Obligations

Skill: obligations

Maintain the project's obligations — the commitments it must discharge (a frozen confirmatory comparison that must be run as specified, a Data Management Plan deliverable, an ethics amendment, a funder report due by a date). This is the "to-do list of promises" of the Manage & Comply lane, tracked in the ledger obligations[] so the administrative record is provenanced alongside the science. You own the tracking judgment; you delegate the save to the datalad doer.

When to use

• The user wants to see what is outstanding/overdue, add a new commitment, or mark one met/waived.
• Do NOT use to create a pre-registration (that is govern/preregister, which adds the

obligation) or to run the confirmatory analysis (analyze/run-comparison).

Steps

1. Read the current obligations — from project.yaml obligations[]. Present a concise

surface: what is pending (highlight anything with a due date that is near or past), what is met, what is waived. Group by kind (preregistration, confirmatory-comparison, dmp, ethics, funder-report).

1. Act on the request:

• Add — append { id, kind, description, due?, status: pending, ref? } (unique id).
• Resolve — flip an entry's status to met (the commitment was fulfilled — e.g. the

confirmatory comparison was completed as specified) or waived (dropped, with the reason in the log). Never delete an obligation; the record of the commitment stays.

• Update — add a ref once a pending registration is assigned an id/URL, or adjust a due.

1. Log it — append { ts, op: obligations, stage: govern, note: " ", branch: }.
2. Save — delegate to the datalad doer: "save: datalad save -m 'obligations: '."
3. Report — the updated surface, and the next thing due (by date, then by kind). If a

confirmatory-comparison obligation is still pending, point to analyze/run-comparison; if a pre-registration lacks a ref, point to govern/preregister.

Constraints

• Obligations are never deleted — resolution is a forward status change (pending → met/waived)

with the reason captured in the log. This preserves the compliance trail.

• Keep obligations[] ids unique; add/resolve per docs/project-ledger.md.
• Do not silently mark a confirmatory obligation met — confirm the comparison was actually run as

specified (any deviation from the frozen spec is reportable, not a quiet pass).

• Keep log: append-only and the ledger schema-valid; delegate the save to the datalad doer.

Source & license

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

• Author: neuroanalytics
• Source: neuroanalytics/data-science-harness
• License: MIT

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