Two kinds of project arrive at this template and neither had a document written
for it. A new repository needs a first act. An existing one -- which is most of
them, since eight were surveyed and one had adopted anything -- needs a merge,
with documents and conventions already in place that must survive it.
What existed was README's "Adopting it": seven steps aimed at a person reading
top to bottom, silent about existing projects, and opening with the one form
that destroys work:
cp -r Projects/Template/docs <your-project>/docs
cp -r overwrites. scaffold.sh exists precisely because that is unsafe, and its
header argues the case at length: a clobbered document is work nothing notices
is gone, silent when it happens and silent afterwards. An existing project
following step 1 literally replaced its own architecture notes with
placeholders. The instruction and the tool disagreed and the instruction was the
dangerous one.
Both documents hold one prompt each, written to be handed to an agent whole, and
both open by putting it in PLAN MODE with nothing changed until the plan is
approved. Each plan must name what will be created, what kept, what deleted,
which scripts the project adopts -- and what will be left undone, by name. That
last is the one that gets skipped: an adoption quietly missing the webhook or
half the status headers looks identical to a complete one from outside.
The existing-project prompt is the harder half. Its spine is survey, reconcile,
destroy nothing: the survey IS the plan phase and is entirely read-only; the
scaffold's "kept" list is the merge worklist; existing prose is the project's own
knowledge and the template supplies shape, not content; and any markdown backlog
moves into the tracker and is deleted in the same commit, because two records of
what is open is the failure the whole convention exists to prevent.
Verified rather than asserted, since the whole document rests on it: a scratch
project with three written documents, scaffolded into, reported 16 created and 3
kept, and all three pre-existing files were byte-identical afterwards with their
prose intact.
README's section becomes a pointer to the two, since three descriptions of
adoption in one repository is the two-records failure with an extra copy, and the
sentence about the Command Center's generated prompt now says which is the
source rather than leaving a reader to pick.
Also corrected: README's `Governs: Projects/Template/**` was true when this was a
folder inside Projects/ and matched nothing once it became a repository root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
null