project-management

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: project-management
description: >-
  Agent-only procedure for Firstmate project management.
  Use before adding, creating, removing, or initializing a project.
  Cloning or registering a project is add intake and uses the same trigger.
  Owns project add, create, clone, remove, initialization, registry, delivery-mode, autonomy, and outward-consent decisions.
user-invocable: false
metadata:
  internal: true
---

# project-management

Use this procedure before adding, creating, removing, or initializing a project.
Cloning or registering a project is add intake and uses the same trigger.
This skill is the single owner of Firstmate's project-management procedure.
It does not replace `secondmate-provisioning`, which owns project clones inside persistent secondmate homes.

## Preconditions and registry

Projects live flat under `projects/`, and `data/projects.md` is the private fleet registry.
Use the registry format and parser contract owned by the header of `bin/fm-project-mode.sh`.
Keep each registry description useful for identifying the project, but keep delivery posture, captain-private state, and detailed project knowledge in their existing designated homes.
Do not turn the registry into project documentation.

Before adding, cloning, creating, or registering any project in the main home, inspect the authoritative `data/secondmates.md` routing table and judge every existing natural-language `scope:` against the proposed project or domain.
Apply `AGENTS.md` section 7's authoritative secondmate routing rules; if an existing scope owns that domain, route the new-project operation or work there instead of creating or registering a duplicate main-home clone.
Absence from the main `data/projects.md` registry is never evidence that no second mate owns the domain.
If the owning second mate cannot accept the route, report that concrete blocker or obtain an explicit captain redirection rather than silently duplicating the project in the main home.

Resolve the project name, destination, delivery posture, and autonomy posture before changing local or remote state.
Keep a newly added clone and its registry entry consistent, and roll back only artifacts created by the incomplete operation when a later initialization step fails and that rollback is safe.
Do not overwrite or repurpose an existing path.

## Delivery posture

The registry records the project's standing posture, which is the captain's default for the work rather than any task's answer; `AGENTS.md` section 7 owns how each task's concrete mode and yolo are resolved at intake and passed explicitly to the brief, the spawn, and any promotion.
Choose that posture when adding or creating the project:

- `no-mistakes` runs the full validation pipeline before a PR.
- `direct-PR` pushes and opens a PR without the no-mistakes pipeline.
- `local-only` has no required remote or PR and lands only through the approved local fast-forward path.
- `no-mistakes-prod-only` is a conditional policy rather than one flat mode: genuinely internal-only tooling, automation, contributor or operator process, and release or submission work ships `direct-PR`, while product-facing, mixed, and uncertain work ships `no-mistakes`.

`no-mistakes-prod-only` is the default for a newly added or created remote-backed project when the captain specifies nothing, and a project with no remote defaults to `local-only`.
State that resolved default while confirming the source, local name, and posture instead of asking the captain to choose from scratch, and record a flat mode instead whenever they ask for one.
Existing registry entries keep the meaning they already have and are never migrated or reinterpreted, so a legacy entry with no bracket stays `no-mistakes`.
Registering a conditional policy is a one-time choice and never requires classifying any change; the per-task surface classification happens at each task's intake, and internal-only is never inferred from file location or project name.

The optional `+y