Every initiative gets ONE file that travels its whole life:

 idea ──> survived ──> planned ──> executing ──> reviewed ──> banked
              ^            ^
          the gauntlet  THIS SKILL

Plan owns the arrow. Work that reaches sprint without passing through here does not run. That refusal is the whole point of the collection, and this skill is where it lives.

Before any step, read . This resolves from the installed skill directory to the plugin's shared contract; the founder's working folder is never used to locate it. Its state, receipts, filing, and dedupe rules govern this workflow.

Run the shared contract's Universal preflight. A Fresh, Partial, or Wrong-folder result routes to (re-sync for Partial) and stops without creating an initiative or vision stub. On Ready, read the charter (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md), then check the charter-mapped vision path immediately. If the canonical vision is missing, say the founder is planning against nothing, route to vision, and stop without creating or sizing an initiative, changing a queue entry, or writing a log row. Only after vision exists, consult the vault: what does already know about this idea, this customer, past attempts? Cite what you find by file. Read pending entries addressed to ; an offer queue item points to the canonical rather than carrying copied terms. Then locate the initiative: an existing file in , or a new one.

Done when: you hold the charter's laws, the vault's relevant history, and the initiative file.

One judgment, made out loud: SMALL (hours, reversible, no real money) or BIG (weeks, money, customer-facing, hard to undo). Uncertain resolves to BIG. The size sets everything downstream: question count, research depth, whether the gauntlet is required.

Done when: the size is stated in one line with its reason, in the initiative file.

Check the stages in order, and stop at the first one missing:

Done when: every required stage before is genuinely done, or the founder has been routed to the one that is missing.

One question per turn, recommended answer attached, founder's words captured. Facts you can get yourself (from the vault, from research), get yourself. Probe only where a real gap shows: what is the smallest version that still delivers, and what does the current workaround cost? A concrete founder earns zero probes.

Then the checkpoint, before the Scope and Roadmap sections or any state change are written (the stub and its sizing line may already exist). Present on one screen:

Every line must be judgeable without homework. Any correction: integrate, re-present the whole checkpoint, wait for the yes again. A revision is never a confirmation.

Run the shared durable claim admission gate before this checkpoint and again before filing. Each number, customer fact, and causal statement carries a recomputation, an exact checked quote from an open source file, or . Earlier gauntlet or offer prose is not trusted as a receipt merely because it is already durable.

Apply the shared parameter gate to durations, counts, caps, sequence assumptions, and completion thresholds. Ask one founder question when a missing value blocks the scope; otherwise keep it as a working hypothesis under Needs your call or Parked recommendations. Imported unverified offer or gauntlet values never become roadmap commitments.

Ask before you assert: never present a quantity, duration, sample size, date, or causal motive in prose before asking the founder for it or citing a receipt for it.

A page is a T1 consent surface (shared contract, Immutable consent receipts): plan may create one only with the founder's for the exact call. Without that yes, record the tradeoff in Key decisions and write no decision page.

Done when: the founder has said yes to the exact scope about to be written.

STOP. Read now: it holds the file's exact section shape and the roadmap rules. An improvised structure breaks sprint's ability to execute it.

Snapshot every pre-existing prior-stage section before editing. Patch Scope, Roadmap, Needs your call, and Parked recommendations in place; preserve the complete Gauntlet verdict, advisor board, objections, exact receipt lines, and append-only Log. Scope links to . points to the event and never stores the board. Compare the preserved sections byte for byte before the state flip; any loss aborts the transition.

Write decisions with their rationale, never task spam. Every consequential recommendation in Key decisions carries both receipt legs from the shared contract: a vault fact and a checked external source. A missing leg moves the item to in the contract's canonical shape; it never moves to "Needs your call" because evidence gathering is not a founder judgment. The roadmap section follows fog-of-war discipline: chart in detail only what is visible now as session-sized steps, keep the rest in "Not yet decided" where it graduates as the frontier advances, and keep "Out of scope" as the list that never graduates.

Every initiative advancing beyond carries both checked references in frontmatter: to business evidence outside initiative/content output, and to dated checked research. This is a state invariant, independent of wording or size. Missing fields keep the initiative PARKED and below .

Done when: the initiative file matches the template with zero empty sections (an honest "Not yet decided" or "Parked recommendations: None." entry counts as content).

Re-read the current state immediately before writing. Set only for the legal SMALL waiver or transition. Replanning stays ; a same-destination executing amendment stays . Any other state follows Step 2 instead of moving backward. Bump today's date and append the log row: . Ensure and point to the initiative under the bucket matching its current state, update the index roadmap summary and , and reconcile the consumed queue entry as one linked-state transaction. Then close with exactly two lines: what got decided (one line), and the ONE next command: "say 'let's work' and sprint takes the first step."

When this plan consumes a queue entry, mark that same ID done with the initiative path only after the initiative legally reaches . A route to vision, gauntlet, or receipts leaves the entry pending.

Done when: the legal state is preserved or advanced, the log row exists, and the founder knows the next move.