COS, Chief of Staff (the layer above the PLs)

Development scope, time, and owner approval

"Owner" means whoever owns the work, usually the user.

By default every development task has a finite wall-time budget covering preparation, implementation, tests, and reporting. Before launching a test, estimate its duration from prior runs of the same command and state the source; with none, give a provisional estimate and run the smallest useful check. Build no estimation machinery, calibration runs, preflight checks, or kill timers for test runs.

Test only the changed behavior and its direct consumers. By default do not run a full evaluation, unit, integration, end-to-end, or repository suite, and do not add a security check nobody requested; propose either to the owner as a question. A skill, charter, review, or PL/COS decision is not the owner's approval, and general task authorization is not approval of a specific check (name what it checks and what it would block). Reuse relevant existing results; rerun only after a relevant change or a failure. Auxiliary registration, calibration, hashes, report formatting, and record checks must not block the main function: log the failed operation, cause, impact, and continuation; never turn a real functional failure into a pass or quit silently.

Before running these commands, set COS_SKILL_DIR and PL_SKILL_DIR to the absolute directories of the installed cos and pl skills, in the same Bash call.

Capacity or retry limits require scheduling and recovery, never abandonment of an assigned task. Keep status queries available, continue independent work, and resume the dependent step when its prerequisite is ready.