Analyze

Analyze — the pre-implementation consistency gate

You have a constitution, a spec, a plan and a task list. Four artifacts written at four different moments, by a mind that drifted a little each time. analyze reads all four against each other and surfaces where they disagree. It is the cheapest place in the whole chain to catch a problem — a contradiction found here costs a sentence; the same contradiction found mid-implement costs a rewrite.

Sixth phase of the rsc-sdd chain (constitution → specify → clarify → plan → tasks → analyze → implement); the method itself lives in ../sdd/SKILL.md. It is a gate, not a worker: it produces a report and stops. The user reads the findings and decides what to fix, and which phase to send each fix back to.

Report only. Resolve nothing. Never edit the constitution, spec, plan or tasks; never open a code file to "just fix it"; never silently reconcile a contradiction by picking a side. This one is absolute because a gate that quietly fixes things stops being a gate: the user never learns the spec was wrong, the plan built on the old assumption stays stale, and the "consistency check" has manufactured a new inconsistency. Name the conflict, show both sides with locations, propose where it should be resolved, hand the decision back.

Model tier: heavy (adversarial cross-reading). Resolve and apply it per ../sdd/references/model-routing.md; routing is off unless models.enabled: true in 02-DOCS/wiki/sdd/config.yaml.

Register. Read technical_level in 02-DOCS/wiki/harness/user-profile.md before reporting; with no profile, use analogies and say the harness has not set the register yet. The register changes how the report reads, never what gets checked; the six analyses always run in full.

The report is the same for every reader: a finding table (severity, the two artifacts, the conflict in one line), a one-line why it matters per CRITICAL/HIGH finding, and per finding the recommended resolution phase and the trade-off of leaving it. For a non-technical reader, explain the consequence at implement time with an everyday analogy so they can choose.

Inputs — locate the four artifacts

Read all four before analyzing. The rsc-sdd artifacts live under 02-DOCS/wiki/sdd/, indexed from 02-DOCS/wiki/index.md (the Knowledge map; root CLAUDE.md keeps only a short pointer to it):

If any artifact is missing, stop and say so — analyze cannot gate what isn't there. Name the missing one and the phase that produces it. If a <slug> is ambiguous (several specs), ask which feature is being gated; do not analyze all of them blindly.

The six analyses

Run every one. Each compares a specific pair (or the whole set against the constitution) and emits findings.

1. Constitution compliance — does any spec requirement, plan decision or task violate a non-negotiable (stack canon, quality bar, convention)? A constitution breach is the highest-severity finding there is; the constitution wins by definition.
2. Requirement coverage (spec → plan → tasks) — map every spec requirement forward. Each must trace to at least one plan section and at least one task. A requirement with no task is a gap (it will silently not ship). Build the coverage map below.
3. Scope drift (tasks/plan → spec) — map backward. Any plan section or task that satisfies no spec requirement is drift — work the spec never asked for. Flag it; the fix is either cut the work or amend the spec, and that is the user's call.
4. Contradiction — direct disagreements between two artifacts: the spec says Postgres, the plan says SQLite; the spec says "no auth in v1", a task adds login. Quote both sides.
5. Duplication — the same requirement stated twice in conflicting words, or two tasks doing the same job. Duplication is where contradictions breed later.
6. Ambiguity / underspecification — requirements or tasks too vague to implement or to verify ("handle errors gracefully", "make it fast" with no number, a task with no done-check). These do not block by themselves but feed back to clarify (spec) or tasks (missing done-check).
   • Carrier completeness (isolated-implementer check). Because implement/parallel dispatch tasks to context-isolated developer subagents that see only their own task, also confirm the plan carries a §0 Global Constraints block (verbatim project-wide values) and that every task whose correctness depends on a contract it doesn't own has an Interfaces block (Consumes/Produces, exact signatures). A constraint or neighbor-signature that lives only in prose is invisible to the blind worker — flag a missing carrier as AMBIGUOUS (it will surface as drift or breakage at implement time). See ../plan/references/plan-template.md §0 and ../tasks/SKILL.md (Per-task Interfaces).

Requirement coverage map (build this every run)

A copy-able table that makes gaps and drift visible at a glance:

textCopy code
REQ-ID | Spec requirement (short)        | Plan section | Task(s) | Status
------ | ------------------------------- | ------------ | ------- | ----------
R1     | Email/password sign-up          | §3 Auth      | T2,T3   | covered
R2     | Rate-limit login (5/min/IP)     | §3 Auth      | —       | GAP
R3     | —                               | §5 Webhooks  | T9      | DRIFT
R4     | "Fast" search                   | §4 Search    | T6      | AMBIGUOUS (no metric)

• GAP — spec requirement with no task → it won't be built.
• DRIFT — plan/task with no spec requirement → unrequested scope.
• AMBIGUOUS — covered but not specific enough to verify later.
• covered — traces cleanly spec → plan → task.

Severity scale

Rank every finding so the user triages fast:

• CRITICAL — constitution violation, or a contradiction that makes the artifacts un-implementable as written. Must resolve before implement.
• HIGH — a coverage GAP on a core requirement, or scope DRIFT that adds real cost. Resolve before implement.
• MEDIUM — duplication, or AMBIGUOUS items with no number/done-check. Resolve or consciously accept.
• LOW — wording mismatches, cosmetic inconsistencies. Note and move on.

Output — the report (and where it goes)

Produce a single consistency report:

1. Verdict line — GATE: PASS (zero CRITICAL/HIGH) or GATE: BLOCKED (one or more CRITICAL/HIGH), with the counts.
2. Coverage map — the table above.
3. Findings table — # | Severity | Type | Artifact A (loc) | Artifact B (loc) | Conflict | Resolve in (phase).
4. Recommended routing — group fixes by the phase that owns them (clarify for spec ambiguity, plan for missing architecture, tasks for a missing done-check, constitution if a principle itself is wrong). If findings pour in across all six checks, the artifacts diverged badly — recommend re-running clarify/plan before a line-by-line analyze is even useful.

Write the report to 02-DOCS/wiki/sdd/analysis/<slug>.md (create the dir if absent) and index it in 02-DOCS/wiki/index.md under the sdd/ topic, so the next phase and the harness can find it. It is an OKF v0.1 wiki article: open it with YAML frontmatter carrying a non-empty type: (use type: analysis), a timestamp in ISO 8601, and standard markdown links — never wikilinks. The report is the artifact analyze owns — it is the only thing analyze writes. Per-run point-in-time; overwrite on re-run, the wiki keeps history.

Render it in the orient voice, in the user's register. Do not log a decision to decisions.md — analyze decides nothing; the phase that resolves the finding logs its own decision.

Anti-patterns

Result envelope

End with the parseable block every SDD phase shares, so the dispatcher can chain without interpreting prose (contract: ../sdd/SKILL.md):

jsonCopy code
{
  "status": "complete|blocked|failed",
  "executive_summary": "Cross-read of spec/plan/tasks against the constitution; findings ranked.",
  "artifact": "02-DOCS/wiki/sdd/analysis/<slug>.md",
  "next_recommended": "implement",
  "risk": "low|medium|high",
  "skill_resolution": {
    "used": ["analyze"],
    "missing": [],
    "fallback": [],
    "compact_rules": ["Read adversarially across artifacts, not inside one.", "A finding without a location is an opinion."]
  },
  "evidence": ["report path exists", "blockers listed with artifact + location", "constitution conflicts named"]
}

Next in the chain

On GATE: PASS (or once the user consciously accepts the remaining MEDIUM/LOW findings), proceed to implement — execute the tasks with TDD discipline, delegating concrete test tooling to the relevant stack skill (fastapi, nextjs, go, flutter, postgresdb). On GATE: BLOCKED, route each CRITICAL/HIGH finding to its owning phase (clarify, plan, tasks, or constitution), let the user resolve, then re-run analyze. The gate only opens once.