Operationalize

Operationalize

Turn repeated, cited expertise into a proposal for a reusable artifact.

1. Require cited evidence for the expertise: real occurrences or an explicit authoritative source, subject to the three-instance floor below when the proposal abstracts a rule.
2. State the triggering situation, desired behavior, inputs, outputs, negative examples, and evidence.
3. Choose the smallest fitting shape: reference, skill, deterministic check, or caller-owned workflow.
4. Search existing capabilities and prefer extension over duplication.
5. Provide an activation example, holdout/negative example, owner, and rollback or deletion condition.
6. Return the proposal to the caller or an authoring specialist.

Three-instance floor

A rule needs three real occurrences before it may be abstracted. Count only occurrences that actually happened and can be cited — sessions, diffs, verdicts, or artifacts that resolve in this repository — not hypothetical cases or restatements of one event. With one or two occurrences, propose a quote-anchored reference note instead and stop short of a rule. An explicit authoritative source may substitute for occurrences only when the proposal transcribes that source rather than generalizing beyond it. The named failure mode is premature abstraction: a rule minted from a single vivid incident that encodes the incident's accidents as policy.

Reapply proof

Every proposed rule carries a reapply proof: a demonstration that the rule, as written, reproduces the correct decision on at least one of its source occurrences without extra context. If applying the drafted rule to its own source moment requires unwritten judgment, the rule is not yet operational — tighten the wording until the reapply succeeds, or downgrade the proposal to a reference. No reapply proof, no rule.

Quote-bank anchors

Tie each rule to its source moments with a quote bank: for every counted occurrence, a short verbatim quote or command/output excerpt plus a locally resolving citation (repo path, .agents/ao digest, or session artifact). An occurrence that cannot be quoted and cited does not count toward the three-instance floor. Anchors let a later reader test whether the rule still matches what actually happened, instead of trusting the abstraction.

Boundary

Operationalize does not create tracker work, promote policy, start a factory, validate its own output, or control another invocation.