Context

spec-kitty charter generate compiles a project charter from .kittify/charter/interview/answers.yaml.

That interview schema includes explicit selection lists for:

  • selected_paradigms
  • selected_directives
  • available_tools

During emergency hardening of the charter flow, it became clear that the compiler treated explicit empty selections as "apply all shipped defaults". That behavior is wrong.

If the interview or the agent leaves one of these lists empty, that means one of two things:

  1. no shipped doctrine/tooling cleanly fits the user's needs yet, or
  2. the user deliberately does not want shipped doctrine/tooling imposed.

Broadening an explicit empty list into the full catalog force-feeds doctrine that the user did not ask for, misrepresents the interview outcome, and makes the generated charter less truthful than the source answers.

Decision

Explicit empty charter selections remain empty.

Specifically:

  • selected_paradigms: [] stays []
  • selected_directives: [] stays []
  • available_tools: [] stays []

The compiler must not silently expand an explicit empty selection into mission defaults or the full packaged catalog.

Defaults remain valid only when the user explicitly asks for defaults or when a bootstrap path generates non-empty default interview data before compilation.

Consequences

Positive

  • The generated charter reflects the interview truthfully.
  • Users are not force-fed shipped doctrine they did not ask for.
  • Doctrine gaps can be represented honestly as project-specific charter policy.
  • /spec-kitty.charter can safely say "do not force a near-match" and the compiler will honor it.

Negative

  • Some generated charters will be intentionally sparse until doctrine is added or the user chooses concrete shipped selections.
  • Existing assumptions that "empty means defaults" must not be reintroduced in future compiler or CLI refactors.

Rules Going Forward

  1. Treat empty lists as an intentional state, not missing data.
  2. If defaults are desired, they must be made explicit before compilation.
  3. Any future charter compiler rewrite must preserve this invariant.
  4. Reviewers should reject changes that broaden explicit empty selections.

Implementation Notes

The invariant is enforced in the charter compiler sanitization path and covered by regression tests asserting that compiled selections and rendered charter output preserve empty lists exactly.

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