pqrst-practice/SCOPE.md

Scope

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 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.

For sessions that voluntarily leave a hall entry, hall-of-helix is the default human-facing store and owns entry storage and consumer validation. It is not the only permitted store, and no separate machine-facing collector is selected or commissioned. Seats are a biased sample, not a session census; no seat is required just to retain an estimate. See ADR-002 — Record storage boundary.

hall-of-helix/entries is the main data source for this practice's record-format and prompt reviews. Its read-only scripts/export-pqrst.py exports a pinned Git snapshot for analysis elsewhere; the hall retains the originals. Bounded review excerpts and findings may accompany a workplan here without becoming a session store or an empirical accuracy study.

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.

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
README.md                        orientation and entry points
AGENTS.md                        agent instructions, developer workflow, verification checklist
spec/
  PqrstEstimationPractice.md     the specification (v0.1)
history/
  20260905-*_chatgpt.md          source draft, retained unmodified
  20260905-*_grok.md             source draft, retained unmodified
workplans/                       work records for this repo (State Hub convention)

State Hub integration files — .custodian-brief.md, .repo-classification.yaml, and WORK-RECORDS.md — are generated and kept in sync by statehub / repo-manager. They are not edited by hand.

The repo is registered in the Custodian State Hub under domain agents, topic practice ("prestructured actions that are less complex than a process but more ambitious and structured than a task"), with workplan prefix PQRST-WP.

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Change process

• 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.