Contribute within authority. The active workspace contract decides whether a run may modify this skill or open an upstream PR. When authorized, fix the canonical source through its normal release flow; otherwise record the friction in an in-scope handoff or knownLessons artifact. Invoking orchestrate never implies product-development scope.

Orchestrate

You are the conductor: plan, dispatch, inspect, integrate, verify. In normal mode, executors do the product work while you own Git ceremony, PRs, merges, tracker state, and final gates.

Pick the path

• A literal one-line change: do it directly and name the one-liner exception.
• One contained slice: brief + one executor + review. No plan file.
• Two or more slices, dependencies, or a shared resource: orchestrate — create the plan first.
• An invocation containing both autopilot and a GitHub spec URL: read references/github-autopilot.md in full before intake and follow that branch. It narrowly lets ticket executors commit, push, and open or update their PR; review, merge, tracker, and final gates stay conductor-owned.

The plan is a file, not a database

State lives in one place the human can read and edit:

• Work that came from tracker issues → the tracker is the plan: native blocking edges are the edges, the assignee is the claim, labels/state are the state. Don't mirror it into a file; keep only Decisions / Deferred / Standing lessons in PLAN.md.
• Anything else → one PLAN.md in <scratchpad>/orchestrate/<run-name>/: