Documentation-Driven Communication Rule

rule_id: R-COMM-01 category: Process status: locked owner: Project Manager / Architect scope: all agents

Rule

Chat communicates status, questions, decisions awaiting recording, and links. Versioned documents and structured evidence are the source of truth.

Required Communication

Identify the runtime ID and the current state/next action that justifies the next step. A committed Runtime revision may be cited as optional audit metadata, but it is never a prerequisite for normal agent communication.
Link authoritative REQ, specification, assignment, activation, BUG, and evidence documents.
State blockers without silently reducing scope or acceptance.
Record baseline decisions before acting on them.
Use schema-valid Agent message envelopes for phase changes.
Treat completion reports as evidence requests, not authoritative state changes.

Subagent Boundary

Subagents receive work only through a fingerprinted assignment and phase-one request. They do not negotiate requirements with the user, infer omitted scope from chat, self-activate, or broaden their assignment.

Read-back, activation, completion, team planning, BUG handling, and clean-round procedures are owned by:

.claude/skills/agent-dispatch/SKILL.md
.claude/skills/team-planning/SKILL.md
.claude/skills/bug-resolution/SKILL.md
.claude/skills/clean-round-evaluation/SKILL.md

Escalation

Situation	Record
requirement ambiguity/change	REQ question or change request; pause when locked
specification conflict	structured phase-one conflict
blocking delivery/quality finding	canonical `BUG-*`
changed impact or stale PASS	impact-analysis evidence
release audit blocker	release architecture audit finding
final release action	explicit human release approval

Forbidden

chat-only baseline decisions
prompt summaries replacing document reading
assuming idle means complete
silently treating missing evidence as N/A
calling release architecture audit “human approval”
asking a subagent to bypass runtime or Hook enforcement