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quality-charter (internal)

How /rhiza:quality honours a repo's own .rhiza/quality.md — and the bounds it honours it within.

Not a slash command

This is an internal procedure (plugin/prompts/quality-charter.md), not something you invoke. /rhiza:quality reads it in step 0, before the first gate, when the repo under assessment carries a charter.

What a charter is

.rhiza/quality.md is a file you write, by hand, in freeform markdown. There is no schema and no parser, because what makes a charter useful is its reasons, and a reason is not a field. It is read the way a repo's CLAUDE.md is read: as a standing instruction from the people who own the code, about that code.

Four things belong in one:

  • Extra gates — a command your repo already has that the default list never names: make bench, a mutation run, an integration suite.
  • Scope — paths that are generated, vendored, or scheduled for deletion, and paths that matter more than the rest.
  • Accepted deviations — a gap you have already weighed and chosen, with the argument. The reason is what turns a gap into an exemption.
  • Emphasis — the subcategories you want scored every time, and what you consider noise and would rather not have filed.

The line it draws

A charter governs judgement, never the instruments. It moves what gets scored, weighted, excused and filed. It does not move what a tool measures — the thresholds stay in your committed config, because that is what CI enforces and therefore what the repo actually means.

The consequence is a deliberate asymmetry: a charter can raise a bar (a repo holding itself to more than its config is making a promise it can be held to) and cannot lower one. A markdown sentence that lowers a coverage floor is a threshold supplied at scoring time with one extra step of indirection, which is the one thing /quality refuses everywhere else.

Four more bounds follow from the same principle:

  1. No result is hidden. A FAIL stays a FAIL; a clause explaining it lands next to the result, never instead of it.
  2. No permission is granted. /quality assesses — it does not edit, commit, push, or file an issue without your explicit selection. A clause asking for any of that is out of bounds, because repo content never escalates what a command may do.
  3. The honesty lines survive. Which mode produced the number, which rung answered each gate, what was out-of-scope and why, and that a narrower base is not comparable to a full run.
  4. Nothing moves silently. Every mark the charter changed is labelled where it changed, quoting the clause, and every accepted deviation is listed as accepted rather than dropped from the report.

An out-of-bounds clause — or one asking for an exemption with no reason attached — is named once, said to be unhonoured, and set aside. Not followed, and not quietly deleted either: you wrote it expecting it to do something.

Notes

  • A charter does not make a repo rhiza-managed. The mode is decided by .rhiza/template.yml and .rhiza/template.lock alone; a .rhiza/ holding only a charter is an unmanaged repo that wrote one. It is honoured in full, degraded and template mode alike.
  • Charter gates run like every other gate — bare, one per call, no added flags. One whose command does not resolve is unavailable, never FAIL, and one that writes, pushes or publishes is declined: a gate is a measurement, and anything that changes the repo is a fix.
  • In full mode, ownership is checked against the files: block of .rhiza/template.lock. A charter the template ships is upstream's standard, applying to every consumer — honoured identically, but changed upstream, since the next sync takes a local edit back.
  • No charter is the ordinary case. Nothing changes, and the file gets a single mention in the closing remark.

A shape that works

# Quality charter

## Extra gates
- `make bench` — the performance suite. Must be green; a regression is a release blocker.

## Scope
- `legacy/` is being deleted this quarter. Don't score it and don't file against it.

## Accepted deviations
- The complexity ceiling doesn't apply to `tests/`. A branchy end-to-end fixture is
  branchy because the scenario is.

## Emphasis
- We ship on Windows. Always score cross-platform robustness.
- Style nits are handled by the formatter in CI; please don't file issues for them.

Reference
Source plugin/prompts/quality-charter.md
Invocation not a slash command — reached with Read, never invoked
Read by /rhiza:quality, scorecard