agentic-praxis-grimoire

ADR 0022: ChatGPT Manager Skill Topology and Personal Hygiene Transition

Status

Accepted

Date

2026-07-22

Context

APG’s nineteen current canonical skills are direct children of skills/, and the general router enumerates every routable non-router capability. One provisional leaf, composing-approved-roadmap-assignments, has a primary actor and output specific to the ChatGPT top-level manager. Future manager-only capabilities would make the general router and flat canonical ownership less coherent if each were added directly.

Three personal hygiene skills overlap in part with APG process behavior, repository-owned conventions, and machine/private policy. Removing them before replacement, source-qualified shadow, non-trigger evidence, and restoration proof would risk losing legitimate private-only behavior or confusing duplicate discovery with precedence.

Decision

Adopt skills/chatgpt/<name>/ as the future canonical owner for capabilities whose primary actor is the ChatGPT top-level manager. Keep Codex discovery flat through .agents/skills/<name> relative links to the nested canonical leaf.

Create a future chatgpt-manager-workflow subrouter that selects only among ChatGPT-manager capabilities. The general APG router references that subrouter as one capability and does not enumerate its leaves. There is no mandatory router chain; explicit applicable leaf selection remains valid, and ordinary Codex managers do not route through ChatGPT skills.

Classify composing-approved-roadmap-assignments as the initial ChatGPT-manager leaf. Keep worker-assignment composition, planning, design, implementation, debugging, review, synthesis, and technical profiles general unless separate actor-and-trigger evidence supports reclassification.

Later checkers and lifecycle tools recursively discover only allowed canonical owners, retain global frontmatter-name uniqueness, validate catalog links and exact flat projection targets, and resolve source-declared canonical paths without assuming skills/<name>. Public projection must preserve nested canonical bytes and flat links. Public v0.3.0 retains its immutable direct-child shape.

Adopt a bounded transition ledger for docs-only-change-hygiene, git-history-hygiene, and repomap-phase-hygiene. The current recommendations are decommission candidate, scope-reduction candidate, and decommission candidate respectively. Each transition requires source-qualified positive and non-trigger shadow evidence, coherent private-only disposition, exact rollback, fresh review, and explicit human removal authority.

Alternatives considered

• Keep every future canonical leaf flat and enumerate it in the general router. Rejected because actor-specific growth would dilute general selection.
• Move every composition, planning, and review skill under ChatGPT. Rejected because their triggers apply to ordinary Codex managers and repository work.
• Require general router to subrouter to leaf for every selection. Rejected because it adds a mandatory chain and weakens explicit selection.
• Hide nested leaves from flat Codex projection. Rejected because the leaves must remain directly discoverable and source-qualified.
• Remove overlapping personal skills immediately. Rejected because overlap is not replacement evidence or removal authority.
• Copy private wording into public APG. Rejected because private material is evidence, not a public dependency or reuse source.
• Preserve private-only and machine-owned units while decommissioning or narrowing only proven duplicates. Accepted.

Consequences

The future checker, catalog, project/user lifecycle, router maps, public projection, tests, and documentation must support nested canonical ownership without counting namespace directories as skills. The path migration remains a separate behavior-bearing phase and keeps the old tree retrievable for rollback.

The personal transition becomes evidence-driven and reversible. General docs-only and commit defaults move toward project ownership; personal flow and authorized history-rewrite support may remain private; RepoMap-specific phase mechanics remain RepoMap-owned; machine escalation and memory policy do not become public APG procedure.

APG25 changes no canonical path, projection, router map, catalog row, lifecycle schema, public release, active integration, or personal skill.

Deferred decisions

Defer subrouter implementation, canonical relocation, checker and lifecycle changes, public-release support, exact personal scope reduction or removal, application shadow, active integration changes, maturity, and v0.4 publication to separately authorized roadmap slices.

Implementation disposition

APG30 implements the topology portion without changing this decision. The checker accepts exactly direct canonical leaves and skills/chatgpt/<name>/SKILL.md, preserves global identity and flat projections, and rejects unsupported namespace depth. The new provisional chatgpt-manager-workflow owns only the local manager-capability map. composing-approved-roadmap-assignments moves with unchanged procedure bytes and provisional maturity. Project, user, and current-development release owners resolve source-declared paths, while historical v0.1.0 through v0.3.0 policy remains direct-child.

APG30 does not implement the personal transition portion, mutate public or active v0.3.0, or establish post-restart application discovery. Those boundaries remain gated to APG31 and the required full application restart.

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