seat-lifecycle — SLP: one SSOT, four pointers

Census id: F27 · Family: F — rules corpus + generated-rule tooling + shipped audit scripts · Provenance: framework pin b069c59328aa8e08671d3a19fd25efa618dfc1c5 (staging FETCH_HEAD, read 2026-09-11; re-anchored from census pin a1337cb301). Every file:line below is at that pin. Raw reference drafted by stage E4 — factual, unpolished by design.

What it bans

Divergent seat-lifecycle prose across the seat skills, and skipped lifecycle phases. .claude/rules/seat-lifecycle.md:10 «# Seat lifecycle protocol (SLP) — one SSOT, four pointers»; the ownership boundary: :18 «> Authoritative for: the lifecycle SEQUENCE only — §1 the four phases, which settled mechanism each phase reuses, and which steps are Part-II-gated» with :22 «> Every mechanism this file sequences is OWNED elsewhere». Origin: :32-34 «The four seat skills carried divergent (or absent) birth/cleanup/retirement prose — #parallel-evolution-creep.» Class header: :12 «> Class: B — the compensating mechanism ships in the same PR: the all-four-carry-the-pointer grep check ([packages/core/skills/seat-lifecycle-pointer.test.ts]) asserts every SKILL.md named in paths: above links here.» Scope: «Exactly three roles — arch, pipeline, dispatcher; night is a MODE existing seats enter, never a fourth role» (:42-43).

Never (fires)

The anti-patterns: .claude/rules/seat-lifecycle.md:74 «- #fifth-description-of-the-loop — this file (or a skill's pointer block) growing operational detail an owner already carries.»; :77 «- #lifecycle-phase-skipped — a live seat skipping a phase (e.g. retiring with no residue artifact, or a night birth outside an isolated worktree).»; :80 «- #normative-now-from-parked-machinery — treating a PART-II-GATED step as live before its probe lands.»

Always (clean)

The four phases reusing settled mechanisms — birth quoted: .claude/rules/seat-lifecycle.md:49 «1. Birth. NOW: the spawn prompt assigns the role; the first turn verifies an isolated worktree — repo-root sessions are ineligible as seats»; retirement: :65 «4. Retirement. NOW: artifact handoff — D6 residue discipline; nothing load-bearing lives only in working memory (v2 §4 rung 1).» Pointer blocks stay small: :75-76 «pointer blocks in the four skills stay 3–5 lines, never a restatement.»

Enforcement channels

• Rule-index row: .claude/rules/00-rule-index.md:35 «| seat-lifecycle.md | B | seat birth, self-cleaning handoff, or retirement in a seat session. | paths:(4) |»
• paths: frontmatter, 4 skills: .claude/rules/seat-lifecycle.md:3-8 (arch, pipeline, dispatcher, night-mode SKILL.md) — «read-time load on matching work; no edit-time inject» (:16, principle 31 branch (a)).
• Compensating grep check (CI): packages/core/skills/seat-lifecycle-pointer.test.ts — asserts all four skills carry the pointer (:12-13, :112).
• PART-II-GATED steps are explicitly inert until probes land: «Steps marked PART-II-GATED activate only when the session-bus Part-II probes (P1/F4/P4) land; until then they are inert, not improvised.» (:46-47)
• Not backend-rendered — no FF diagnostic applies (FF7001/FF7002, packages/core/diagnostics/registry.ts:321/:329); honest status: read-time paths + one deterministic vitest grep.