Triage — Why-Articulation and Queue Entry

Turn a candidate piece of work into a QUEUE.md row, but only after its why is articulated and a cold review confirms the scope has not silently collapsed to the nearest visible step. Triage is the lifecycle step before gate-plan: nothing else creates the queue row that gate-plan binds to.

The failure this guards against: scoping a work item to the nearest clearly-visible step while the larger shape is still fuzzy, committing silently to the smallest possible scope, and letting that narrow scope harden into architecture downstream. A narrow scope is not a neutral starting point — it is a commitment to the smallest shape, usually made without noticing. Triage forces the narrowing to happen out loud and gates on it.

Input

The operator brings a candidate piece of work — a near-term step they can already see clearly — and references the durable vision (Part 0). No Q-number is supplied; triage assigns it. There is no upstream artifact; the operator's articulation is the input.

Process

Step 0 — Bind the Input

Triage's input is not a parameter sitting where this skill's body can see it. The harness appends it as an ARGUMENTS block after this skill's body — that trailing block is the operator's articulation described in ## Input above: the candidate piece of work and the durable-vision pointer Step 2 climbs from. Read that block as the substrate of the whole triage, not as optional flags. If no ARGUMENTS block was appended — the skill was invoked bare — do not proceed against an empty input or invent a candidate: elicit the articulation from the operator (the near-term step and the vision it serves) before Step 1.

Step 1 — Scaffold the Why-Draft

No Q-number is minted yet. The number is a stable identifier pinned for the item's lifetime, and it is assigned only at commit (Step 5) — the first moment the item is certain to become a queue row — so work that may never reach a row never claims a number. Scaffold the why-draft now, under a slug name, with the deterministic script (run from the workspace root):