gz-intent-trace

Read an ADR's declared Decision and Acceptance Criteria, read the surface that actually shipped, and answer one question per ADR:

Does the shipped surface fulfil its original declared intent?

Every no is a correction routed under the owning ADR — never a fresh pool ADR, never new-design ceremony, and never an "enhancement". That routing is operator canon, verbatim:

"discovering that more is needed to fulfil the intent of a feature is not an enhancement, it is a correction."

Enhancement means the surface works as designed and could merely be tighter. "Capability not yet built" is never an enhancement.

Why this is a skill and not a chore

Chores are recurring maintenance with a definite disposition per finding. This is not that. It is an on-demand deep procedure producing judgments that route to corrective work — the same shape as gz-tech-debt-review and gz-foundation-triage. There is no per-run tidying it generates and no ratchet it holds; forcing it into a chore would label design work as maintenance.

Position in the health-audit method

The fourth and most expensive axis. Run it after the mechanical axes, never before — they exist to aim it. See gz-health-audit for the ordering and why it is load-bearing.

Axis	Surface	Cost
Conformance + validator reachability	control-surface-validator-reachability chore	mechanical
Ledger vocabulary inertness	ledger-vocabulary-inertness chore	mechanical
Doctrine coherence	control-surface-rule-conflicts chore	medium
Intent trace	this skill	deep, sampled, human judgment

Do not trace the whole corpus

The ADR corpus is large enough that an exhaustive pass is not a budget anyone will spend twice, and an unaimed pass spends it on whichever ADR happened to be open. Sample by risk signal, drawn from the mechanical axes:

Signal	Source	Why it predicts intent drift
Parked / withdrawn / repudiated / uncovered-accepted OBPIs	uv run gz adr status <ADR-ID>	a decomposition that did not complete is where declared intent most often outran delivery
A declared mechanism measured inert	Pass E and the ledger-inertness chore	the ADR shipped a surface; nothing exercises it
Heavily cited foundation ADRs	rg across .gzkit/rules/**, docs/governance/**	drift here propagates to everything citing it
Failing gz validate --evaluation-justify-binding	that scope	the ADR's own scorecard already says a dimension is below threshold

Take the intersection first — an ADR carrying two or more signals is the highest-yield trace in the corpus.

Procedure

1. Build the sample

Gather candidates from the signals above. Record the sample and the signal that selected each ADR before reading any of them — a sample chosen after reading is not a sample, it is a conclusion.

2. Read the ADR's declared intent

For each ADR, read ## Decision and ## Acceptance Criteria (or its Feature Checklist). Extract the intent as a list of claims about what will exist and what it will do. Do not read the implementation yet.

uv run gz context <ADR-ID>          # body + OBPI briefs + covering tests + rules
uv run gz adr status <ADR-ID>       # Layer-2 lifecycle and landed count

3. Read what shipped

Read the actual surface — the code, the CLI output, the validator, the rule file. Run it. DO IT RIGHT #4 and Invariant 6g both bind: verify observed behaviour, not assumed behaviour; paste real output.

The most common false pass at this step is reading a test and concluding the behaviour exists. A test that runs against a fixture proves the fixture, not the repository — a failure mode this repo has already shipped (see Pass E's § Background, where three validators failed the live tree while their tests were green).

4. Apply the intent test, claim by claim

For each extracted claim: does the shipped surface fulfil it?

Verdict	Meaning	Route
Fulfilled	the claim is met, observed	nothing
Correction	the surface exists but does not fulfil the declared intent	corrective work under the owning ADR
Enhancement	the surface fulfils the intent and could merely be tighter	out of scope for this skill

When uncertain between correction and enhancement, it is a correction — the default the operator's canon sets, precisely because the opposite default is how unfinished work gets relabelled as satisfactory.

5. Route

• Correction, and it fits AGENTS.md § Defect-fix routing thresholds — direct fix, fix(<scope>): … (GHI #N), citing the owning ADR.
• Correction, larger than the thresholds — file through /ghi-author (never gh issue create), body naming the ADR, the declared claim verbatim, and the observed surface.
• Never author a new ADR from a trace finding. The owning ADR already exists; that is what makes the gap a correction.

Boundaries

• Diagnosis and routing only. This skill does not implement the corrections it finds.
• Never widens the sample mid-run. A signal discovered while tracing goes on the next run's candidate list, not this one's. Widening mid-run is how a sampled audit becomes an unbounded one and stops finishing.
• Never authors a new ADR, pool or otherwise.
• Quote the declared claim verbatim. Invariant 6h — a narrative reconstruction of what an ADR "basically said" is exactly the drift this skill exists to detect, reproduced by the detector.

Sequencing caution

A trace run is deliverable-bearing work and will compete with the active campaign, which is Magna Carta (AGENTS.md § Operator Doctrine). The sample's top entries are frequently the ADRs the campaign is already sequenced around. Surface the collision to the operator and get a ruling before running — do not resolve it unilaterally (Behavior Rule 9).

Related

• gz-health-audit — the router that owns the ordering and the budget rule
• gz-adr-audit — Gate-5 audit of one ADR's own evidence chain (different question: does the evidence support closeout, not does the surface fulfil intent)
• gz-tech-debt-review — debt across probes; this skill is intent, not debt
• AGENTS.md § Operator Doctrine — correction vs enhancement, verbatim