do

No path → halt with usage. Read the Manifest in full, then make every Acceptance Criterion and Global Invariant hold as written; how is yours. Those bind; Initial Approach and Process Guidance advise. When done, report what changed, your basis per gate, and material autonomous decisions with their rationale.

Autonomous execution

Assume the user is AFK for the entire run. Make authorized decisions without asking questions or waiting for approval; carry this posture into every skill you invoke. A user message supplies steering, not a promise to stay for a conversation. Discover missing facts where possible, otherwise choose a defensible assumption within your authority and report material decisions and their rationale on every terminal path and in the execution log when kept.

Choose solutions that make the requested outcome durable and subsequent work easier to do correctly. Address recurring friction and opportunities for error at their source when the benefit justifies the added complexity. The initial plan is yours to change. Appetite — the size of change the problem is worth — may be revised through the authoring skill before broader work starts when the benefit to this outcome justifies the added complexity and maintenance. Explicit Out of bounds exclusions, binding requirements, and permissions remain fixed unless the user changes them; absence from an exclusion list does not authorize unrelated improvements. Never revise Appetite to excuse excess already produced or use it to lower a gate's bar.

A blocked obligation has no viable authorized path after investigating credible alternatives: proceeding requires unavailable knowledge or access, new authority, or a change to a binding requirement. A failed approach or difficult decision calls for investigation and redesign, not automatically for escalation. Stop repeating attempts that yield no new evidence or progress; identify the missing intervention when viable recovery paths are exhausted.

Surface an established blocker promptly with its evidence and the intervention needed, then continue useful independent work that does not depend on guessing the blocked decision. A blocker notice is not a terminal escalation. Every route to /escalate in this skill applies only when no useful independent work remains; invoke it then with the unresolved blockers. An external process still progressing is a wait, governed by the run's waiting policy, never successful completion.

Amendments

Invoke define with the Manifest path and the decision to amend the plan, settled assumptions, or Appetite within your delegated authority, or to encode user steering. Pass the rationale and keep the amendment unattended. An Appetite revision names the benefit to the requested outcome and the added complexity and maintenance; apply it before broader work starts. Never amend directly or rewrite a binding requirement on your own judgment. A false binding premise is a blocker; a failed approach is yours to replace.

Wait for active gate evaluations to finish before amending. If an amendment races an evaluation, discard that evaluation's verdicts and evaluate the amended file. Re-read the amended Manifest. Re-verify every gate whose text, subject, or interpretation changed, including the ceiling when Appetite changes; keep other evidence only while it remains valid. Report material amendments on every terminal path and record them in the execution log when kept.

Continuation

Before implementation, including when called by /auto, resolve the absolute Manifest path and arm the completion backstop: continue under an active goal identifying this same file, or emit the blocks below verbatim, substituting <manifest-path> with the absolute Manifest path. Where a broader parent workflow backstop is already visible and already requires evidence for every gate — a PR-tend contract, say — operate under it: do not set or print a second narrower goal. Do not summarize, shorten, reword, or re-punctuate them. Set them through the harness's goal-setting, continuation, or durable-completion-condition capability, else print them copy-pasteable. Emit the goal block, as one completion contract: one unlabeled block introduced by a sentence of your own, since the fences and their labels are this file's markers rather than part of what you emit.

Work under the Manifest at <manifest-path> until every Acceptance Criterion and Global Invariant in it holds, each with evidence from the artifacts that gate names, and completion has been reported. Read this file before resuming execution.

The Manifest is the contract, not the run's to rewrite: it changes only through the skill that wrote it, never by direct edit, and a changed gate returns unverified.

Record compact checkpoint notes as work proceeds: what changed, what was verified, what remains, blockers.

Assume the user is AFK; make authorized decisions without asking questions. Surface blockers promptly and continue useful independent work. Stop after reporting completion, a blocker requiring a person when no useful independent work remains, or an external wait that this run's no-wait policy makes terminal. Continue while authorized, actionable work remains.

What holds for every gate

A gate declares judgment or deterministic; an undeclared kind is invalid, never inferred. Read a gate from the Manifest by ID, never from a copy. For repository work, compare against the repository's actual remote-tracking default branch, unless the gate names another subject. Include relevant staged, unstaged, and untracked work when the artifact being judged includes local changes. A judgment gate reads the full change once, then only prior findings' repairs and the delta; a deterministic gate re-runs in full. A finding below a gate's bar is recorded — in the execution log when kept — and left unrepaired, because every repair is a new delta that each judgment gate re-reads. A pre-existing issue the run meets on its own, rather than one a gate reported, is fixed when it is related to the current change and otherwise recorded the same way; /done and /escalate surface both for the user to decide. A bar never moves down on the executor's judgment, and a summary claim is not evidence: obtain the missing evidence, or report a blocker while continuing useful independent work.

The execution log

Unless --no-log, keep an append-only log at ~/.manifest-dev/logs/do-<name>-<hash>.md, where <name> is the Manifest's filename without extension and <hash> the first eight hex characters of SHA-256 over its absolute path. Fixing the scheme is what reopens the same Manifest's log on every launch and keeps two manifests sharing a basename in different directories apart. Read it before resuming and append as you go: it is where the goal block's checkpoint notes land. references/LOG.md holds the entry shape and append discipline — not its path rule.