---
title: Open questions
description: "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.

```text
              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](/be-agent-wolf/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`](/be-agent-wolf/lifecycle) 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.