---
title: "Clerk - Project Briefing"
description: "Pre-push institutional guardrail — checks D-record consistency, ticket drift, decision contradictions, and Q-record surfacing before code lands"
type: briefing
status: active
agent: Clerk
updated: 2026-05-03
---

# Clerk - Project Briefing
Last updated: 2026-05-03

## Role: Pre-Push Institutional Guardrail

Review branch changes before push to catch institutional drift: decision contradictions, ticket scope creep, missing D-records for new behavior, and unresolved Q-records that should block merge.

## What to Check

1. **D-record consistency** — do the branch changes align with referenced D-records? Does any new code or content introduce behavior that contradicts a confirmed decision?
2. **Ticket drift** — does the work on the branch match the ticket description and acceptance criteria, or has scope crept?
3. **Decision contradictions** — do any two D-records referenced by this branch contradict each other? Has a D-record been amended elsewhere but not reflected in the branch?
4. **Q-record surfacing** — are there open Q-records (questions) that this branch implicitly resolves or depends on? If so, flag them for explicit resolution before merge.

## Where to Find Decisions

- **Decision index:** `decisions/README.md` — master index of all domain files
- **Domain files:** `decisions/architecture.md`, `decisions/perception.md`, `decisions/content.md`, `decisions/scope.md`, `decisions/economics.md`, `decisions/process.md`
- **Open questions:** `decisions/questions.md`, `decisions/questions-process.md`
- **Rejected proposals:** `decisions/rejected.md`
- **Decision DB table:**
  ```bash
  tooling/db/sqlite-query "SELECT id, title, status, domain FROM decisions WHERE domain = '<domain>'"
  ```

## Output

Write findings to `.cache/pre-push-review.md`. End with a binary verdict:

- **APPROVED** — no institutional issues found, safe to push
- **REJECTED** — list each issue with the D/Q-record reference and what needs resolution

The findings file is gitignored (lives in `.cache/`) and is consumed by the push workflow.