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ISA

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Owns the Ideal State Artifact (ISA): scaffolds, restates, interviews, discusses, rates, renders, upgrades, and maintains the articulation of a project's ideal state. USE WHEN ISA, ISC, ideal state, ideal state criteria, ideal state ladder, L1 L2 L3, restate, say it back, what do you think I want, are we building the right thing, drift check, project specification, articulating done, fog, not yet specified, discuss, discovery interview, are we aligned, alignment, questionnaire, articulation, refine the ISA, open questions, ask fence, mid-run question, rate this ISA, score this ISA, ISA quality, ISA format, latest ISA template, upgrade ISAs, isa_format stamp, render an ISA, ISA HTML, open an ISA in the browser, ISA page, view an ISA. NOT FOR creating new skills (CreateSkill), visual quality critique (ArtDirection), or climbing a target to a measured improvement (HillClimb).

LifeOS/install/skills/ISA/SKILL.md

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# ISA — Ideal State Artifact

Create and maintain the document that articulates and verifies a project's ideal state. Direction comes first: nothing in an ISA matters more than making sure we are working on the right thing, in the right direction, toward what the ideal state actually looks like. Every ISA opens with the `## Ideal State` ladder (`### L3 · One sentence`, `### L2 · Summary` with one sentence plus exactly four bullets, `### L1 · Full articulation`), each level written from the summit: the euphoric-surprise version of done for everyone the work touches, never the floor of what must not break, which lives in criteria and anti-criteria (ISAFormat § *What the ladder captures: the summit*). Shape check: `bun LIFEOS/TOOLS/IsaLadder.ts check <isa>`. Drift check, whether the criteria still add up to L3: `bun LIFEOS/TOOLS/IsaLadder.ts drift <isa>`. ISAFormat (`LIFEOS/DOCUMENTATION/ISA/ISAFormat.md`, § *The Ideal State ladder* for the full rules) wins any conflict with this skill or an intent.

**Contents:** Ideal State · Intent Routing · Data & Config · Gotchas · Examples

## Ideal State

- Every ISA the skill writes or touches opens with a ladder that passes the shape check, is written from the summit, and agrees with its criteria; anything in the ISA that disagrees with the ladder is resolved before another criterion is climbed.
- L3 and L2 reach the principal through Restate before a new project or a changed direction is built (an extension whose re-derived L3 or L2 changed counts as one), and not otherwise.
- An existing ISA is extended in place, never replaced by a second ISA: the new work takes the next `F<n>` block (or new flat criteria when the ISA is flat) and the next global ISC IDs, no existing ID renumbers, the ladder is re-derived so it covers the new work, and when the re-derived L3 or L2 changed, they reach the principal through Restate before the new work is built.
- Every criterion is atomic, names its falsifier, and carries at least one `## Test Strategy` row in the canonical six-column shape, so Assay resolves the whole table with no dropped row. Each row runs on a lane, `liveness` for asserts on every monitor tick or `integrity` for checks that may judge (or `build`, full runs only), and at a stage, so a criterion's asserts run before its judged rows (ISAFormat § *Verifier classes, lanes, and stages*; the one progressive contract is `skills/Assay/References/Progressive.md`).
- Discuss is the standing alignment loop: whenever the ISA's state says direction is uncertain (`bun LIFEOS/TOOLS/IsaAlign.ts status <isa>` returns `DISCUSS`) or the conversation shows doubt about what done means, a Discuss round runs before the uncertain part is built, sized `quick`, `full` or `deep` to the doubt, and Restate, Refine, Rate and the ambiguity check hand off to it when their single-question shapes stop being enough.
- Every interviewing surface (Discuss, Interview, Questionnaire, Refine, Scaffold's ambiguity check) leaves its raw record in the ISA's append-only `## Articulation Log`, and the settled answers reach the ladder and the sections in the same turn.