rac-capture

RAC interview capture

Turn a conversation into one valid RAC artifact. You interview the author and propose; the human ratifies; rac validate is the deterministic check; an independent reviewer promotes it by pull request. This skill never adds AI to the RAC core — it runs in the coding agent and uses the rac CLI.

Hard constraints

• Capture knowledge, not work. Record a decision or a long-lived requirement and its rationale — never owners, assignees, sprints, priorities, or due dates. If the conversation is about who does what by when, that belongs in the team's work tracker, not in RAC; say so and stop.
• The schema is not yours to invent. Read the real shape with rac schema <type> (and rac schema for the recognised types). Use the real section names, the real artifact types, and the real ## Related <Type> relationship sections. Never guess or hard-code a field, type, or relationship kind. If you cannot run rac schema, stop and say so.
• No invention. Capture only what the author actually tells you. Where a required section has no material, ask a question — do not fill it with plausible-sounding text. The interview gathers facts; it does not author them.
• Human ratification is mandatory and explicit (before any file is written). Present the draft and require the user to confirm or correct (a) the artifact type, (b) the title, and (c) each relationship before you write anything. Relationships are suggestions to confirm, never silently asserted. The id is minted by rac new (opaque, system-assigned) — never hand-write or choose it.
• Close on deterministic validation. After writing, run rac validate. If it fails, show the errors, offer to fix them, and re-validate. Never leave an invalid artifact behind.
• Save is a draft commit; promotion is a pull request. A fresh capture is untrusted until a human reviews it. Write the artifact, optionally commit it as a draft on a branch when the user confirms, but never write straight to the trusted corpus, never auto-commit without confirmation, and never self-merge. The trust boundary is review and merge by someone other than the author.

1. Capture the raw intent first

Let the author say it their way before you ask anything — paste or dictate the decision in plain language. Do not gate capture behind your questions; collect the brain-dump, then structure it. If they describe several distinct decisions, capture one artifact at a time and offer to repeat for the rest.

2. Choose the type and read its real schema

Decide with the author whether this is a decision, requirement, design, roadmap, or prompt (most captures are a decision or a requirement). Then read the actual contract:

rac schema                     # the recognised artifact types
rac schema decision            # required / recommended / optional sections, and
                               # any controlled values (e.g. Status, Category)
rac schema decision --json     # the same, machine-readable

Map the captured intent onto these section names. Do not introduce sections the schema does not define.

3. Interview to fill the template

Ask only the two to four things you cannot infer from the brain-dump or safely default — and ask them as confirmations, pre-filled with your best reading, not as blank prompts. Keep each question short and let the author skip or accept. Good targets: the precise decision/requirement statement, the context that forced it, the consequences or rationale, and a ## Status value (use one of the controlled values rac schema lists). Requirements are testable - [REQ-001] ... lines under ## Requirements; prefer normative wording (MUST / SHOULD / MAY), and avoid vague verbs (support, handle, allow, enable) that rac validate warns on.

4. Dedupe, then draft

Before drafting, check whether the team already recorded this, so capture does not create a duplicate:

rac find "<key words from the decision>" rac/

If a close match exists, surface it and ask whether to update that artifact (via rac-import / a normal edit) instead of creating a new one. Otherwise, draft the content under the type's real headings, keeping the author's own wording where it fits. For each required section with no captured material, leave a clearly marked gap to raise with the user — do not invent.

5. Review gate — confirm before writing

Present, in the conversation (not as a file yet):

• the draft artifact;
• a short summary: the chosen type, the proposed title, and any relationships the author named (never relationships inferred by scanning the repository — that is out of scope);
• every gap where a required section had no material.

Ask the user to confirm or correct the type, the title, and each relationship. Verify any relationship target actually resolves before proposing it:

rac resolve <id> rac/
rac find "<text>" rac/

Do not write a file until the user has confirmed.

6. Write, then validate

On confirmation, scaffold the file (this mints the id and writes the canonical template — it never overwrites an existing file), then replace the template body with the confirmed content:

rac new decision rac/decisions/<slug>.md

Write artifacts only inside the host project's RAC directory (rac/ by default; confirm the path if the project keeps them elsewhere) under the matching subfolder (rac/decisions/, rac/requirements/, rac/roadmaps/, rac/prompts/, rac/designs/). If the project has no .rac/config.yaml, run rac init once at the project root first. Keep the ## headings and the frontmatter block intact; never edit the minted id.

Then close on validation:

rac validate rac/decisions/<slug>.md

Treat errors as blocking — show them, offer fixes, and re-run until it exits 0. rac improve <file> --template prints section stubs when the content exists to fill a missing recommended section. If the artifact links to others, finish with rac relationships rac/ --validate.

7. Hand off — draft commit, promote by pull request

A validated capture is a draft, not yet trusted knowledge. With the user's go-ahead, commit it on a branch (a draft), but leave the promotion to the team's normal pull-request flow:

• the author's confirmation in this conversation is a fidelity check — "we captured what you meant" — not ratification into the record;
• the trust boundary is a pull request reviewed and merged by someone other than the author (the project's required-review gate), which is also where rac validate / rac relationships --validate run as checks.

Never open-and-self-approve, and never merge the author's own capture for them.

Out of scope

• Reformatting an existing document into an artifact — use rac-import.
• Bulk or batch conversion, directory crawling, or "migrate my whole wiki" — use rac-ingest.
• Inferring relationships by scanning the repository — only the links the author names, each confirmed.
• Inventing context, consequences, rationale, or requirements the author did not provide.
• Auto-committing without the human-review step, or merging a capture into the trusted corpus without independent review.
• Recording ownership, assignment, scheduling, or any work-tracking field.