Open questions

What the design does not settle, and where each question is held. A question leaves this page when the operator rules; the ruling lands in the design, and the chapter that rests on it is rewritten whole.

sounding’s statement

sounding’s statement of invariants, design/sounding/requirements.md, is being written from the capture design (design/capture/plan.md, step Q1), while the operator rules decision 11 below. It states the question and its sources, the place, the three exits, the stop check, the timebox, rounds, the operator’s decision, and what sounding never does. A fresh model then reconstructs sounding from the statement alone, and the operator rules the questions it asks.

The statement becomes this book’s appendix, and the chapters cite its clauses by number. Until it lands, the chapters rest on the capture design, design/capture/design.md, and cite Flywheel’s statement, whose elaboration gains a clause saying it runs on sounding (58, 62).

The decision awaiting a ruling

The capture design’s decision 11 awaits the operator’s ruling (design/capture/plan.md, step D2). Each chapter states it as the design has it.

sounding is a standalone tool that works one question in one session, in a worktree of its own, and ends on a conclusion the operator accepts, sends back or drops. millpond sends it an item that asks a question, an accepted conclusion is the item’s record, and only a finding beyond the question comes back as a capture (Deciding a conclusion).

Held by the design

The capture design’s own Open section holds these questions about sounding, beside the details it leaves to sounding’s statement:

A standing sounding, which stays open and starts a round when a signal on its subject lands, as Flywheel’s standing elaborations do (25, 26).
Where else an accepted conclusion lives. A repository may keep it in its own record, as crew’s kits keep openspec/explorations/. With no inbox behind it, as when sounding runs on its own, this is where an accepted conclusion lives at all.
crew’s two open records disagree. crew ADR 0019 rests an elaboration on an intent and the new-territory move, and crew’s curation-and-agenda change leaves intents out and replaces that move with join. A sounding sent from an item settles both, once crew’s record says so (plan steps C1 and C6).

A question’s branch

The design names a sounding’s branch twice over. flume names a place’s branch <kind>/<name>, which for the kind question gives question/<name>. The design also names a sounding’s branch sounding/<name>, and the Claude Code plugin’s guard refuses a sluice submission from sounding/*. The chapters use sounding/<name>, as the design’s section on sounding does; flume’s book holds the same question (flume’s open questions).

Left to the statement

The capture design’s Open section leaves sounding’s own details to its statement (plan step Q1). In full:

the timebox’s length, and who sets it;
how a sounding is named, the <name> in its branch and its keys;
where question.md, conclusion.md and rounds/ sit in the worktree, and whether the session commits them on its branch;
what the note the stop check accepts holds and where it is kept, what parks a sounding, and how a parked one resumes;
what accept does to the worktree and the branch, and whether drop deletes the branch with the worktree;
whether the work a conclusion proposes reads the sounding’s branch when it is built;
the source, event_at and raw material an offer’s capture carries;
which card sounding ask and a conclusion use when sounding runs on its own;
whether a --with-me sounding has a timebox and a stop check, and how it ends;
how the operator’s notes in plannotator reach go on.