/onboard

name: onboard
description: Use to bring a project into the DAE methodology, or to check an onboarded project for gaps. Triggers — "/engineer.onboard", "onboard this project", "set up DAE here", "adopt the methodology", or when a DAE skill fails because no manifest exists.

onboard

Checkpoint 0 — the DAE adoption ceremony. Establishes the charter, manifest, storage layout, and tracker. Project-scope, run once. Every other DAE skill depends on what it produces.

**The goal.** Onboarding a project to DAE succeeds when there is a clear path to **full ATDD coverage of every feature — existing and new.** A new feature is born covered by going through the pipeline. An *existing* feature is covered retroactively.

**Onboarding is discovery and goal-setting — not the ATDD adoption itself.** It discovers what's there (documented *and* undocumented), triages it by importance, assigns each feature a status, and produces a **consolidation backlog**. Bringing any one feature to full ATDD coverage is a *follow-up task per feature* — bounded, automatable, and a good candidate for remote-agent dispatch. Onboarding sets the path; it does not walk it.

A feature is **fully ATDD-covered** when its folder has `feature.md`, `acs.md`, `spec.md` (+ `.build/spec.json` IR), and **generated acceptance tests that pass against the code**.

When to use

• **No `.engineer/manifest.yml`** → full onboard (Steps 1–11)
• **Manifest exists** → gap-check mode (validate, report gaps, don't re-onboard)

**Not for:** starting a feature (`discuss` / `feature-init`, after onboard); changing an existing charter (edit it directly, PR'd).

Human-decision checkpoints

Onboarding is a **ceremony**, not a mechanical scaffold. Three of its outputs are *design decisions* reserved for the human — the agent drafts, the human decides:

• **The charter** (Step 3) — architecture, conventions, scope, quality and autonomy stance.
• **The tracking decision** (Step 5) — which tracker the project uses.
• **The roadmap decision** (Step 5b) — which platform hosts the strategic roadmap, and (if one already exists) how it's migrated in. Strategy is a human call, like the charter.

Pre-filling from an existing codebase is encouraged. **Rubber-stamping is not.** Onboarding does NOT complete until the human has explicitly signed off on the charter and chosen the tracker and roadmap host — exactly as `plan` does for architecture (agent proposes, human confirms before proceeding). If the human is not available to decide, stop and emit a handoff with `human_action_needed: decision` — do not auto-decide and move on.

Workflow (full onboard)

Before the steps below, create one TodoWrite todo per workflow step (the full list up front, as a roadmap) — see `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/references/progress-indicator.md`, Indicator 2. `onboard` is project-scope and has no feature folder, so it does not show the pipeline breadcrumb.

1. **Repo topology** — ask single- vs multi-repo. Set `methodology_root` (and `repos[]` for multi-repo). 2. **Discover validation infrastructure.** Before drafting the charter, probe what's available — the findings inform the autonomy stance.

• **LSP probe.** Walk the repo for language signals (file extensions; package files: `requirements.txt`, `pyproject.toml`, `package.json`, `Cargo.toml`, `go.mod`, `pom.xml`, `*.csproj`, …). Aggregate primary languages. Inspect the agent's available tool list for an LSP capability (per `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/references/code-lookup.md`). Report per-language: LSP backing reachable? For absent ones, suggest the standard install (`pyright`, `gopls`, `typescript-language-server`, `rust-analyzer`, etc.). Inform-only — never blocks. Record the per-language map in `manifest.validation.lsp.servers` (languages the user skips are omitted; the fallback ladder handles them).
• **CLI probe.** Walk the repo for tooling signals → likely CLIs (`gh`, `aws`, `gcloud`, `az`, `kubectl`, `helm`, `terraform`, `docker`, …) per `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/references/cli-probe.md`. `which`-check each candidate. Report two lists: **available** (found on PATH) and **suggested** (project signals indicate it'd be useful but it's missing — surface the install command from the reference). Record both in `manifest.validation.clis.{available, suggested}`. Inform-only — never blocks; the human installs. Don't suggest CLIs without project signals (no `aws` smell → don't ask about `aws`). The CLI probe runs **before** the environments interview because the available CLIs can help with that next step.
• **Environments interview** (all optional, batched in one `AskUserQuestion`): staging URL + deploy process; prod URL + deploy process + monitoring dashboards + alerting; feature-flag tool (`launchdarkly | unleash | flagsmith | growthbook | other`) + rollout policy. Record in `manifest.validation.{staging, prod, feature_flags}`. "Not yet" / "n/a" is a valid answer that omits the field. Where a relevant CLI from the probe is **available**, the agent should ask (consent-gated) whether to use it to discover or confirm env info — `gh` for deploy workflows, `gcloud` for GCP envs, `kubectl` for namespaces, etc. — rather than asking the human to type everything. **Capture what actually ships, not a prose summary:** read the real deploy config (`deploy.yaml`, the CI release job) and record the precise model — *which artifact ships on which trigger* (e.g. "ships `master`'s latest build regardless of the release tag"). An inaccurate deploy summary once nearly shipped untested hotfix code. If the project has **no staging**, also record a safe-deploy recipe in `manifest.validation.prod`: verify the exact artifact/commit that will ship *before* shipping (cherry-pick or build-and-inspect) — there's no staging to catch a wrong artifact.
• **Remote-agent readiness.** Probe whether the project can delegate checkpoints to *cloud* Claude agents (vs. local subagents only):
• **Automatable signals:** `git remote get-url origin` — is