/drain — on-demand gate drain pass

/drain is the on-demand entry point to the shared gate evaluator (REQ-H1.4, D-17, D-31). It sweeps every spec bundle's tasks.md for **Gate:** deferral entries, evaluates the structured GATE(when: …) ones against the closed grammar (free-text gates surface unevaluated), and presents the drain report. The scheduled entry point to the same evaluator is /orchestrate --bookkeeping; neither may parse gates on its own. Normative semantics (accumulator classes, grammar productions, lanes, data-only handling) live in the accumulator-taxonomy doctrine doc — read it via the rule-doc resolution path before interpreting the report.

Procedure

1. Resolve the evaluator and the specs root

Resolve the planwright root via the standard chain (PLANWRIGHT_ROOT → CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT → <claude-dir>/planwright); the evaluator is <root>/scripts/drain-gates.sh. The specs root is the current repository's specs/ directory. If there is no specs/ directory, report that there is nothing to drain and stop (this is a read-only authoring-path move: degrade gracefully, REQ-K1.7).

2. Run the evaluator

<planwright-root>/scripts/drain-gates.sh specs/

Exit 0 means the sweep completed — malformed gates are report content, not failures. A non-zero exit means the evaluator could not run or could not complete the sweep; surface the error verbatim and stop. A complete report always ends with the == summary == section; treat a report missing it as a failed sweep, not a result.

3. Present the report

Relay the report grouped by what the human should do with each lane, in this order:

1. MALFORMED — drain-report-level errors. For each, show the file:line,

the reason, and the offending gate text, and propose the corrected entry (restate the condition in the closed grammar, or reword it as a free-text gate if it cannot be said in the grammar). Never evaluate or guess around a malformed gate.

1. SATISFIED — condition gates whose atoms all hold: these items have

re-surfaced and are actionable now.

1. SURFACED — date gates whose date has been reached (reminders, not

proof; a human judges whether the world caught up with the date).

1. FREE-TEXT — gates the machine never evaluates; list them so the

human can judge each condition.

1. PENDING / DORMANT — not yet actionable; summarize counts, with

detail on request.

1. Observations — the log's unmined count and oldest-entry age, plus

the reminder that its canonical reader is /spec-draft (mining happens there, not here).

Items within each lane of each spec's section arrive ordered low-confidence first (REQ-H1.5); when merging lanes across specs, re-sort by the [confidence] tag so low still comes first.

4. Disposition (human-reserved)

The sweep never auto-resolves and never auto-drops (REQ-H1.4) — and neither does this skill. For each re-surfaced or malformed item, ask the human what to do (un-defer the work, record the decision, re-gate with a new condition, fix the malformed entry, or leave it) and apply only what they choose. Edits to tasks.md follow the normal state-move commit discipline (commit_on_state_move).

Maintenance

After each run, compare these instructions against the doctrine and spec they implement: the accumulator-taxonomy doctrine doc (lanes, grammar, drain-pass contract) and REQ-H1.3/REQ-H1.4/REQ-H1.5. If the evaluator's report format, lanes, or grammar have drifted from what this skill describes, append a one-line drift observation to specs/_observations/opportunities.md in the standard format (- <YYYY-MM-DD> [<repo>] skill-drift(drain): <what>) and commit the append as its own chore commit, per REQ-B3.2 / D-42. In repositories without specs/, surface the drift to the user instead of writing the log. Do not edit this skill or the doctrine docs to resolve the drift; the observation log's reader owns folding drift into spec amendments.