repository-governance-lifecycle
Repository Governance Lifecycle
Concept bridge (read before procedural steps)
Skill Steward procedures assume three portable lenses. If you only have this skill installed, load the digests in references/ (they ship with the skill). Full essays live on docs.page.
| Lens | One-line | When to apply | Digest | Full |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering Stewardship | Keep the repo ecology understandable and improvable via observe → decide → update → prove → preserve | Friction repeats or survives one session | stewardship-loop.md | docs.page · North Star |
| Evolutionary simplicity | Evolve toward lower future confusion (split / compress / promote / demote / delete / stay native) — not always fewer parts | Before adding, splitting, merging, or deleting a surface | evolutionary-simplicity.md | docs.page |
| Generational architecture | Choose the smallest useful layer (G0–G5); higher is not automatically better; mature stewardship can move down | Before promoting codegen, harness actions, or new abstractions | generational-architecture-ladder.md | docs.page |
Install-world rule: never rely on ../../docs/core/... alone — those paths only work inside a skill_steward checkout. Prefer the digests above and absolute docs.page URLs.
These lenses are not a new doctrine skill (see DESIGN_FAQ). This skill applies them; the digests teach them when the docs tree is not present.
This is the central nervous system for governing an agent-operated repository. It applies to apps, libraries, tools, plugins, harnesses, and meta repos; Skill Steward itself remains a structural stewardship repo, not a domain tutorial catalog. It unifies ethics, branding, architectural decision logs (ADRs), and living documentation (FAQs) into a single, cohesive loop: Decide → Document → Cleanup.
Whenever an agent proposes or executes a structural shift, claim change, durable policy change, or docs-lattice change, they must walk this loop. Routine repo repairs should keep the original goal and native gate first; use this governance loop only when the repair changes durable ownership, policy, evidence, ADR/FAQ truth, or plan hygiene.