Ship

Ship

Orchestrator for the ship phase — the last leg of the lifecycle, after the change is built, validated, and reviewed. It sequences the ship disciplines and stops at a human go/no-go before anything reaches users.

Step 1: Confirm Validation and Review Passed

Shipping presupposes a clean change. Confirm both gates already cleared:

• Validation passed — see [[validate]].
• Review passed — see [[review-pr]].

Check for evidence (a green validation run, an approved PR). If you cannot confirm either, stop and ask the user to run [[validate]] / [[review-pr]] first. Do not re-run them here; this skill assumes they are done.

Step 2: Sequence the Ship Disciplines

Dispatch the two disciplines in order via the Skill tool. Each is dual-tier, so this leaf may call them. Do not parallelize — the rollout depends on the instrumentation.

(Architecture decisions are recorded earlier, during design-architecture — there is no decision-capture step here.)

1. Skill(skill="groundwork:instrument-observability") — make the change observable (structured logs, RED metrics, trace spans, symptom alerts). Run before rollout: the rollout's monitoring window watches these signals.
2. Skill(skill="groundwork:staged-rollout") — produce the pre-launch checklist, feature-flag gating, the staged/canary ramp, and the written rollback plan.

Carry each skill's verification result forward. If any reports its Verification incomplete, surface that to the user at Step 3 rather than silently proceeding.

Step 3: Final Go / No-Go Gate

Before any outward-facing deploy step (flipping the canary flag on, promoting a stage, releasing), stop and ask the user with AskUserQuestion:

{
  "questions": [{
    "question": "Validation and review passed. Observability instrumented, staged rollout plan and rollback ready. Proceed to begin the rollout?",
    "header": "Go / No-Go",
    "options": [
      { "label": "Go", "description": "Begin the staged rollout starting at the canary stage" },
      { "label": "No-Go", "description": "Stop — something needs attention first" }
    ],
    "multiSelect": false
  }]
}

• No-Go → stop. Report what's outstanding; do not deploy.
• Go → proceed to begin the staged rollout (the canary stage) per the plan from Step 2. Never skip this gate, even if every prior step is green — a human owns the decision to expose the change to users.

Verification

• [ ] Validation and review were confirmed passed before any ship step ran
• [ ] instrument-observability then staged-rollout were dispatched in that order
• [ ] Each dispatched skill's Verification result was carried forward and any gaps surfaced
• [ ] The go/no-go AskUserQuestion gate ran before any outward-facing deploy step
• [ ] On No-Go, nothing was deployed; on Go, the rollout began at the canary stage

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: etr
• Source: etr/groundwork
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.