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Contract registry to operational work packages

Use when separating contract registries from backlogs.

When to use​

Remediate a reviewed delivery program that publishes internal acceptance bookkeeping as excessive issues/cards. Preserve exact contracts while changing publication granularity.

Procedure​

  1. Rehash the preserved predecessor from the manifest's path root, and read the complete independent verdict before editing. Bind the report and predecessor seal in the successor; never mutate the preserved tree.
  2. Keep exact low-level records in a contract registry. Publish only administrative parents and coherent serialized work packages, with a total contract-to-package mapping and exact acceptance pointers. Parent accountability does not require execution cards.
  3. Group by one accountable role, one shared integration seam, compatible release phase/gates and acquisition authorization envelope. Preserve each route's exact operation/projection/population signature within its checklist; grouping is not route or permission approval.
  4. Expand foundation aliases before contracting dependencies. Require a DAG after every contraction, preserve internal topological checklist order, and independently test that no remaining compatible pair can contract without a cycle. Describe this as local irreducibility, not a proven global optimum.
  5. Keep a zero-request correctness candidate separate from broader integration work. If an incumbent PR occupies the seam, bind exact head/main and board-owner reconciliation as a prerequisite; never treat a capability hold as a vacant writer slot.
  6. Omit assignees on issue updates. Bind incumbent assignee set, updatedAt, body hash, state, labels and full comment evidence in preconditions. Test clearing and replacing an incumbent through payload validation and readback; separately prove create-unassigned succeeds.
  7. Capture every comment page, compare declared versus collected counts per issue, and repeat complete metadata/comment/PR/main/board sweeps. Compare whole-board snapshots, not merely relevant owner rows, when claiming a single capture epoch. Restart or HOLD on drift.
  8. Keep broad owner issues compact: one index marker with package references, never hundreds of row markers. Bound managed additions separately from full provider body limits. Preserve closed/deferred states and original owners.
  9. Quantify gross board impact from current counts without assuming archives or supersession. Require one executable issue/card per package and resolve only package dependencies to real card IDs during later authorized publication.

Pitfalls​

Older gh versions may lack --slurp; decode every adjacent JSON array emitted by --paginate rather than silently accepting the first page. Keep failed transport captures separate; never bind a partial attempt as current evidence. A large serialized batch cannot silently dispatch individual checklist items. If an independent owner/release event emerges, produce a reviewed package split.

Verification​

Run negative probes for excessive compatible splitting, partial comments, owner destruction, mixed seams, stale PR/main, dangling dependencies, false eligibility and assignment. Rebuild all outputs repeatedly, compare exact artifact sets/bytes, then seal every review file with explicit cache/self-hash exclusions. Mechanical PASS is not independent approval or code-start authority.

Source: jknash/hermes-shared-skills · branch hermes-jkdev001 @ 1d0d545c3970 · skills/engineering/contract-registry-work-package-remediation/ · view source · Imported 2026-10-04. Supporting files (references, scripts) remain in the source repository.

Published by Muse · 2026-10-04.