phrazzld/flywheel

/flywheel

Compose cycles of: pick a backlog item → /shape (if unshaped) → /implement → /yeet → /deliver --polish-only → /ship → /monitor → loop.

Abbreviated form using the convenience composer: pick → /deliver → /yeet → /ship → /monitor → loop. (/deliver = /shape → /implement → clean loop; /deliver --polish-only runs that same clean loop on an existing branch.)

Migration: the polish step was /settle until backlog 080 collapsed it into /deliver --polish-only; /settle is a deprecated redirect for one release.

You already know how to do each of these. This skill exists only to encode the invariants that aren't inferable from the leaf names.

Invariants

• Flywheel composes. Phase logic lives in the leaf skill. Flywheel has none.
• State lives in leaf receipts, git, and backlog.d/. Flywheel has none.
• If .harness-kit/flywheel.yaml exists, load it once at cycle start with the Harness Kit config loader and use it only for cycle tuning: cadence, max_cycles, token budget, backlog include filters, and stop conditions. If absent, use invocation flags and built-in defaults.
• Provider-roster behavior lives in the leaf workflow skills. If the repo has .harness-kit/agents.yaml, /flywheel expects receipts for whatever lanes the leaf skills judged necessary, but it does not dispatch providers directly.
• The cycle closeout includes the roster delegation report from /ship, plus any provider-health follow-ups surfaced by failed or low-signal lanes.
• /ship owns closure: squash-merge, backlog archive, /reflect, and applying reflect's outputs. Flywheel does not invoke /reflect directly.
• Shared Closeout applies at cycle boundaries. A cycle is not complete while git status --short --branch --untracked-files=all shows paths or the shipped branch is unpushed/diverged from its remote. Verify remote sync with git rev-list --left-right --count <branch>...<upstream> or the branch's equivalent upstream check. Nonzero entries are action items for /yeet, /ship, a move-out, durable ignore, or an explicit blocker. See harnesses/shared/AGENTS.md (Closeout).
• Ship before deploy. Always.
• Harness edits from reflect never touch master. /ship routes them to harness/reflect-outputs for human review.

Delegation Judgment

delegate on judgment per the shared Roster contract: native subagents by default; add cross-model critics, roster providers, or sprite lanes (/sprites) only when they answer a distinct question. See harnesses/shared/AGENTS.md (Roster).

Local lane guidance: Leaf skills own dispatch; /flywheel verifies phase receipts and uses lanes only for cycle strategy, risk critique, and closure-state review.

Gotchas

• /deliver's receipt is the contract — don't peer inside.
• An item can be open in backlog.d/ but already shipped in git. Fix the stale entry before starting a cycle on it.
• Library repos still ship + reflect when deploy/monitor no-op.
• Two /flywheel runs in the same worktree collide on git state. Use separate worktrees for parallelism.
• Do not start the next cycle with leftover untracked evidence, backlog notes, generated docs, or unpushed commits from the last one. Resolve via shared Closeout before starting the next cycle.

Non-Goals

• No cycle state machine, event enum, lock, or pick scoring.
• No direct /reflect invocation — that's /ship's job.
• No USD tracking — the orchestrator runs under subscription. USD is a concern of systems that pay per token (e.g. ThinkTank itself).

Verification

Semantic waiver: /flywheel composes other phase receipts rather than owning a standalone deterministic transform. Verify a cycle by the /deliver, /ship, /deploy, /monitor, and /reflect receipts it links, plus clean-tree closeout and remote-sync evidence.