tegwick
4986a87773
Merge the two independent 2026-09-05 drafts under history/ into a single normative specification at spec/PqrstEstimationPractice.md (v0.1). Where the sources diverged on the canonical result format, the block/ signature record is adopted as the source of truth and the per-dimension table is retained as an optional presentation form; recorded in the spec's version history. Two rules the sources implied but did not state are added: confidence stays outside the 5-tuple (R9), and no sixth dimension may be introduced (R10). Add PqrstPrompt.md in the root as the canonical end-of-session prompt, pairing the fuller rule list with the strict fixed output block. Add INTENT.md and SCOPE.md framing the repo as the means of closing agentic coding sessions: why the practice exists, its anti-goals, and the boundary that this is a specification-and-prompt repo only — no tooling, storage, harness integration, scoring, or empirical validation. Source drafts under history/ are retained unmodified and are append-only. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SQ6oF1DtVDKcD1FCpvRVLx Assistant: claude-code Assistant-Model: opus Assistant-Process: 272883@bnt-lap001 Assistant-Session: f40c8f53-fb65-4980-9d29-bcdb3dd946f7
49 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
# Intent
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## Why this repository exists
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Agentic coding sessions end without a closing move. Work stops when the task is done, the context window fills, or attention moves elsewhere. What the session *was* — where the engineering attention actually went — evaporates with the transcript.
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This repository provides the means of **closing an agentic coding session**: a short, standard, retrospective act performed at the end of a bounded unit of work, producing one durable, comparable record.
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The instrument is PQRST — a forced 100% allocation of the session's effective engineering effort across five stable dimensions: **P**roblem, **Q**uality, **R**esearch, **S**ecurity, **T**ask organization.
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## The problem being addressed
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An individual session is legible while you are in it and opaque a week later. Across many sessions the questions that matter are process questions, and none of them can be answered from transcripts:
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- Is research effort on this repository falling as its documentation improves, or not?
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- Do sessions that spend more effort coordinating than building fail more often, or merely cost more?
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- Are we shipping implementation with no verification behind it, and paying for that in later bugfix sessions?
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- Does security work appear where the task class says it should?
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Existing telemetry — tokens, wall-clock time, tool-call counts, diff size — measures consumption, not character. A session can burn a large budget on reconstructing an undocumented request path and produce three lines of code; another can spend the same budget implementing a well-specified feature. Consumption metrics cannot tell those apart. **PQRST is a judgment, deliberately, because the thing worth recording is a judgment.**
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## What we intend PQRST to be
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A **lens**, applied consistently, whose value accumulates in aggregate.
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1. **Retrospective, never prospective.** The estimate is produced after the work. A session must never be steered toward a target signature. The moment PQRST becomes something to hit, it stops describing anything.
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2. **Coarse and honest.** Five-point increments and a stated confidence beat invented precision. A defensible `P30 Q20 R30 S0 T20` at low confidence is worth more than a fabricated `P31 Q19 R28 S2 T20`.
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3. **Auditable.** A signature without its dominant-factors sentence is not a record. Numbers are the index; the evidence is the content.
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4. **Stable.** The five dimensions do not change, so that records made a year apart remain comparable. Detail is added by expanding a letter into subdimensions, never by growing the acronym.
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5. **Diagnostic, not evaluative.** There is no good profile. An exploration session is R-heavy; a hardening session is Q-heavy; a credential integration is S-heavy. The question is always whether the mix fits the class of task.
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## What we intend it not to become
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- **Not a productivity score.** PQRST does not rank developers, agents, models, or teams. Raw percentages carry no verdict, and using them as one destroys the honesty the practice depends on.
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- **Not telemetry.** It does not reconstruct time, tokens, compute, or tool calls. Cost measures may be stored *alongside* a record; they may never substitute for one.
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- **Not a planning tool.** No session is designed against a PQRST budget.
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- **Not a completeness ritual.** A zero is information. A dimension inflated so the record "looks thorough" poisons every trend it enters.
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## The measure of success
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This repository succeeds when a session can be closed in under a minute; when the resulting record is still meaningful six months later; and when accumulated records change something real — a document that gets written because research effort refused to fall, a workflow that gets fixed because coordination effort kept dominating routine changes.
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It fails the moment anyone tries to score well on it.
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## Related documents
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- [`SCOPE.md`](SCOPE.md) — what is and is not in this repository
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- [`spec/PqrstEstimationPractice.md`](spec/PqrstEstimationPractice.md) — the specification, v0.1
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- [`PqrstPrompt.md`](PqrstPrompt.md) — the canonical end-of-session prompt
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