Goal Contract

The finish line romp hands your agent — GATE, DONE, PROVE IT, CONSTRAINTS.

romp hands the agent a finish line, not a task description. The rendered prompt is the single contract between romp and the agent, and it is harness-agnostic: claude and codex 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 the verify command and show the fresh passing output.
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:

At least one acceptance criterion a test could check.
The files or area expected to change.
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.

Outcome artifacts

The agent 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 after the harness exits and never parses a harness’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.

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.