Open questions

Five decisions Wolf is waiting on, and who owes each one.

Open questions

Five things are undecided. Nothing here is settled elsewhere on these pages.

1. The metadata carve-out — UNRESOLVED, blocks everything

Decides: Ryan. Nobody else can.

CLAUDE.md says no source access, and calls it non-negotiable. But Wolf cannot run stage 4 — TRACK — or “manage through to merge” without knowing whether a PR is open, whether checks passed, what a reviewer said, whether it merged. That is reading state in an engineering repo.

              reads CODE?          reads PR STATE?
  Wolf            ✗ never              ? UNDECIDED
  Wiki pages      ✗                    ✗ (pointers only)

The argued case for a carve-out is that the stated reason for the rule is drift — a spec written by something that reads code starts describing the code — and that PR state causes no such drift. That is an argument, not a ruling. It has not been made and must not happen by accident. Until Ryan rules explicitly, Wolf does not ship.

Every other page here assumes some answer to this. Read them that way.

2. Does the engineering repo accept docs/specs/?

Decides: engineering. Cannot be checked from this repo. The spec-PR spine in The PR depends on being able to merge a markdown file into the target repo. If the answer is no, that design collapses and the fallback is tracking-issue-first — a different shape, needing a rewrite.

3. Who builds?

Decides: Ryan. The flow assumes an actor with repo access that picks up the tracking issue and writes the code. A separate builder agent, or humans? No such agent exists today. Until it does, stage 3 has no owner.

4. Will anyone actually set short?

Decides: Ryan and engineering, together. short means shipped-but-misses-spec. It has no prior art; it is invented to fit this repo’s rule that docs are never reconciled. It only works if someone is willing to mark their own build as having missed. If nobody will, the state is decoration and the rule has no teeth.

5. The target repo is unknowable from here

Decides: engineering, per repo. PR template, CODEOWNERS, branch protection — Wolf cannot see any of them. The body template is written to survive being appended to an unknown template, but that is a mitigation, not a fix. Someone with access has to confirm it lands cleanly the first time.

Answer 1 first. Two through five are design work. One is permission, and without it there is no Wolf.