State the Recurring Case in Three Rules That Only State the Common One

[ptr727]

Ships the ready cluster carrying #578. No closing keyword, since a feature to develop pull request never fires one.

Each of the three rules is correct about its common case and silent about the case that keeps recurring. The issue's own diagnosis is that downstream agents keep re-deriving them and reporting the result as a discovery, which says the wording does not reach the case rather than that the rule is missing.

All three Checked anchors were re-read against develop at a706ddb before anything was written. All three gaps were still real.

The three widenings

GOVERNANCE.md "Branching Model" now states that an issue closes when its work is verifiably complete, and that the keyword automates the case where completion and promotion coincide rather than adding a second condition to it. Two cases fall outside it and both close by hand: a promotion that merged without the keyword, and work complete on develop with no promotion imminent, where waiting holds a finished issue open for however long the next promotion takes. The closing comment cites the squash SHA, re-read against the branch rather than trusted from the claim that asked for the close.

The old wording licensed a hand-close only as a repair after a promotion had already merged without the keyword, which is why the second case had no route.

GOVERNANCE.md "Communicating with the User" now says the clickable link goes in the message that comes before the prompt rather than merely alongside it. The rule already got the hard part right, that a prompt renders neither a Markdown link nor a bare URL. What it missed is that a prompt blocks on an answer, so a message emitted after it is read once the answer is already given, which is the one moment the link is no longer any use. One word, accompanies to before, plus the reason.

GOVERNANCE.md "Operational Repositories" now states when to decline the direct-commit grant. The grant exists for the one-line config edit whose review round costs more than it protects, and that reason stops applying well before a change gets large, so the test is stated as a shape rather than a line count: restructuring rather than adjusting a value, several files at once, a device, integration or automation that did not exist before, anything whose failure shows up on the live service rather than in a lint run, or a change the author cannot state in one sentence.

This stays guidance by construction. Adding a pull_request rule to repo-config/operational/develop.json would gate the direct push too and withdraw the very allowance the model exists to give, so nothing mechanical can apply it.

What sweeping by term found

Item 3 swept by term rather than by the instance the issue named turned up WORKFLOW.md section 3 restating the same allowance with the same silence, in the same words: "a change worth reviewing still takes one". It now points at the section that owns the test instead of repeating it, so the rule stays in one place and the second reader still finds it.

Item 1's rule also sits in "Branching Model", not the "Git and Commit Rules" the cluster's Touches line named. That is where the re-vendor has to look for it, so it is recorded rather than silently corrected.

Backlog bookkeeping

• The shipped cluster is retired from "Work Clusters".
• Evidence for the agent-isolation rule from the swept side, and an answer to its two open questions #557 and A repository with no carried instruction set cannot resolve the words its task is phrased in #579 leave "Verified Complete, Awaiting Close", both having been closed on 2026-08-08, along with four link definitions left orphaned by their removal.
• Three carried rules state the common case and leave the recurring case unstated #578 takes their place with its closing evidence quoted, so the section is not empty and the issue stays visible while open, which step 1 of "How to Select the Next Item" requires.
• The "Fleet Sweeps" re-vendor entry records that this half propagates a rule rather than refreshing a hash. Every other carried change queued there is punctuation or capitalization, where a repo on the old copy is correct on the rule and wrong on the bytes. Here it is wrong on the rule, which makes it the half to carry first, and item 3 matters most on the two operational repos that can act on it.

Verification

Gate	Result
prose_lint.py --diff origin/develop .	clean
markdownlint-cli2 over **/*.md	0 issues in 44 files
editorconfig-checker	clean
CRLF preserved	0 lines without CR in all three files

Three carried verbatim GOVERNANCE.md sections change, so the fleet is byte-mismatched until the re-vendor visit. WORKFLOW.md is intent, so nothing reports its cross-reference at all, which is why it is written down.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Updates the ProjectTemplate governance docs to explicitly cover three recurring edge cases that were previously left unstated, and aligns related documentation to point at the single authoritative rule text.

Changes:

• Widen GOVERNANCE.md guidance for (1) when issues are closed by hand, (2) where to place clickable links relative to interactive prompts, and (3) when to prefer a PR over a direct commit in operational repos.
• Update WORKFLOW.md to reference the authoritative “Operational Repositories” test instead of restating it.
• Retire the related TODO.md work-cluster entry and record #578 as verified complete with closing evidence.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

File	Description
GOVERNANCE.md	Expands three carried rules to cover recurring non-common cases (hand-closing issues, link placement vs prompts, operational direct-commit vs PR decision).
WORKFLOW.md	Replaces repeated allowance text with a cross-reference to the governance section that owns the “when to take a PR” test.
TODO.md	Removes the shipped cluster, records #578 as complete (with evidence), and updates link definitions accordingly.

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