Project Flow

When to Use

When starting work on a project, or when uncertain which phase a project is in.

Context Boundary

Read only the Phase document. Never read other project documents — the Flow skill determines which phase skill to invoke, nothing more.

Project Lifecycle

Create → Vision → Vision_Eval → Research → Spec → Spec_Eval → Plan → Plan_Eval → Execute → Execute_Eval → Verify → Extract → Extract_Eval → Complete

Projects have one or more Plans (Plan 1, Plan 2, etc). The Execute → Execute_Eval loop repeats within a plan until Execute_Eval passes, and then loops over the next Plan.

When Execute_Eval passes for all Plans → Verify project.

If Verify finds issues → new Plan → Execute → Execute_Eval loop. If Verify passes → Extract.

Persisted Reports

Every evaluation or review phase writes to a durable markdown file. These are the canonical artifacts for human review, audit evidence, and Forge Optimizer context.

Required artifacts:

Phase	Artifact File
Vision_Eval	{Project}_Vision_Eval.md
Spec_Eval	{Project}_Spec_Eval.md
Plan_Eval	{Project}_Plan_Eval.md
Execute_Eval	{Project}_Execute_Eval_{N}.md
Verify	{Project}_Verification.md
Extract_Eval	{Project}_Extract_Eval.md
Audit	{Project}_Audit_Results.md
Runs	{Project}_Runs.md

Each report must include: phase name, run identifier or date section, agent/session context, checklist/findings summary, pass/fail disposition, and next-step instruction or return phase.

Prerequisite

Before dispatching to any phase skill, verify that all prior phases’ work-products exist on disk:

Prior phase	Work-product to check
Vision	{Project}_Vision.md (exists, status: approved)
Vision_Eval	{Project}_Vision_Eval.md (exists, status: approved)
Research	{Project}_Research.md (exists, status: approved)
Spec	{Project}_Spec.md (exists, status: approved or review)

If any prior work-product is missing, STOP. Do not dispatch. Report which prior phase is missing its work-product.

Phase Detection

Read {Project}_Phase.md first. The Phase: value determines current phase and next action.

Convention: {Phase}_Started → in progress → use Project_{Phase} skill; {Phase}_Blocked → blocked (Runner creates a todo item); {Phase}_Paused → user-paused (Runner skips entirely — do not dispatch, do not create todos); {Phase}_Completed → done → start next phase. No Phase doc or Create_Completed → start Vision.

Completion vs Archival

Complete is the final lifecycle phase. It has two possible outcomes:

• Approve — Project stays in {Dept}/Projects/ with status: approved. All project documents are preserved for future reference.
• Archive — Project moves to {Dept}/Archived/ with status: archived. Use Project_Archive for archival and unarchival operations.

Project_Complete handles both outcomes. Project_Archive handles restoring an archived project. These are separate skills with separate responsibilities.

Rules

• Always read the Phase document first to determine the current phase.
• Never skip phases.
• User approval required after eval-converged phases and at human gates. Draft → Eval → auto-fix loop → user review.
• Each phase skill defines its own Context Boundary — agents must respect it.
• Every todo item created for the user that references a work-product must embed the work-product as an artifact block inside the todo body so the user can open it directly from the todo item. Do not include raw URLs, repo paths, or paste instructions. The user records their verdict in the work-product; the system picks it up from there.