Vision

/vision

You are running the vision skill. Produce a VISION.md the author can approve: an acceptance policy for the project's future, grounded in what they actually build, and sharpened by hypotheticals they answer on an interactive review board.

VISION.md is the only committed alignment surface. A reviewer who has never seen the board must be able to accept or resist a change from it alone.

This is not a writing exercise. Follow this file top to bottom.

Host requirement

You need read access to the target repository and its real history:

• Prefer merged-PR history via a GitHub-class CLI (gh, gh-axi).
• If PRs are not accessible, fall back to git commit history on the default branch (git log): titles and messages still reveal what the author builds.
• Only if no real history is readable at all, stop and say so. Never fabricate the author's values, PR titles, or evidence. A vision built on invented evidence is worse than no vision.

The review loop runs on lavish-axi, executed directly through npx -y lavish-axi - no install requirement. Simply try to launch it, and report a blocker only if the launch itself fails.

Hard rules

1. Evidence over vibes. Every principle in the draft must be traceable to concrete evidence: named PRs or commits, files, docs, or reasoning the author approved into VISION.md. Generic engineering virtues ("we value quality") are banned unless the history demonstrates them specifically.
2. Check for an existing VISION.md first. If one exists on the default branch, switch to delta mode: treat it as the approved baseline, propose line-level candidate changes from evidence newer than it, and never write a competing document.
3. The author owns the vision. You draft, stress-test, and fold in their verdicts; you never approve, never soften a hypothetical to please, and never fold in a principle they did not state or demonstrate.
4. A vision is an acceptance policy. Write testable accept/resist criteria in declarative present tense, with explicit non-goals, so a future reader, human or agent, can apply them to a concrete change from VISION.md alone.
5. No softball hypotheticals. Each one must sit on a genuine fault line where yes and no are both defensible, with both sides steelmanned. If you can predict the author's answer, replace the hypothetical.
6. The review loop runs on lavish-axi, from the shipped template. Draft and hypotheticals are presented as one board built from assets/review-template.html + assets/review.css, used as-is: black ink on white paper set like literature, full draft always fully visible, one hypothetical at a time in a card stack. Fill the template's slots; never restyle or restructure it, and never substitute another review surface.
7. Iterate in batches, trace every edit. Each author verdict maps to a named edit in a changelog; the author must be able to see exactly how their answer changed the text.
8. Formatting. One sentence per line. Plain hyphens, never em dashes. No roadmap, no feature list, no marketing voice.
9. VISION.md is the single alignment surface. Fold the author's reasoning into the prose wherever it matters, in whatever form reads best. Never copy hypotheticals or board transcripts into VISION.md. Never write, keep, or point to an answers file in the target repo. Board transcripts may live in the tool's scratch area and must never be committed.

Pipeline

Step 0 - Parse target and author

• Target repo: current working directory by default, or an explicit owner/repo.
• Author: the person whose vision this is; default to the repo owner. Their merged work is the evidence base.
• Ask one short question if the target or author is genuinely ambiguous.

Step 1 - Learn the pattern

A VISION.md has a stable anatomy; hold the draft to it:

• Identity opener: "X exists so that ...", who it serves, and "It owns exactly one thing: ...".
• 3-6 principle sections with short declarative headings, each a set of testable present-tense commitments and refusals.
• Explicit non-goals, named concretely ("it is not a CI system, not a ...").
• A closing pair of tests: "A change aligns when ..." and "A change should be resisted when ...", concrete enough to apply to a real PR.
• Voice: declarative, present tense, zero marketing; length a page or two (40-70 lines). Author reasoning belongs in the prose wherever it matters, in whatever form reads best; never as a ledger of questions asked.

If the author names exemplar visions, read them; note shape, voice, length.

Step 2 - Existing-vision check

• If the default branch has a VISION.md: delta mode (hard rule 2). Diff its age against the history and propose only evidence-backed candidate additions or edits, each independently acceptable.
• If not: from-scratch mode.
• If VISION-ANSWERS.md or any companion answers file exists, run Migration before drafting: fold any missing reasoning into VISION.md, delete the answers file, and remove pointers to it.

Step 3 - Mine the evidence

• Repo analysis: README identity claims, architecture, stated non-goals, refusal paths, test discipline.
• History mining: list the author's merged PRs, aim for 30-100 titles, and read 8-15 full bodies spread across the range (for example gh pr list --author <owner> --state merged --limit 100, or the gh-axi equivalent). If PRs are inaccessible, walk default-branch commit history instead (git log --author=<owner>), reading messages for the same signal.
• Extract recurring revealed values: what gets built, what gets refused, what class of bug gets fixed at the root, what the author writes in intent statements.
• Produce a private evidence sheet: value -> supporting PRs, commits, or files. This sheet is the source of truth for every drafted line.

Step 4 - Draft

• Follow the step 1 anatomy and the output template below.
• Every line must map to the evidence sheet. Length target: 40-70 lines.
• Delta mode instead yields: baseline unchanged + a numbered list of candidate line additions/edits, each with its evidence.