Rewrite Coordinator prompt as a minimal orchestration contract

[jrpbuilds]

Parent

Part of #46.

Relationships

Depends on #50, #52, #54, #55 and #56.

Goal

Rebuild the Coordinator prompt from first principles after deterministic workflow mechanics have moved into runtime/tooling.

Do not line-edit the existing ~34 KB prompt. Start with the minimum role/orchestration contract and add guidance back only where it protects behaviour that cannot be enforced or supplied elsewhere.

Core responsibilities to keep

The prompt should primarily establish that the Coordinator:

• guides an OpenSpec change through planning, implementation, independent review and completion;
• treats SpecOps/OpenSpec workflow state and tool legality as authoritative where those facts are actually represented by tooling;
• delegates specialist work to the appropriate SpecOps roles;
• uses judgement when choosing among eligible actions;
• decides when evidence/exploration is useful;
• decides whether parallel implementation is worthwhile and how lanes should be formed;
• responds intelligently to blockers, malformed handoffs and remediation;
• does not perform specialist implementation/review work itself unless explicitly designed otherwise.

Guidance expected to disappear

Once the prerequisite runtime issues land, the Coordinator prompt should no longer teach algorithms/protocols for:

• Todo projection and reconciliation;
• parallel progress reporting;
• artifact dependency traversal and eligibility reconstruction;
• task checkbox reconciliation;
• assignment overlap/capacity validation;
• lifecycle legality that is genuinely exposed and enforced by the canonical tooling from Enrich specops_status with workflow capabilities #48-Consolidate workflow legality behind one canonical derivation #50;
• review-guard mechanics already enforced by tooling;
• detailed background dispatch bookkeeping where the host/tool contract can express it;
• repetitive permission rules that the runtime already denies;
• current-job facts that belong in Make specialist dispatch payloads carry current-job context #56 dispatch payloads.

Archive/review boundary

Do not remove a semantic guardrail merely because nearby lifecycle mechanics became deterministic.

#48 intentionally does not claim archive legality because review PASS/FAIL is not currently a durable OpenSpec fact. #50 will determine whether archive legality can be represented canonically from existing trustworthy state.

If #50 concludes that archive-after-successful-review remains model/session-owned, retain the smallest explicit Coordinator invariant needed to preserve it (for example, archive only after the required review has succeeded). Do not reintroduce a large archive procedure.

If #50 establishes a canonical tooling boundary that fully enforces archive legality, remove the redundant prompt rule and consume that tooling instead.

The general rule is:

Remove prompt guidance only after runtime/tooling genuinely replaces the behaviour it protected.

Rewrite method

1. Create a new minimal prompt from zero.
2. Preserve only semantic behaviour that is genuinely model-owned or not yet enforceable elsewhere.
3. Run focused behavioural tests/scenarios.
4. Add back the smallest missing constraint when a concrete regression demonstrates the need.
5. Avoid re-importing legacy prose as a precautionary measure.

Mode fragments

Review Interactive/Auto/Frontier Coordinator fragments under the same rule. Mode-specific prompts should state meaningful behavioural differences, not duplicate the base workflow manual.

Acceptance criteria

• Coordinator prompt is rebuilt from a blank/minimal contract rather than incrementally trimmed.
• Todo and specops_progress maintenance instructions are absent from normal Coordinator guidance.
• Lifecycle/artifact legality that is canonically represented by tooling is consumed from tooling rather than reconstructed from prose.
• Any lifecycle invariant not yet represented/enforced by tooling retains only the minimum required prompt guardrail.
• Archive/review behaviour matches the explicit outcome of Consolidate workflow legality behind one canonical derivation #50; the rewrite neither invents deterministic archive legality nor accidentally drops the successful-review requirement.
• The prompt explicitly preserves Coordinator judgement over eligible choices, evidence sufficiency, parallelism and lane formation.
• Interactive vs Auto differences remain clear without duplicating shared content.
• Existing hard permission/lifecycle boundaries are not weakened.
• Representative workflows still complete correctly under the new prompt.
• Final prompt size is substantially below v1.6 and fits the later v1.7 budget issue.

Out of scope

• Specialist prompt rewrites.
• Lowering prompt budgets before behaviour settles.
• Adding deterministic policy for judgement-driven decisions.
• Introducing new persistent review/archive state.