Writing a contract

The contract is the layer that says what the task is — prompt, purpose, territory, gates and the shape of the report.

A task has four layers. The first is the contract: what this task is. It is what you declare at creation, and it is what the card receives in the briefing.

The fields

Field	Values	Required	Rule
`prompt`	free text	yes	why the task exists
`purpose`	`investigate` `implement` `measure` `fix`	no	write-once: labeling it wrong is another task, not a relabel
`deps`	ids of other tasks	no	unlocks automatic dispatch when all become `done`
`review`	`wanted` or absent	no	mutable — risk is assessment, and assessment changes
`territory`	files/regions	no	which files belong to this task
`gates`	commands	no	what must pass before delivering
`allow_commit`	bool	no	whether the card may commit; usually `false`
`report_schema`	JSON	no	the format you require back
`cwd`	path	no	where the card is born

The assembled briefing

The card receives, at dispatch:

prompt  +  dependency pointer  +  contract

Nothing more. Board rule is not on that list: if you need the card to know something, it fits in a contract field, or you send it explicitly, or it will not know it.

The most expensive error is a brief without the “how”

Briefing “measure X” without saying how to measure already produced twelve probes in twenty-three seconds in the user’s conversation. Briefing “touch only this region” without saying what to do with the old source already produced a second source of truth beside the first.

A good contract:

The defect, measured — not “improve X”, but “X does A when it should do B; measured in N cases; here is the query or the file”.
The boundary — which files are yours, and who else is writing to them now.
The decision you did not make — if there are two plausible outs, say both and ask the card to measure before choosing.
The gate — what must pass before the delivery counts.
The shape of the report — so you do not get prose when you need numbers.

After the contract, the next step is Roles and verdicts.