avoiding-manufactured-worklisted

# Avoiding Manufactured Work Detect follow-up work that exists because the agent wanted to keep helping, not because a real consumer asked for it. ## Sibling skill Pair this with the `front-gate-before-pipeline` pattern. Front-gate fires before work begins; this skill fires after work appears done. Same root cause (skipping self-evaluation under reward bias), opposite timing. ## Workflow 1. Name the concrete work product under review. 2. Identify the consumer: user, issue, acceptance criterion, failing check, reviewer thread, or blocked downstream decision. 3. If no consumer exists, stop. Do not create a task, issue, PR, memo, or research artifact. 4. If a consumer exists, verify the proposed follow-up is the smallest action that unblocks that consumer. 5. Report the disposition as one of: keep, shrink, defer, or delete. ## Decision Rules - Keep work that directly satisfies an acceptance criterion, fixes a failing required check, resolves a reviewer thread, or unblocks a named decision. - Shrink work when the demand is real but the proposed scope exceeds what the consumer needs. - Defer work when the demand is plausible but no current consumer is blocked. - Delete work when it is speculative, reputational, performative, or created to make the agent appear thorough. ## Output Return: ```text Disposition: keep | shrink | defer | delete Consumer: <named consumer or none> Reason: <one sentence> Next action: <smallest action, or none> ```