chore: completed sprints are disposable — contract reworded, 36 sprint files deleted

[sungjunlee]

Decision (maintainer, 2026-09-20)

Sprint files are disposable work units, not history. What was done and how is already known from Issues, epics, and PRs, so the "completed sprints are immutable history / permanent execution record" contract is withdrawn: completed sprint files may be deleted at any time.

What stays unchanged:

• an active sprint is still the execution hub while it runs;
• status: completed is still never flipped back — reopening means a new sprint;
• _context.md (cross-sprint context promoted at close) stays, and is the only thing worth keeping after a sprint closes.

What changed, per file

spec/capabilities.md — sprint-execution Hard Constraint, never-flip-back half kept:

• Never mutate a sprint's status: completed back to active — reopening the work means a new sprint. Completed sprint files are disposable and may be deleted at any time: the record of what was done and how is the Issue, the epic, and the PR, and the only thing to keep is what was promoted to _context.md.

One append-only Decisions row added (no existing row edited or deleted):

| 2026-09-20 | Completed sprint files are disposable and may be deleted at any time; after a close the only thing kept is what was promoted to _context.md. status: completed is still never flipped back — reopening the work is a new sprint | a sprint is a disposable work unit, not a record: what was done and how already lives in the Issue, the epic, and the PR, so retaining closed sprint files only adds surface to read and to drift; the repo's own 36 completed files are deleted with this decision and remain in git history | the "completed sprints are immutable history" half of this capability's Hard Constraint, and the "Deletion stops at history: v1.0.0 is reserved and is not a cleanup cut, so completed sprint files stay" gotcha in _context.md |

The capability's Expected Behaviors and In-scope carried no "permanent record" wording, so nothing else in that section moved.

spec/system-map.md — Storage And External Systems:

• .dev-backlog/sprints/ — admitted execution state; completed sprints are disposable; delete them freely, the record is the Issue/epic/PR.

skills/dev-backlog/SKILL.md (164 lines, unchanged — three one-line rewrites):

• Core model: "…stay in an admitted sprint file while it runs; once completed that file is disposable — the record is the Issue, the epic, and the PR."
• Complete rail: "…promote project-level Running Context to _context.md, which is the only thing worth keeping — the completed sprint file is disposable and may be deleted at any time."
• Hard Constraint: "status: completed is never flipped back (reopening means a new sprint); completed sprint files are disposable and may be deleted at any time — keep only _context.md."

skills/dev-backlog/references/authority-contract.md — the Historical evidence row no longer routes reads to committed sprint files, which would otherwise have pointed at deleted files:

| Historical evidence | Repository history (git plus the authority's closed tasks and PRs) | Read closed Issues/PRs and commits (completed sprint files are disposable and may already be deleted) | … |

.dev-backlog/sprints/_context.md — the Architecture Decisions bullet's closing clause replaces "Deletion stops at history: v1.0.0 is reserved and is not a cleanup cut, so completed sprint files stay." with:

Completed sprint files are disposable and may be deleted at any time: the record of what was done and how is the Issue, the epic, and the PR, and _context.md is the only thing kept after a close.

Sprint files — all 36 .dev-backlog/sprints/2026-*.md deleted (git rm); _context.md and .dev-backlog/triage-config.yml kept. Git history keeps the deleted files.

README.md, CLAUDE.md, skills/dev-backlog/references/file-format.md, tests/evals/dev-backlog.md — grepped for "permanent" / "immutable" / "history" near "sprint"; no sprint-lifecycle claims found (the only hits are about docs/ retention and comment history), so no change. Eval scenario 9 already says only "promote durable context to _context.md, set the sprint completed", so nothing graded moved. docs/conformance/ is a recorded run artifact and was deliberately left as-is.

Test fixture change

tests/dev-backlog/authority-contract.test.js read .dev-backlog/sprints/2026-07-github-native-core-simplification.md and asserted two things on it: objectives: [O10] present, and no read-only fallback wording. That content moved to a new tests/fixtures/admitted-sprint.md — a minimal admitted-sprint file (frontmatter with the spec axis, Goal / batched Plan with [x] [~] [ ] and a moored in-flight pointer / Running Context / Progress) — and the test now reads the fixture. No test depends on a real repo sprint file any more.

Swept the rest of tests/ for real-file dependencies: every other .dev-backlog/sprints/2026-* path is written into a temp dir by the test itself. The doc-drift check (tests/tools/doc-drift-check.js) scans skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/*/references/*.md, and .dev-backlog/sprints/_context.md only — it never read the completed sprint files, and still reports zero dangling mentions.

Verification

Chained with &&, both green on the final tree:

node --test --test-concurrency=1 tests/*.test.js tests/*/*.test.js && bash tests/smoke/smoke-test.sh

• Node: 188 tests, 187 pass, 0 fail, 1 skipped (the opt-in live triage-apply integration case, skipped without TRIAGE_APPLY_INTEGRATION=1), 36 suites
• Smoke: 167/167 passed, 0 failed
• Combined exit code 0

Diff: 44 files, +54 / −1,806.

BREAKING for nothing in code — prose and dogfood state only.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01X9gZYk7FcYSLAZBBe7JXvZ

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Codex Review Summary

This comment shows the latest Codex review activity on this pull request.

Review	Status	Commit	Review trigger
📝 Code Review	✅ Completed 2026-09-20T08:58:15.452040Z	20bb0af	PR opened

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[sungjunlee]

Independent review round 1 (GPT-6 Astra via codex exec, read-only, with scripts/doctor/tests as context): LGTM — no residual contradiction, decision row appended only, fixture faithfully replaces the deleted sprint file, scripts run without completed files.