spec: flatten skip-prone substeps in /ship and child skills

[nick-inkeep]

Summary

• Spec for restructuring /ship's phase hierarchy and child skill internals to reduce sub-step skipping by AI agents
• Audit found ~60 high-skip-risk inline substeps across ship and 7 child skills
• Proposes a three-layer defense: explicit phases (prevent), tasks (detect), artifacts (enforce)
• 4 files changed: ship, /spec, /implement, /qa
• Ship goes from 9 → 11 phases; 3 substeps move into child skills; /spec always runs

Changes proposed in the spec

File	Change
ship	Promote 2 substeps to explicit phases (codebase understanding, ownership review). Always invoke /spec. Update task list 9→11.
/spec	Accept --scope param (feature/enhancement/bugfix). Absorb implementation-readiness validation into Step 8.
/implement	Add Phase 4: Verify Output (mechanical verification before handing back).
/qa	Add Step 6b: Re-run quality gates after any code changes made during testing.

Key decisions

• D1: Only 2 substeps become ship phases (3 others belong in child skills)
• D2: Spec validation → /spec, testing exit gate → /qa, implementation verification → /implement
• D3: Always invoke /spec (with --scope calibration instead of bypassing for lightweight specs)
• D5: Persist codebase understanding to tmp/ship/codebase-context.md (survives compaction)

Research

• Task Management in Claude Code CLI report — tasks can't be inserted between existing tasks; subagents lack Task* tools; execution order is advisory

Test plan

• Review spec for completeness and accuracy
• Validate that proposed changes are backward compatible
• Confirm implementation phases are correctly sequenced

🤖 Generated with Claude Code