stations-from-seed

Purpose

Turn the picked seed into the route. One seed sits at the project's journey/nemawashi/ root carrying a checklist somebody proposed; what leaves is the checklist a PM will actually walk, station by station.

This file is the orchestrator. It owns the posture gate, resolving the seed, the two gates that stop a run, the in-place rewrite, and the commit. It makes no judgment about the route itself.

The method is prompts/rich.md — the one body this file points at. Read it in full at Step 2 and apply it. Everything about what the stations are and whether the seed can be split lives there — its § What a station is, and what it is not, § The checklist you were handed is a proposal, § How one seed becomes 1 to N stations, § Every station carries a reached-when that can be checked against the world, § The six defects, hunted by name, § A divergence from the proposal is logged in the seed, § What you do not write and § When you stop. None of it is repeated here, and where a step below needs a judgment it names the section that makes it.

A seed's shape is <CORE>/templates/journey-templates/nemawashi_template.md, which fixes the checklist's form and how terse a station line has to be. The prompt points at it too. Neither this file nor the prompt restates it.

Posture

PM only. Run in a pm: session or as the pm subagent. Invoked from anywhere else, halt at once, say the posture is wrong, and name the way in. The seat's contract is <CORE>/roles/loaders/pm_global.md, and the gate is what makes this skill that seat's — its § Skills toolbox (reminder) names it, and its § Responsibilities places this move second, between the pick and the station-open.

The gate is about the seat, not about the session's liveness. This move is interactive with the owner by design, and a live session invoking it is the ordinary way in.

Input

The project — system/projects/<project>/. If none is supplied, ask which one; the PM cannot work undirected. Everything else the run needs is resolved from there, and the prompt's § Inputs you work from fixes what is read and which input wins where two disagree.

The run works in the instance it was started in. It opens no worktree and cuts no branch, so the re-cut checklist is in the seed the moment the run ends.

Where the product's code runs. If seeing what the product does today means running any of its code — a check, its command, an import — run it in a disposable copy: a fresh clone at the commit you are reading (git clone --quiet <repo> <scratch> && git -C <scratch> checkout --quiet <sha>), never the product's main checkout. Running it there leaves files behind — a Python __pycache__/, a build directory — and the chain halts this run for every entry it finds there that was not there at launch (<CORE>/roles/CROSS_ROLE.md § Every seat — a run leaves the product's main checkout as it found it). Run the checks from a subshell, never cd your own shell into the copy, and remove the copy when you have read the result, in a command of its own run from outside it. Reading the code needs no copy.

Workflow

Step 1 — Gate, then resolve the seed

Check the posture (§ Posture) and halt there rather than proceeding.

Resolve <nema> = system/projects/<project>/journey/nemawashi. The picked seed is the single item at that root — a file, or a folder holding seed.md — excluding README.md and the unpicked/, trail/ and drop/ subfolders. For a folder-seed, seed.md is the one file this skill ever reads or rewrites; the folder's own report/recommendation files are untouched.

Gate A — is a seed picked at all? If the root holds no seed item, there is nothing to split. Stop, say so, and name the pick as the move that comes first — nemawashi-pick.

Gate B — is the seed being walked? Check system/projects/<project>/journey/tobiishi/ for a change unit at its root, and read the seed for an ad-hoc arc belonging to it that has not finished. If either is open, stop and say what is open. A seed is not modified mid-walk — the route it is being walked on would change underneath the session walking it. The resolution is an order rather than a merge: the open work seals or is set down first, then this skill runs.

An empty change-unit slot passes this gate silently.

Step 2 — Read the method, then split

Read prompts/rich.md in full, then <CORE>/templates/journey-templates/nemawashi_template.md. Apply them. Every judgment this run makes — what counts as a station, how many the seed becomes, where the boundaries fall, what each reached-when claims, the order, and whether the seed can be split at all — is made there, including the four cases that stop the run.

Step 3 — Rewrite the checklist in place

Replace the seed's route section with the route, one line per station in the shape the template fixes. Where the seed has no such section, add it in the template's position. For a folder-seed, the rewrite lands in seed.md — the one file inside the folder this skill ever edits.

The route is the section whose heading begins ## Stations — match that prefix, never the full string. The template writes the long form at its :64 and calls it ## Stations at :32, and seeds on disk carry several spellings between those two, so a full-string match reads a seed that has a route as one that has none. tobiishi-open's Step 4 keys on the same prefix, and it routes callers here.

Two rules bound the edit, and both are about what you do not touch:

• An already-ticked item is never re-ordered, re-worded or un-ticked. A [x] records a station that was really reached and whose file is in shukuba/trail/; the record on disk would disagree with the seed the moment you moved it. Re-cut only what is still [ ].
• No other section changes, except the divergence lines the prompt's § A divergence from the proposal is logged in the seed requires. Those go in the seed's own prose, one line per departure — never a new section, never a table, never appended to a checklist line.

Write no station file and no change_request.md. Both are later moves, and the prompt's § What you do not write says why.

Step 4 — Commit

Per <CORE>/doctrine/governance/commit_via_builder.md, staging the seed and nothing else, with --skill stations-from-seed and --prompt stations-from-seed/rich as this run's producing pair, and --role PM. The directional is the project's — Agari: <project> — progress: <what the route now says> — since settling a route advances the seed toward its terminus.

Step 5 — Close, or stop

On a clean close, report: how many stations the seed now carries, how many it arrived with, every divergence and its reason, and the next move — open the first unticked station — shukuba-open — and then tobiishi-open for the change units that reach it.

On a stop, report the case from the prompt's § When you stop, commit nothing, and halt. A partial checklist is worse than none: it reads as a settled route.

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Outputs

File / effect	Produced when
The picked seed's ## Stations — dynamic checklist rewritten, one commit	Success (Step 3)
Divergence lines in the seed's prose, same commit	The re-cut departed from the proposal
No change; the pick named as the move that comes first	The seedbed root holds no seed (Gate A)
No change; what is open, named	A change unit or ad-hoc arc is unfinished (Gate B)
No change; the stop case named	The prompt's § When you stop fired (Step 2)

The seed — seed.md alone, for a folder-seed — is the only file this skill ever writes, and it writes at most one commit per run.

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Critical Rules

• The seed is the only file that changes — seed.md alone, for a folder-seed. No station file, no change_request.md, no seed of your own in unpicked/ — stocking the pool is the Principal PM's.
• A ticked item is history. Never re-order, re-word or un-tick an [x]; its station's record is in shukuba/trail/ and would contradict you.
• Never split a seed being walked. Gate B stops the run. The fix is an order — the open work seals or is set down first — never a bundled edit and never a silent one.
• Split, don't re-cut the seed. What the work is was settled by the cut and the Agari behind it. Re-cutting the route is this skill's; changing the subject is another seat's.
• Every divergence is logged. A re-cut that departs from the proposal and says nothing leaves the next reader unable to tell it from a careless one. The prompt makes this mandatory.
• The method is the prompt's. Everything about what a station is and whether the split can be made lives in prompts/rich.md. A second copy here is a copy free to drift.