PROPOSAL — TFW-59: North Star Lifecycle — who designates it, where it lives, who asks¶
Date: 2026-08-18 Author: Coordinator (Claude Code) Status: 📋 PROPOSAL — not chartered, no HL Origin: owner observation 2026-08-18, after closing TFW-53 Sequenced after: TFW-55 amendment A2 (the designation for this repository) — this proposal is the mechanism, and the two are different problems
1. The observation¶
TFW-53 Phase C shipped the Project North Star as a concept and gave it everything except a life. It has a definition, seven rules, a glossary article, a PV priority, a template field and a place in the reviewer's reference set — and no answer to who writes it, when, where it is recorded once, and who notices it is missing.
The owner's words, 2026-08-18: «непонятно куда что когда писать. и кто-то должен спросить, но координатор не спрашивает — его вообще не парит, что его нет».
2. Measured, not asserted¶
| # | Measurement | Command / source | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Does any workflow tell a coordinator to establish a north star? | grep -i "north star" .tfw/workflows/plan.md |
0 |
| 2 | Does initialization ask a new project for one? | grep -i "north star" .tfw/workflows/init.md |
0 |
| 3 | Is there a project-level carrier? | grep -i north .tfw/project_config.yaml .tfw/templates/project_config.yaml |
0 — no key |
| 4 | What is the only carrier? | templates/HL.md:18 |
A per-task header field, retyped by every HL, with nothing checking that two HLs name the same locus |
| 5 | Does anything detect its absence? | review.md, judge.md |
The fallback is correct and silent. ⚪ N/A is permitted, a review is never blocked — by design (rule 5) — so absence produces no signal at all |
| 6 | Did the gap actually bite? | HL-[TFW-54](../TFW-54__agent_team_mode/):12, :485, :518 |
The coordinator recorded N/A — no project north star designated three times, ruled it not a blocker, and routed the designation to TFW-55 |
| 7 | Did the receiving contract accept it? | grep -i "north star" [HL-TFW-55](../TFW-55__canonization_program/HL-TFW-55__canonization_program.md)…md |
One hit, the header phrase "North-star role" — a metaphor for that task's foundational role, not the conventions.md §3 concept. TFW-55's frozen DoD says nothing about a designation |
| 8 | Does the content exist? | grep -i "non-goal" README.md .tfw/README.md |
0. Rule 3 makes non-goals mandatory; this repository has none |
The shape of the defect. Nothing misbehaved. The coordinator noticed, wrote the field honestly,
applied the correct fallback and routed the work — and the routing landed on a contract that never
accepted it, because no rule says who may accept it. A responsibility that belongs to no role is
discharged by everyone writing N/A and moving on. Rule 5's "a review is never blocked on a missing
north star" is right for review and, without a counterpart elsewhere, it means the absence is never
raised by anyone at any point in the lifecycle.
3. Why it matters, in one sentence each¶
- The fallback is not equivalent. §1 Vision at the contract baseline states what a task is for. It catches a result that contradicts the goal; it cannot catch excess, and rule 3 says excess is what this layer exists to catch.
- Excess is TFW-54's first failure mode. A coordinator releasing a team of delegate sessions is the case where excess is cheapest to produce and slowest to notice.
- Per-HL retyping drifts. The one carrier is a free-text field in every HL. Two tasks naming different sections is undetectable today, and that is the same defect class as the pre-TFW-53 HL: a claim with no single place it lives.
4. Design sketch — recorded, not decided¶
Four questions the task would answer. The sketch is a starting point, not a ruling.
| Question | Sketch |
|---|---|
| Where is it recorded once? | A project-level carrier so the locus is declared one time and every HL cites it rather than restating it. Candidate: a tfw.north_star key listing sections, propagated through workflows/config.md's Config Sync Registry like every other parameter. The HL field then becomes a citation, not a source |
| Who writes it, and when? | init.md asks at initialization — it already interviews for project context, and this is the one question that establishes what the product is for. For an existing project without one, /tfw-config or a /tfw-plan step raises it once, not per task |
| Who notices it is missing? | Not the reviewer — rule 5 is deliberate and should stand. A coordinator-side prompt is the natural home: the role that writes the HL header field is the role that should be made to ask rather than to type N/A. Open question: a hard gate reproduces the interruption the owner refuses (stakeholder.md F6), so this is probably a one-time ask with a recorded declination |
| How does a task hand designation work to another task? | The TFW-54 → TFW-55 routing failed silently because a frozen contract cannot receive scope by being named from outside. The general rule is small: work routed into a frozen contract enters through that contract's §12, or it has not been routed |
5. Scope boundary¶
In: the lifecycle — carrier, authoring moment, the asking role, cross-task routing into a frozen contract.
Out: writing this repository's north star and its non-goals. That is content, it belongs to the task that owns both README surfaces, and it is filed as TFW-55 amendment A2, awaiting the owner's verdict. Shipping the mechanism and the content together would repeat the coupling that TFW-53 deliberately split across its own phases.
Also out: changing rule 5. A review is never blocked on a missing north star, and that stays.
6. Cost of not doing it¶
Every project on TFW — including this one — runs its Purpose Check on a reference set that answers what
was this task for and never what is this product for. The check still fires and still cites, so the
gap is invisible in exactly the way philosophy.md F39 describes: a citation that resolves is not a
citation that is relevant. The precedent is not hypothetical — process.md F30 records that this
project wrote down the coordinator-drift failure in April 2026, built no enforcement site, and paid
27,103 deleted lines for it.
PROPOSAL — TFW-59: North Star Lifecycle | 2026-08-18