The board line's next-cost field had a reader (board.sh) and no writer, so
its value was retyped by hand every session and drifted into several
competing spellings. Cleaning the data could not fix that: the cause was the
missing write path.
route.sh is that writer. Four scored traits of the next task -- path,
verification, reversibility, scope -- plus a required rationale, run through
the operator's model rubric moved here as the single copy. The row table is a
closed set of six values, so a seventh spelling cannot enter circulation, and
route-selftest.sh section 6 runs the round trip (route emits -> board parses)
inside one repo rather than across two.
Two spellings of one decision come out of one table: the rubric name for the
board line, the CLI alias for the command the operator pastes. Effort levels
are the set pinned in this marketplace; model aliases are gated against the
installed claude rather than hardcoded.
Three things worth naming:
- Escalation is asymmetric. Any single trait escalates; the cheapest row needs
all four at the cheap end. Underkill costs one session, overkill costs quota
every session -- but a wrong architecture call costs more than either.
- The Fable rows fire only from an explicit judgement flag, never inferred
from the last-session record. "The session did not finish" also covers
context exhaustion and operator interrupts, which say nothing about the
model, and Fable runs without an advisor.
- The trait block is a single-line HTML comment because board.sh's NESTE
extractor skips only lines that START with '<!--'. Measured first: a YAML
block or a multi-line comment silently replaces the repo's next step on the
board with "next_task:". Pinned by section 7.
board.sh is untouched as a program; its header now points at route.sh for the
value set so this does not reopen the two-specs defect 305f168 closed.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 47 (new), node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX