[1.0 T4] Link existing design rationale and capture outcome deviations once #180

Problem and outcome

Preserve before/after reasoning without duplicating it across new proposal, outcome, decision, feature-delta, and review narratives.

Interaction contract

Keep FluencyLoop. Proposed positioning: Stay fluent as people and agents evolve the product.

Use retained product reasoning automatically. Explain consequential choices at the right depth. Recommend a path. Continue within agreed intent. Ask when human judgment is needed. Update the shared model at natural boundaries.

The flagship goal/principles/precedents/tradeoffs reasoning is integrated into the existing design explanation at proportional depth. It is not a mandatory recital, proposal form, or new approval exchange. People must remain able to understand and challenge the design.

Scope

• Reuse the existing design/decision rationale as the canonical explanation. Add only evidence and reference fields T1 shows are necessary; a proposal is not a new approval form.
• At natural completion, link the rationale and capture deviations plus implemented/changed/abandoned/incomplete outcome state. Do not rewrite unchanged rationale.
• Keep delegated action, explicit human agreement, implementation state, and independent evidence verification distinct.
• Generate mechanical summaries from links and retain a single bounded wrap-up distillation. Supporting-revision changes are passive review exposure, not automatic repair tasks.
• Implement the same append/reference contract in Bash and PowerShell with legacy provenance intact.

Acceptance criteria

• The original design explanation is linked rather than restated in a second mandatory proposal narrative.
• An unchanged approach needs no repeated outcome rationale or extra user approval.
• Changed/abandoned/incomplete outcomes are honest and deviations are recorded at natural closure.
• Missing evidence metadata remains advisory and is not defaulted to human approval or verification.
• Mechanical assembled views and wrap-up prose reuse rationale; no per-slice distillation is introduced.

Validation

Add Bats/Pester fixtures for linked rationale, deviations-only closure, abandoned work, legacy references, and trust/authority separation. Compare record/text volume to T1 baseline to detect duplicated capture.

Starting points

scripts/{bash,powershell}/add-decision., add-requirement., common.*; tests/store.bats, tests/feature-session.bats and PowerShell mirrors

Constraints

• Target dev; main distributes releases. No runtime implementation occurs in the planning PR.
• T1 is an observed pilot using existing artifacts before new infrastructure. Use its evidence to retain, narrow, or defer later scope.
• Recommend and continue within authorized intent; ask with a recommendation only for consequential unresolved judgment. Batch independent questions, reuse settled answers, and wait for dependent work. Silence is not approval.
• Absent briefs, historical link gaps, stale prose, and unreviewed metadata alone are advisory. Do not require onboarding, cleanup, or retrospective approvals to work.
• Unknown familiarity is not fluency and does not automatically require a blocking probe/check. Support requested guided learning without quizzes; keep calibration/preferences private. T5 explicitly updates inherited pause rules.
• Capture rationale once, link mechanical views, record outcome deviations at natural closure, distill once at wrap-up, and reuse unchanged context.
• Preserve append-only history/provenance; Bash and PowerShell implement the same contract. Core remains Node-optional; no new database, hosted service, or vector search.

Dependencies and size

• Task: T4
• Relative size: M (not a calendar estimate)
• Depends on: T2: [1.0 T2] Add stable record references and explicit decision lifecycle #178
• Milestone: https://github.com/baokhang83/fluencyloop/milestone/3
• Plan: draft source
• Planning PR: docs: propose FluencyLoop 1.0 shared product direction and design #189