Tutorial: Governed Charter Workflow End-to-End

Background: If you're new to Charter, read How Charter Works first.

Governed charter workflow - Mission Kitty splash

Stylized splash — the seal and stage board are decorative. Setup, governed run, and retrospective steps are in the linked how-tos below.

What you'll build

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a project with Charter governance fully configured, doctrine synthesized into a valid bundle, and at least one governed mission action run. This page does not repeat the step-by-step commands for each stage — each stage already has its own authoritative how-to. Instead, it connects them in the order you'll actually use them, so you understand the complete operator flow: from a blank git repository to agents receiving consistent, policy-backed context on every action.

Tip

This page is a tour. Stage commands live in the linked how-tos: setup governance, run a governed mission, retrospective learning.

Stage 1: Set up governance

Initialize the project scaffold, run the Charter interview, generate the charter bundle, validate it, and synthesize doctrine. This is the complete interview-to-generation flow, covered start to finish in one place:

→ How to Set Up Project Governance

Work through that guide's Steps 1–4 before continuing. When spec-kitty charter status shows no drift after synthesis, your governance is active and you're ready for Stage 2.

Stage 2: Run a governed mission action

With governance set up and doctrine synthesized, create a mission (see Create a Specification if you don't have one yet — spec-kitty specify returns a full mission_slug, which is what spec-kitty next --mission expects, not just the short name) and drive it with spec-kitty next. Charter context is injected into every mission-action prompt automatically — that's what "governed" means. The full command reference (query mode vs. --result, reading the JSON output, composed steps, blocked decisions) lives in its own guide:

→ How to Run a Governed Mission

Stage 3: The retrospective record and summary

When a mission completes, Spec Kitty automatically authors a retrospective.yaml for that mission under .kittify/missions/<mission_id>/ — no configuration needed by default. Configuring retrospective policy (blocking completion on a failed retrospective, opting out, applying proposals back into governance) is its own operator workflow:

→ How to Use Retrospective Learning

What's next

You've completed the full Charter governance loop. Here is where to go from here:

See also

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