This repository provides the means of **closing agentic coding sessions** using the PQRST estimation practice. It is a specification-and-prompt repository. It defines the practice, supplies the artifacts needed to perform it, and stops there.
See [`INTENT.md`](INTENT.md) for why.
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## In scope
### 1. The specification
`spec/PqrstEstimationPractice.md` — the normative definition of PQRST: the five dimensions, the estimation rules, the collection point, the canonical result formats, validation constraints, derived views, the pattern catalog, and the practice rules. Versioned; currently **0.1**.
### 2. The closing prompt
`PqrstPrompt.md` — the canonical end-of-session prompt, kept in the repository root so it is trivially reachable at the moment a session ends. Includes the optional add-ons and the accept/reject checklist.
### 3. Record formats
The stored block record, the compact signature line, the optional human-readable table, and the optional YAML form — including the validation rules that make a record well-formed.
### 4. Interpretation guidance
Derived views (`P+Q`, `R+S+T`), example signatures, the pattern catalog, and correlation ideas — all as hypotheses for qualitative review, never as automatic conclusions.
### 5. Provenance
`history/` — the source drafts from which a specification version was consolidated, retained unmodified. New drafts are added; existing ones are not edited.
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## Out of scope
### Tooling and automation
No collectors, parsers, validators, CLIs, linters, hooks, dashboards, or storage backends live here. The record format is specified precisely enough that such tools can be built — **elsewhere**. A reference validator may be reconsidered for a later version; it is not a commitment.
### Session storage
This repository defines what a record looks like. It does not hold anyone's records, prescribe a database, or specify a schema for a session corpus.
### Integration with any particular agent or harness
PQRST is deliberately agent-agnostic and model-agnostic. Wiring it into a specific harness, plugin, skill, or CI pipeline belongs to that harness's own repository.
### Scoring, benchmarking, and evaluation
No thresholds, no healthy-profile templates, no grading, no leaderboards, no comparison of agents or models on PQRST values. This is excluded on principle, not for lack of time — see [`INTENT.md`](INTENT.md).
### Prospective planning
No effort budgets, no target allocations, no pre-session PQRST plans.
### Extending the model
The acronym is closed at five letters. Proposals for a sixth dimension are out of scope. Proposals to expand an existing letter into subdimensions, or to add companion fields *outside* the 5-tuple (task type, outcome, cost, module id), are in scope for a future version.
### Empirical validation
This repository does not claim, and does not attempt to establish, that PQRST estimates are accurate, reproducible across estimators, or predictive of outcomes. The practice is offered as a structured judgment. Studying whether it holds up is legitimate work — it is not this repository's work.
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## Boundaries and invariants
These hold across all versions:
1.**Exactly five dimensions**, named P, Q, R, S, T, with stable meanings.
2.**Retrospective only.** Nothing here is ever to be used as a planning target.
3.**Records are auditable.** A signature is never published without its evidence.
4.**Local files are the source of truth.** The specification governs; anything generated from it follows.
5.**`history/` is append-only.**
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## Repository layout
```
INTENT.md why this practice exists and what it must not become
SCOPE.md this file
PqrstPrompt.md the canonical end-of-session prompt
- The specification is versioned. Substantive changes increment the version and record a line in its Appendix B version history.
- Changes that alter the meaning of a dimension, the validation rules, or the stored record format are **breaking**: they make older records less comparable, and must say so explicitly.
- Editorial changes — clarification, examples, wording — do not require a version bump.
- Source drafts in `history/` are never edited, only added to.
