xoai/sage-tiers

Tiers

Tier is the answer to one question: how much process does this deserve?

Too much process on a trivial change is bureaucracy, and users learn to route around it. Too little on a consequential one is how a "quick fix" becomes an outage. Tier is where that judgment is made explicit instead of being made silently, differently, every time.

The three tiers

| Tier | Response | What it looks like | |---|---|---| | Tier 1 | Just do it. | Single file, no design decisions, a quick answer. No manifest, no spec, no confirmation. | | Tier 2 | Announce and proceed. | Multiple steps, creates artifacts. Say what you are doing, then do it. | | Tier 3 | Card and choose. | Major effort, genuine ambiguity. Present options and let the user pick. |

The bias

Bias toward Standard scope. When a task sits on a boundary, take the higher tier.

Any of these puts a task at Tier 2 minimum, regardless of how small the diff looks:

• a behavior change
• an API change
• a decision the team would want to see

The asymmetry is deliberate. The cost of over-tiering is a few minutes of ceremony. The cost of under-tiering is a change nobody reviewed, in a place nobody expected, discovered later by someone who did not know it happened.

Tier 1 is a real escape hatch, not a trap

Tier 1 exists so the process does not tax trivial work, and it is genuinely free: no manifest is created, so the spec-gate hook has nothing to block on (the hook reads gate_state from a manifest; no manifest means no active cycle means edits are unrestricted).

That is the escape hatch working as designed. It is not a loophole — "I will call it Tier 1 so I do not have to write a spec" is a rationalization, and the list above is what it collides with.

Rationalizations that do not survive contact

| The thought | Why it is wrong | |---|---| | "It is literally one line" | One line that changes behavior is a behavior change. The diff size is not the blast radius. | | "The design is obvious" | Obvious to you, now, with your context. Write it down and find out. | | "I will note it in the commit message" | A commit message is not a decision record and nobody reads it before the fact. | | "The user just wants it done" | The user wants it right. They will not thank you for speed on the change that broke checkout. |