decompose-gates

# Decompose With Gates Turn a hard task into pieces that can each pass or fail on their own, ordered so the riskiest assumption is tested first. Full doctrine: `docs/agent-craft.md` §2–§3. ## Procedure 1. **Split along verification boundaries, not implementation convenience.** Each piece must have its own pass/fail check that does not depend on the other pieces being right. If checking B assumes A is correct, A+B is one piece, not two. 2. **State each piece as a falsifiable claim, not a task.** "The watermark advances only after server ack" (checkable) — not "update watermark logic" (a task). Attach to each claim the concrete check that decides it: a test slice, a log observation, a live replay, a measurement. 3. **Name the risk spots before sequencing.** Write the two or three "if I'm wrong anywhere, it's here" spots — silent failure modes, irreversible steps, boring mechanical stretches — and design a specific verification for each. Generic suite runs are uniform effort against non-uniform risk. 4. **Order by information yield.** Test first the smallest shared assumption whose failure would invalidate repeated downstream units. This gates only dependent replication: keep independent work moving and expand the rolling window as soon as the assumption holds. Skip the ramp when prior evidence or a deterministic tool already proves the unit shape. 5. **Relay dependency context, not only order.** State the upstream contract and evidence each piece consumes. Those assumptions ...