts, branch SHAs, pull-request state, lane occupancy, and handoff facts. Those facts drifted and forced replacement.

OpenAI defines a goal as one durable objective with source pointers, checkpoint proof, and a verifiable stopping condition; it warns against loose backlogs and accumulated one-off instructions. [[OAIGOAL]] Anthropic observed long-running agents one-shotting work, abandoning half-built state, and declaring completion early across fresh contexts; structured continuity and incremental progress reduced those failures. [[LONGHARNESS]] Microsoft Research separates stable task planning from mutable progress tracking in its Magentic-One orchestrator. [[MAGENTIC]]

Suspec needs a durable campaign contract without becoming a scheduler or duplicating project state.

Decision

1. Rename the author. campaign becomes sus-campaign with no alias. It authors, revises, and checks one type: campaign artifact for a multi-pull-request delivery goal.
2. Keep the contract stable. A campaign carries Objective, Completion contract, Authorities, Operating loop, and Stops. Constraints, Non-goals, and Workstreams appear only when useful.
3. Keep progress native. One issue, epic, or equivalent project ledger owns work items, dependencies, assignments, pull requests, and status. The campaign points to it. The campaign contains no mutable task-list checkboxes or copied status.
4. Make every pickup equivalent. Each pickup rereads the campaign and authorities, reconciles live repository, ledger, pull-request, worktree, worker, and verification state, repairs ledger drift, selects dependency-ready work, executes project gates, records durable progress, and repeats.
5. Define terminal truth. Completion is the artifact's verifiable completion contract, not an agent's impression, an exhausted queue scan, or stale counts.
6. Use native goal execution. A local harness receives the campaign by absolute path. A harness without path access receives the same artifact body. Suspec does not set, schedule, resume, or store goal runtime state.
7. Block unreachable authority. Local source and ledger references are artifact-relative. A remote run starts only when every authority is reachable there through a durable URL or promoted project-owned file.
8. Check the deterministic shell. Checks contract 0.24.0 adds campaign as a checked type: C029 validates frontmatter and required sections, C030 validates authority references and rejects duplicated task-list state, and C031 rejects unresolved blocking state at ready.
9. Preserve delivery control. Existing capability preflight, worktree ownership, proportionate proof, bounded review, independent repair, human merge authority, and cleanup rules remain in force. The artifact carries their project-specific authorities; it does not replace them.
10. Add no runtime surface. The CLI remains a read-only checker. MCP inherits contract parity and gains no tool. No registry, daemon, hook, scheduler, tracker, or project-owned state enters Suspec.

Narrowed decisions

• ADR-0148: campaign artifacts use the same transient neutral root and explicit handoff.
• ADR-0151 and ADR-0157: campaign joins the closed artifact set and its writer adopts the sus- prefix.
• ADR-0162: project-native campaign state stands; the stable campaign contract now points to it.
• ADR-0167 and ADR-0176: delivery controls stand and become campaign authorities rather than startup-only instructions.

Consequences

• Goal text remains useful after any context reset because it carries invariants, not a snapshot.
• The native ledger provides the progress checklist without creating a second truth.
• Campaigns become portable Suspec artifacts while execution remains harness- and project-owned.
• Deterministic checks catch malformed, stale-by-construction campaign shells before dispatch.

Status

Accepted (2026-08-10). Narrows ADR-0148, ADR-0151, ADR-0157, ADR-0162, ADR-0167, and ADR-0176.