Goal Contract

romp hands the builder a finish line, not a task description. The rendered builder prompt is the contract between romp and the builder, and it is harness-agnostic: Claude, Codex, and OpenCode receive the same structure.

The four sections

• GATE — reject the issue before touching code if it’s ambiguous, contradictory, or under-scoped. Don’t invent missing criteria.
• DONE — every acceptance criterion met, on a clean tree.
• PROVE IT — run every configured verification command in order and show the fresh passing output for each.
• CONSTRAINTS — no deleted, skipped, or weakened tests, no hardcoded expected values, no out-of-scope files, no git commit/git push.

The GATE is the point. An issue is shippable only if all three of these are already written in the issue body:

1. At least one acceptance criterion a test could check.
2. The files or area expected to change.
3. Enough constraint that two competent agents would ship the same product.

If any is missing — or the issue is a menu of options with no choice made — the agent must self-reject before editing source, write the specific gap to .romp/blocked.md, and stop. A plausible PR solving the wrong problem costs more than no PR.

Builder outcome artifacts

The builder reports a structured result by writing a markdown file under .romp/:

• pull-request.md — PR title, conventional-commit subject, and description (with mermaid diagrams for substantial changes)
• blocked.md — the specific gap when an issue is under-scoped

romp reads these builder artifacts after the harness exits. It does not parse the builder’s native output. pull-request.md is removed before committing; blocked.md is consumed on a path that returns before any commit, so neither reaches the diff.

When the artifact is missing or malformed, romp falls back to safe defaults: the issue title, a conventional commit, and Closes #N.

The review gate uses a different contract. Romp starts one independent, read-only reviewer call per routed lens. Each call writes no artifact and returns one strict JSON document through harness.Result.Output. An empty, malformed, or semantically invalid document is an error, never an implicit approval. The runner supplies the diff, branch log, changed files, focused lens, verification transcript, builder reports, prior review outcomes, and convention references. It parses every outcome and merges them into one logical pass. The runner records that pass as one PR comment. The review renderer, parser, and outcome merger perform no filesystem discovery or harness calls.

Codex skills

An issue can invoke an installed Codex skill with $skill-name. The Codex adapter force-refreshes app-server skill discovery and sends each matching path as a first-class skill input. Dollar-prefixed shell variables such as $HOME stay ordinary prompt text when no installed skill has that name.

Customizing the prompt

Override the built-in template with .romp/prompt.md (a Go text/template, configured via [prompt] template). Put long repo context — architecture, conventions, invariants — in .romp/DESIGN.md and point [prompt] brief at it; the agent is told to read it first.

When blocked, romp relabels the issue romp:blocked and posts the gap as a comment, so the human knows exactly what to add to make the issue shippable.